ANTH 233 Ethnographic Studies
26 November 2008
Virtual anthropology
Reed, Adam (2005) "‘My blog is me’: Texts and persons in UK online journal culture (and anthropology)." Ethnos, 70(2): 220- 242. Taylor and Francis Journals Online.
How is cyberspace a social space, and thus a potential subject for anthropological analysis?
- how does technology affect what is possible in cybersociety?
- how is cybersociety different from or the same as other human social groups?
- what forms of cybersociety might we study?
Reed analyses bloggers as a way to address these questions. He also turns the analysis back to how anthropology represents societies (that is, the kinds of questions we have been pursuing in the course) by comparing blogs and anthropological texts.
- apply "essay grid" (argument, theory, context, evidence, conclusion) to the article
- what does Reed argue about the relations between the blog, the creator of the blog, the blogger’s real life, and visitors to the blog?
- which has agency, and when?
- with respect to text production, how does the structure of a blog impose a message?
- how might we think about anthropological texts as "persons", or as a text with a relation to its producer, to the subject, and to readers?
What kinds of blogs are there?
e.g. political news blogs:
What other forms of cybersociety exist and might be studied?
As an anthropologist, what questions would you want to ask about Facebook or Second Life?