Anthropology of social networking
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Social networking blog
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 [...]
The post The mystery of the young man without a QQ number: accounting for non-users appeared first on UCL Social Networking Sites & Social Science Research Project.
Read more...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 [...]
The post Child in India? Sorry! No Facebook then! appeared first on UCL Social Networking Sites & Social Science Research Project.
Read more...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...'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).
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