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The focus of this book is ethnographic work on digital culture that I carried out while working as a business anthropologist over the past eight years. In a series of projects, I have drawn on ideas in humanistic anthropology and in other fields, such as literary studies, to consider the meaningful, experiential dimensions created by the use of new technologies, especially new communication technologies such as virtual reality. I have carried out cultural analyses of visual social media and online picture and video exchange, and the uses of new technologies by journalists. My team and I have carried out work on the meanings and practices associated with different social media platforms and on the culture of social media, both in North American and Asian contexts. We have considered theoretical topics, such as the development of new forms of literacy and of “secondary orality” (Papacharissi 2015), as we have worked within these categories. All of this work would now be classified as part of the relatively new field of digital anthropology. But I am a practicing anthropologist, and these efforts also illustrate how an anthropologist works with companies (both commercial and non-profit) to bring humanistic insights to bear on business decisions.
Jonathan Cook has written that
In recent years, as business culture has focused on obtaining quick growth through digital automation, accounts of the human experience have been fading fast. A growing movement seeks to reverse that trend, to reassert the vital place of humanity in well-balanced, sustainable commerce.
From the Podcast, This Human Business 2019
The following work fits into this movement and, hopefully, gives it more precise definition (see also Madsberg’s 2017 work Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm). One part of this tradition is narrative analysis and storytelling. The organizing notion of the book is the idea of a story culture. A story culture does not simply indicate a different way of telling a story. The notion of telling, as we will consider in the chapter on virtual reality, may not even be relevant in particular story cultures. A story culture is like any other form of culture that anthropologists study. It is a system of meanings, embodied in symbols and made to come to life through concrete practices that evoke powerful emotional responses and experiences. A story culture frames a meaningful reality for people and this framing defines what counts as a story, how a story should be composed, what the experience of story is like. A story culture indicates a caste of mind that is revealed by story forms. The digital space is a space of new story cultures and this book’s academic objective is to make sense of these cultures and in this way to re-imagine practices in the digital space.
It may seem unlikely that a business anthropologist would consider the work of literary critics such as Auerbach (1945/1991), or of Phelan et al. (2012), Marie-Laure Ryan (2015), or David Carr (1986) as he carries out his own practical work. In fact, taking the theory and practice of narrative into consideration has been central to my practice. My objective has been to develop an understanding of storytelling in the digital space and how this is shaped by the use of new communication technologies. For example, the aesthetic effect produced by VR technologies was of “a local and temporal present that seemed absolute” (Auerbach 1945/1991:7). The style of VR appeared “externalized, a universally illuminated phenomena at a definite place in perpetual foreground” (Auerbach 1945/1991:11). Auerbach’s ideas of narrative and time, with VR producing a “local and temporal present,” provided insight into the way people experienced story in this medium. The focus on narrative world making–how storytellers construct different worlds through narrative–is key. As an example, the notion of anti-mimetic narrative is used in the book, especially in the chapter on VR, with VR creating “original or unprecedented scenes, figures and worlds” (Richardson 2012:22). Anti-mimetic narratives “provide a conceptual framework for works that refuse to follow the conventions of ordinary storytelling” (Richardson 2012:22).
Understanding the Virtual Reality narrative style is a key concern for journalists, advertisers, and even psychologists working with patients who had experienced trauma. Other research on visual storytelling and imagery provided clients with insight into the lived experience associated with photographic practices on the digital space as did aesthetic theories of beauty (Scary 1999; Hillman 1998). In this particular project, the practice of storytelling with pictures on the digital space reminded me of Tim Ingold’s notion of the wayfarer (2016). People and groups who share imagery are known through the trails of images that they together capture and send out. The digital picture creating and sharing wayfarer is always on the move, so to speak, with picture exchange and imagery being part and parcel of the new mobile life. People and images are always situated in movement, capturing the quotidian realities of moment-to-moment life and in the process establishing digital kinds of sociality and constructing places. The narrative of picture exchange, as we will show, has this quality of processual wayfaring, as it creates picture trails. Another chapter, on new mobile technologies, considers the play of mobile devices. That is, it considers how people create a narrative of play with places and with time, and how smartphone play has changed culturally specific experiences of time and place. It stresses how “time is rich in material culture interactions,” and that these interactions create different temporal orders (Shove, Trentmann, Wilk 2009:5). The chapter focuses on the different temporal rhythms produced by mobile device play. The book also contains comparative culture work. The comparative chapter considers how the concepts of time and place are experienced and expressed in an Asian cultural idiom through an emerging narrative of play.
The chapter on social media expresses the generally “earnest” character of this book, as it puts forward a view of social media platforms as different conceptual structures (Crick 1976), or different language games, as Wittgenstein might say. In fact, the character of the work is in opposition to the usual culture critiques of the digital realm and online popular expression. Whitney et al. (2017) describe people’s practices on the web today as a form of “dirt work,” borrowing the term from the anthropologist Mary Douglass. The web is full of irony, transgression, silliness, cynicism and angry exchanges, insults, and expressions of violence and hatred. There is agonistic play around seemingly any topic. Accordingly, many people speak of the Web as if it were a polluting “sewer.” In this view, the sum of digital practice is a form of cyber dirt that people continually throw at one another (hence, the terms dirt work or dirt play). These and other writers also understand the current online moment by referencing historical folkloric traditions like the medieval Feast of Fools (Festum Fatuorum) or the Irish wake wherein persons, practices and beliefs, even sacred beliefs, were satirically mocked. Mockery and satire, hostility and general wisenheimery is what the internet is about in addition to displaying unsafe content (much of this content being pornographic), with corporate and other nefarious entities invading people’s privacy, inflaming social and political divisions and thereby rending the social fabric, as we have seen so tragically play out in actual political insurrection.
Phillip and Millar use the word ambivalent to describe the spirit of the Web, which they oppose to the spirit of earnestness. Writers analyzing Internet practices like picture exchanges in earnest terms, arguing that people create public goods such as knowledge and insight through such practices, are missing the mark. Many of my respondents openly bemoaned the inauthenticity of overly positive imagery of lives and lifestyles on the visual Web. These images can be considered a form of dirt that people throw at each other. Popular psychology notes that overly pretty, seemingly boastful pictures can make others feel badly in various ways about their circumstances. Miller (2011) touches on some of these issues in his work on Facebook imagery. But this leaves a theoretical space for considering the earnest and commonplace aspects of digital culture which really are preponderant on digital spaces, as I will show. It leaves a space for considering the digital and social media realm as offering a “third place,” a place of escape and of sociality, as Boyd has argued in her study of teens and the Internet (Boyd 2014). It also leaves a space for considering creative, reciprocal exchanges and the development of knowledge in digital participatory culture (Jenkins, Ito, Boyd 2016). Others, like Broadbent (2016), have also skillfully explored some of the socially positive aspects of online life, yet most orientations are more sociological than cultural, and not squarely in the tradition of interpretive anthropology.
Other approaches, including some in digital anthropology, focus primarily on questions of power and inequality, as in the unequal access to technologies and the avenues of power that they offer. This reflects the turn to political economy, dominant in anthropology since the 1980s, with this approach’s emphasis on questions of power, inequality and what Robbins (2013) has called, “the suffering subject.” The entire interpretive turn of the 1970s and 1980s in anthropology, and then the turn to postmodernism with a “mistrust of systematic closure,” an emphasis on reciprocal interpretation and cultural expressivity, and on the poetics as well as the politics of cultural expressivity have been largely eschewed (with Miller and Horst’s 2012 volume again being an exception to this characterization) as digital anthropology has developed. Ironically, business rather than academic anthropology does at least tangentially recognize the validity and power of the spirit of such approaches. This is seen in its concern with what is called “the user experience.”
My interest in the reciprocal interpretation of texts, my mistrust of approaches that argue for systematic explanatory closure, and my penchant for paying attention to the poetics of expressive culture are long standing. My first book was about religious poetry, cultural poetics and concepts of the person in a Melanesian culture. Readers will see a concern with poetics, expressivity and meaning in the essays that follow. They will also see it in the extensive use of and dialogue with respondent verbatims. I dialogued with people as I carried out my business research, and these dialogues constitute the gist of the research. This is the same way that I approached my research in New Guinea.
I realize that digital media represents culture at both the smallest, most intimate and the largest scale. My projects have concentrated on the intimate human experiences conjured by interactions with digital technologies. In the course of these projects the companies I have worked for have added quantitative facts and sometimes “big data” to the ethnographies, but to my mind these can be discordant with the substance and utility of the reports. I am reminded of the anthropologist David Schneider’s famous, or perhaps infamous remark, that he only needed one good respondent to give an account of a culture topic. And, I am reminded of Malcolm Gladwell’s work Blink (2005) that provides voluminous examples of the limitations of “big data” approaches in coming to correct conclusions. This is not my approach, but there is a point both in Gladwell’s examples and in Schneider’s remark, not only because culture is a shared phenomenon that can be spoken about without the backup of hundreds of thousands of data points but also because these writers’ insights so artfully tweak the current cult of quantification and big data. Interesting that the most prominent technology companies have, in the projects we will speak of here, attempted to leaven their data with cultural analysis and semiotic understanding.
The following essays emerge from work in both the world of business and in the world of the academy. I have been both a business and an academic anthropologist and there are obvious differences between the two roles, none of which are easily explained by traditional and often times invidious distinctions between practicing anthropology and academic anthropology. But one salutary influence the business world has had on my work is that it has forced me to simplify my language. Because I am speaking with non-academic collaborators and audiences I use, or at least try to use, a language that is clear and that assumes nothing about my audience’s degree of anthropological knowledge. I make the case to clients that accurate and creative interpretations of the human meanings of a practice or technology is the only way to create effective business strategy. As such I apply what I deem to be the best, which is not always the latest, literature to each project. Business anthropology, or at least the kind I practice, makes clear that certain approaches have withstood the test of time, else they would not result in successful business and other strategies. Others can be too obscure and simply not useful in practicing contexts. This may lead to charges that the approach of this book is somewhat unfashionable. Yet, looking at some of the most recent work on digital media, there is often reference to classics of political economy, such as those by Raymond Williams. Foucault gets a nod when questions of power and control are broached. Habermas and the Frankfurt School are often invoked in studies on media and politics, as is the Manchester School. In many ways I find “new” political economy approaches to be as much throwbacks or at least beholden to older traditions as phenomenological or interpretive ones. And, this is just a personal pet peeve, I find the language of the leading journals often to be obscure, jargon-heavy and awkward rather than connotative of deep thinking. You cannot use that sort of language in practicing contexts.
Another point about business anthropology and how my approach differs from the usual projects and concerns of academic anthropology: I have been a student of commercial culture and how values and sentiments are encompassed by this culture (Maschio 2016:416–425). Business anthropologists are in the advantageous position of seeing the syncretism or blending of commerce with personal sentiment, and with categories of “high culture” such as art, music and fashion and with other categories. Business anthropologists see how commercial phenomena are imaginatively captured by people and woven into projects of personal construction and expression. There is something of the spirit of Warhol and of Man Ray in this field, but especially of Warhol, with his refusal to see distinctions between high and low art, and his use of commercial and popular imagery in his own art to express wide ranging ideas about culture. Perhaps being a New Guineanist makes me particularly aware of these connections. Robert Foster, an ethnographer of New Guinea, discussed some of these points in his own work on material culture, showing how print advertising was an integral part of constructing Papua New Guinea-ness and concepts of the emerging nation-state (1995:151–184). My experience in New Guinea showed me that it was unremarkable for people to incorporate commodity symbols and objects into self-decorative and adornment styles, these objects frequently being the most ubiquitous and sometimes some of the most important objects of people’s lives. Thoughts like these resurfaced when I started to carry out ethnographic work in contemporary digital and commercial culture.
- People are developing new story cultures on the digital space: This book reveals the elements of that culture, defines the term story culture, and uses it as a lens through which to view important communicative practices on the digital space.
- The book’s anthropological view of new technologies, and the emerging practices of the digital space, connects these technologies and practices with older and broader cultural forms.
- Digital tools have a social and cultural life that humanistic anthropology is particularly well suited to reveal. Humanistic anthropology can be accessible and effective for business.
- The book provides a blend of symbolic analysis and phenomenology, thereby revealing important meanings and experiences of digital practice. This blend of approaches and ideas is novel in the context of business anthropology.
Gloss on organizing themes and claims
The larger theoretical move of the book, apart from developing the idea of a story culture, is to blend representational approaches, such as symbolic and interpretive anthropology with phenomenological approaches to understanding digital experiences. This approach can more clearly reveal the social and cultural ...
