Anthropology of Social Networking

The mystery of the young man without a QQ number: accounting for non-users

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:02:39 +0000

At 5:30am yesterday I was stood on the side of the in my fieldsite, a small town in Shandong, waiting for the bus. Next to me was a grandmother sat on the side of the road selling cherries. A young man, probably in his early twenties, approached me and politely asked if it was alright to take a picture [...]

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Child in India? Sorry! No Facebook then!

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:57:07 +0000

The Delhi High Court had questioned the Union Government of India on why minors (children below 18 years of age) were on Facebook and Google. This was in response to a case filed by an ideologue of a major political party in India. The issue they wanted explained was how someone under the age of [...]

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What is social media about?

Thu, 09 May 2013 11:53:59 +0000

In this post I will summarise my individual interest in this project and how it relates to my previous work. In my PhD I discussed a particular and apparently individual reaction to the lack of appropriate alignment of the individual to the external forces that come from society. I showed that in rural southeast Romania [...]

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‘What is social media?’ – a definition

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 23:01:01 +0000

Having described our project as the Global Social Media Impact Study, we realised there was just one little thing we hadn’t actually done. This was to define, at least for our purposes, what we mean by the words ‘social media’. Our studies are ethnographies, there is pretty much nothing we would not wish to include. [...]

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The secret world of the inbox

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:03:35 +0000

This is my last week in my field site until 2014. I’ve been hussling to spend as much time with as many people as I can in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been invited to a wedding, a ceremony of Hindu prayers (a puja), a political rally, a cd launch by a local band and [...]

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