Anthropology of Social Networking

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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Chinese ‘WeChat’ social media app will make the world look around and shake!

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 01:38:40 +0000

Two years is a long time in the world of social media. This point has been reinforced to me multiple times in the last few weeks since my return to China. When I was in the country carrying out research for my PhD in 2011, no-one in my fieldsite was talking about WeChat (威信 weixin). [...]

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“I am not alone, loneliness is always with me”

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:45:52 +0000

Now I am in China. Thanks to the taxi detour which sent me to a wrong train station I had to take a slow train rather than a high speed one to go to the fieldsite – which turned out to be coincidentally rewarding since the majority of the passengers on this slow train was [...]

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