Anthropology of social networking
- Home
- Projects
- A New Public Order: Network Politics and the Tea Party Movement
- Facebook in Trinidad
- Occupying Cyberspace: Indonesian Cyberactivism and Occupy Wall Street
- 'Online togetherness' of Brazilian migrants on social network sites
- Secret communication systems in Facebook
- Shifting Fields: Social Media, Religion and Popular Culture in Brazil and the Diaspora
- What 'friends' on the screen may mean: social networking shaping the Filipino diaspora
- Add your project
- Mailing list
- Blog
- Contact
Social networking blog
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 [...]
The post What is social media about? appeared first on UCL Social Networking Sites & Social Science Research Project.
Read more...‘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. [...]
The post ‘What is social media?’ – a definition appeared first on UCL Social Networking Sites & Social Science Research Project.
Read more...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 [...]
The post The secret world of the inbox appeared first on UCL Social Networking Sites & Social Science Research Project.
Read more...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). [...]
The post Chinese ‘WeChat’ social media app will make the world look around and shake! appeared first on UCL Social Networking Sites & Social Science Research Project.
Read more...“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 [...]
The post “I am not alone, loneliness is always with me” appeared first on UCL Social Networking Sites & Social Science Research Project.
Read more...'Online togetherness' of Brazilian migrants on social network sites
Mieke Schrooten is a doctoral candidate in the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre at the KU Leuven (University of Leuven, under the supervision of prof.dr. Christiane Stallaert) and a lecturer in the Department of Social Work at Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel. She received her master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Utrecht in 2007. Her current research focuses on the anthropology of social networking, investigating how new media affect the experience of migration and the conditions of being a migrant. In her PhD, she examines how Brazilian migrants make use of new media to settle down, feel connected, make a livelihood in Belgium and remain in touch with their family and friends back home.
Specifically, she investigates the ‘online togetherness’ of Brazilian migrants on social network sites such as Orkut or Facebook. In many cities all over the world with a significant number of Brazilian migrants, SNS members have formed online migrant ‘communities’. These communities play a significant role as an access gate to information that can be used to organize their migration and daily life at the scene of arrival. In the SNS communities she is studying, Mieke found that the key functions of these communities are different in each stage of the migration process. Also, the degree of users’ involvement varies, ranging from consumption or lurking – a loose online togetherness – to a strong social life online – an intense online togetherness.
Mieke’s main research interests are in migration and transnationalism; migrant communities; Brazilian migration; the consequences of new media for interpersonal relationships, especially in the context of migration; and online anthropology. Her recent publications include “Moving ethnography online: Researching Brazilian migrants’ online togetherness”, in Ethnic and Racial Studies. Special issue: "Methodologies on the Move: The Transnational Turn in Empirical Migration Research (2012) and “Internal migration and ethnic divison: The case of Palmas, Brazil”, in The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2011).
Page last modified on 04 apr 12 22:22
