Tues Jan 24: Introductions and goals

McChesney, Robert. 2014. ch. 1 What is the Elephant in the Digital Room? Digital Disconnect How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. The New Press. (22 pp). (ereserve, book reserve).

Week 1 slide: Opening Questions

Thurs Jan 26: The Medium is the Message?

Marshall McLuhan, 2003 (1964). "the Medium is the Message," Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man.  Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press Inc. (11 pp). (book, ereserve).

Boyer, Dominic. 2007. Understanding Media: A Popular Philosophy.  Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. (103 pp) (bookstore, book reserve)

Week 1a slide: Boyer's Poetic-Medial-Formal Triad

• Sign up for Discussion Facilitator
• Hand out Discussion Facilitation Guidelines

Good overall reference books:

Peters, Benjamin, ed. 2016. Digital Keywords A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture, Princeton University Press.

Ouellette, Laurie and Jonathan Gray, ed.s 2017. Keywords for Media Studies. NYU Press.
See their website including multiple essays from the book.

Media Anthropology for the Digital Age. Wiley 2018

_____________________________

Agha, Asif, ed. 2011. “Mediatized Communication in Complex Societies.” Language & Communication 31 (3): 163–274.

Agha A. 2011b. Meet mediatization. Lang. Commun. 31: 163–70
"Social life has a mediated character whenever persons are linked to each other through speech and other perceivable signs in participation frameworks of communicative activity".

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities.

Axel, Brian Keith. “Anthropology and the New Technologies of Communication.” Cultural Anthropology 21, no.3 (2006): 354-384.

Bagdikian, Ben. 1997(1983). The Media Monopoly. [one of the first English-language books to look at the growing monopolization of media markets by corporations. Bagdikian found that just 50 companies owned 90% of the media; by the late 1990s, that had dwindled to only 6].

Boellstorff,Tom. Digital Anthropology. In Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology. Edited by John Jackson. New York: Oxford U. Press, 2013.

Boler, Megan. Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. Cambridge; London: The MIT Press, 2008.

Boyer, Dominic. 2010. Digital Expertise in Online Journalism (and Anthropology). Anthropological Quarterly 83(1): 73−96. [gives history of anthro engagement with cybernetics; pushes back against opposition of trad vs digital knowledge]

Boyer, Dominic. 2012. From Media Anthropology to Anthropology of Mediation. In The Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology, p. 383– 392.

Duclos, Vincent. 2017. INHABITING MEDIA: An Anthropology of Life in Digital Speed. Cultural Anthro 32:1,

Eisenlohr, P. (2011). Introduction: What is a medium? theologies, technologies and aspirations. Social Anthropology, 19 (1): 1-5.

Foucault, Michel. Technologies of the Self. [transcriptions and interviews from his final lecture/seminars before his death]

Gershon, I. (2017). Language and the Newness of Media. Annual Review of Anthropology.

Gershon, I. and Bell, J. A. (2013) Introduction: The Newness of New Media. Culture, Theory and Critique 54:3, pages 259-264.

Ginsburg, Faye, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin. 2002. Introduction in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. New York: University Press., pp. 1-36.

Hegel, Phenomonology of the Spirit. [Opening arguments until 'perception']

Herman and McChesney. Global Media, Global transformations reader. [lays out history of media deregulation and conglomeration].

Kacynski, Ted. [known as the 'unabomber,' Kacynski was a math prodigy and professor at Berkeley before he resigned, took to life in a remote cabin, and then railed against modern technology and industrialization; this is an archive of his writings, including his famous manifesto].

Mazzarella, William. 2004. Culture, Globalization, Mediation. Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 33: 345-367

McLuhan, Marshall. 1980 “Living at the Speed of Light.” MacLean’s, January 7: 32–33.

Pink, Sarah and Kerstin Leder Mackley, Saturated and Situated: Expanding the Meaning of Media in the Routines of Everyday Life. Media, Culture & Society 35(6):677–691, 2013.

Sarah Pink and Simone Abram, eds., Media, anthropology and public engagement . New York, New York: Berghahn Books, 2015.

Poster, Mark. Postcolonial Theory and Global Media. In Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines, 26–45 (Duke U. Press, 2006).

Said, Edward W. 1981. Covering Islam. [discussion of the nature of the media in contemporary times]

Silverstein, Michael 2000 Whorfianism and the Linguistic Imagination of Nationality. In Regimes of Language. Paul V.Kroskrity, ed. Pp. 85–138. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. [cited by Gershon, critiques Anderson]

Spitulnik D. 1996. The social circulation of media discourse and the mediation of communities. J. Linguist. Anthropol. 6(2):161–87

Urban G., Lee B. 2001. Metaculture: How Cultures Moves Through the World. Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. Press

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: Culture, Media, Mediation.

Williams, Raymond. 2002. “The Technology and the Society” in Anthropology of Media Reader, Kelly Askew and Richard R. Wilk, eds. Blackwell. Pp 27-40.

Digital Immersion

Growing Up Online. PBS Frontline Documentary, 2006. Documentary looking at the massive impact of the internet on U.S. middle class childhood (watch online).

Digital Nation. PBS Frontline Documentary, 2010. Follow up to Growing up Online. (watch online).

Generation Like. PBS Frontline Documentary, 2014. Follow up to Merchants of Cool. (watch online).

Media Conglomerates and Power

Digital Disconnect [film accompanying McChesney's book of the same name]

Who Own's the Media? Now this World, 2016

Ted Kasinski (the Unabomber)'s 1995 Manifesto on Technology (The Washington Post)

Editor's Note: This is the text of a 35,000-word manifesto as submitted to The Washington Post and the New York Times by the serial mail bomber called the Unabomber. The manifesto appeared in The Washington Post as an eight-page supplement that was not part of the news sections. This document contains corrections that appeared in the Friday, Sept. 22, 1995 editions of Washington Post. The text was sent in June, 1995 to The New York Times and The Washington Post by the person who calls himself “FC,” identified by the FBI as the Unabomber, whom authorities have implicated in three murders and 16 bombings. The author threatened to send a bomb to an unspecified destination “with intent to kill” unless one of the newspapers published this manuscript. The Attorney General and the Director of the FBI recommended publication.

Media Conglomeration (1990s-2000s)

Index of US Media Ownership, Harvard Future of Media Project

Investopedia World's Top Media Companies 2022

NPR All Tech Considered 2017: Big Media Companies and their Many Brands--in One Chart

Global Issues blog 2009: Media Conglomerates, Mergers, Concentration of Ownership

Freepress.net: Who Owns the Media?

Forbes 2016: These 15 Billionaires Own America's News Media

Michael Corcoran 2016: Twenty Years of Media Consolidation Has Not Been Good For Our Democracy (Bill Moyers.com)

 Net Neutrality

John Oliver, Last Week Tonight, Net Neutrality (June 2014)

John Oliver, Last Week Tonight, Net Neutrality II (May 2017)

What Everyone Gets Wrong in the Debate about Net Neutrality (Wired 3-part series, June 2014)

Here's How the End of Net Neutrality will Change the Internet (Wired Mag, 2017)

News on Net Neutrality on Twitter

Free Press: Net Neutrality: What you need to know now

Net Neutrality (Wikipedia)

Am I the Only Techie Against Net Neutrality? (Forbes op-ed)

What is Net Neutrality? (ACLU)

Tues Jan 31 Navigating Objectification: Authenticity, Estrangement and Reproducibility

Marx. “Estranged Labor” in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 1844. (ereserve).

Benjamin, Walter. "The work of art in its age of technological reproducibility, Second Version," Selected Writings Volume 3, 1935-1938, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002 (1936). (22 pp) (ereserve).

• Hand out Commentary and Peer Commenting Guidelines
• Assign Commentary Blog Partners

Thurs Feb. 2 Mediated lives: Cyborgs, Humans and Nonhumans

Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–182 (Routledge, 1991). (32 pp) (book, ereserve).

Latour, Bruno. 1999. “A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans: Following Daedalus’s Labyrinth” in Pandora’s Hope, Harvard University Press. pp. 174-190 (16 pp) (book, ereserve).

Adorno and Horkheimer. 1944. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities.[especially his chapter on the rise of print capitalism]

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. [Also see his film he made to accompany the book]

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich and Michael Marrinan, eds. 2003. Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age. [chapter by Kentor: "What is Mechanical Reproduction,"], Stanford U Press.

Hegel, G.W.F. 1807. Phenomenology of Spirit. [Opening arguments until 'perception']

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology. In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 3–35 (Harper and Row, 1977 [1954]).

Kockelman, Paul. The anthropology of an equation. Sieves, spam filters, agentive algorithms, and ontologies of transformation. Hau Vol 3, No 3 (2013).

Latour, Bruno. 1999. The Slight Surprise of Action: Facts, Fetishes, Factishes. Pandora’s Hope. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pp. 266-292.

Latour B, 2005 Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network Theory (Oxford University Press, Oxford) [cited by Ingold, says p. 44-46, in section on mediators and intermediaries]

Peters, John. 1999. ch. 3 Toward a more Robust Vision of Spirit: Hegel, Marx and Kierkegaard, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Pinney, Christopher. “The Indian Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Media Worlds, pp. 355-369

Proctor, Devin. Cybernetic Animism: Non-Human Personhood and the Internet,” 2018, in Digital Existence:  Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture, ed. Amanda Lagerkvist. London: Routledge, pp. 227-241 [Takes animism for granted, no critique of the colonial nature of that term, see Nasaday critique of the recent return of animism]

Film and Viewer Experiences of Immediacy and Expertise

• Key and Peele: The Valets (mid 2010s)

Theorists of Mediation

G.W.F. Hegel (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Karl Marx (1818-1883) (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Marx Engels Collected Works (Internet Archive)

Marxism and Alienation (Marxists.org)

The Frankfurt School (Wikipedia)

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Walter Benjamin (Wikipedia)

Donna Haraway (1944-) (Wikipedia)

Donna Haraway: a Cyborg Manifesto (Wikipedia)

"You are a Cyborg," (Wired Mag, 1997)

Bruno Latour (1947-) (Wikipedia)

Bruno Latour (Personal Website)

Cybernetics (influential in Haraway and Latour's theories)

Cybernetics: a Definition (Comprehensive discussion by Paul Pangaro)

Cybernetics (Wikipedia)

What is Cybernetics? (excerpts from early textbooks, 1960s)

Defining Cybernetics (American Society of Cybernetics)

4th Wave Cybernetics (Cyborg Anthropology blog)

Human-Nonhuman Cyborgs

https://www.nytimes.com/video/arts/100000005820692/internet-fembot-robot-women.html?emc=edit_th_180809&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=550126610809 [amanda hess short feminist video on fembots; references Haraway]

The Nod Podcast on Black robots

Tues Feb. 7 Remediation and The Problem of Communication

Bolter, J. David and Richard Grusin. 1998. Introduction. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, p. 1-15 (14 pp) (Bookstore, book reserve and ereserve).

Peters, John Durham. 1999. Introduction: the Problem of Communication, and Ch. 6 Machines, Animals, Aliens: Horizons of Incommunicability, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (~70 pp). (book reserve, ereserve)

• Hand out final multimodal project guidelines
• Week Three Slides: Affordances and Dialogism as Remediation

Thurs Feb. 9 In-class workshop: Methods and Ethics in Media-Making with AV/Creative Consultants, Tony Moreno, Joe Janiga, and Ann Matsushima Chiu

Come prepared to think about what medium(s) you want to work in (audio, video, photo, digitized drawing/painting, zines, collage).

Auslander, Philip. 1999. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. Psychology Press.

Axel, Brian Keith. “Anthropology and the New Technologies of Communication.” Cultural Anthropology 21, no.3 (2006): 354-384.

Boyd, Danah 2011 Social Networked Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications. In A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture in Social Network Sites. Zizi Papacharissi, ed. Pp. 39–58. New York : Routledge.

Gershon, I. (2017). Language and the Newness of Media. Annual Review of Anthropology.

Gershon, I. and Bell, J. A. (2013) Introduction: The Newness of New Media. Culture, Theory and Critique 54:3, pages 259-264.

Graham, P. (2006). Hypercapitalism: New media, language, and social perceptions of value (Vol. 15). Peter Lang.

Megan Halpern and Lee Humphreys, Iphoneography as an Emergent Art World. New Media & Society, 2014.

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology. In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 3–35 (Harper and Row, 1977 [1954]).

Hirschkind, Charles, Maria José A. de Abreu, and Carlo Caduff. "New Media, New Publics?: An Introduction to Supplement 15." Current Anthropology 58, no. S15 (February 2017): S3-S12.

Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge; London: The MIT Press, 2016.

Henry Jenkins, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (NYU Press, 2013).

Keating, E. (2005). Homo prostheticus: Problematizing the notions of activity and computer-mediated interaction. Discourse Studies, 7(4/5), 527-545.

Kittler, Fredrick. 1987. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. October Vol. 41: 101-118.

Kate Maddalena and Jeremy Packer, The Digital Body: Telegraphy as Discourse Network. Theory, Culture & Society 32(1):93–117, 2015.

Nardi, Bonnie. Virtuality. Annual Review of Anthropology 2015 44:1, 15-31
This review examines studies of the affordances of digital technologies that produce virtuality. What we can call a “technological turn” in the literature considers technology a first-order analytical object rather than blackboxing it or subsuming it under social process. J.J. Gibson's original concept of affordance is explained, as well as its evolution to a concept consonant with anthropology's concerns. The review probes studies of political activism, work, and play. It comments on how virtuality affects anthropology as a discipline.

Nayar, Pramod K.. An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Ong, Walter. 1982. Writing Restructures Consciousness. In Orality and Literacy. p. 78– 116.

Peters, John Durham. 1999. ch. 5 The Quest for Authentic Connection, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Seth Shapiro and Lee Humphreys, Exploring Old and New Media: Comparing Military Blogs to Civil War Letters. New Media & Society 15(7): 1151–1167, 2012.

Silvio T. 2010. Animation: the new performance? J. Linguist. Anthropol. 20(2):422–38

Thomas Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers (Walker & Company, 2007).

Thomas Standage, Writing on the Wall: Social Media, The First 2,000 Years (Bloomsbury, 2013)

Taylor J. 2009. “Speaking shadows”: a history of the voice in the transition from silent to sound film in the United States. J. Linguist. Anthropol. 19(1):1–20.

Thurlow C. 2006. From statistical panic to moral panic: The metadiscursive construction and popular exaggeration of new media language in the print media. J. Comput. Mediated Commun. 11(3):667–70 [useful discussion of claims that computer mediated communication is radically unlike face to face, antisocial, etc: " recognize the relative inseparability of mediated and unmediated communication; both are equally situated and context-dependent, and mediated practices are intricately embedded in the daily lives of users"].

Wellman, Barry, Anabel Quan-Haase, Jeffrey Boase, Wenhong Chen, Keith Hampton, Isabel Isla de Diaz, and Kakuko Miyata 2003 The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 8(3), April. http://jcmc.indiana.edu,

Raymond Williams. 2002. “The Technology and the Society” in Anthropology of Media Reader, Kelly Askew and Richard R. Wilk, eds. Blackwell. Pp 27-40.

Goodbye Uncanny Valley, 2017
Alan Warburton video on the increasing sophistication of computer graphics and photorealism

Contact, 1997 feature film
Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster), after years of searching, finds conclusive radio proof of extraterrestrial intelligence, sending plans for a mysterious machine.

Grizzly Man, 2005 documentary
A devastating and heartrending take on grizzly bear activists Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard, who were killed in October of 2003 while living among grizzlies in Alaska.

Arrival 2016 feature film
When twelve mysterious spacecrafts appear around the world, linguistics professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is tasked with interpreting the language of the apparent alien visitors.

"The Consuming Fervor of 'Arrival'", The New Yorker, 2016.

Affordance Theory

Affordance (Wikipedia)

Affordances (Glossary of Human-Computer Interaction)

Affordances and Design (Interaction Design Foundation)

The Concept of Affordances (Anthropologist John Postill on Juris' definition)

Affordances and reflexivity in ethical life: An ethnographic stance, Anthropological Theory, 2014. (Linguistic anthropologist Webb Keane on an anthro approach to)

Human and Non-Human: AI, algorithms, Bots

Wooley, Boyd et al How to Think about Bots: a Botifesto, Mother Jones Mag.

A.I. Is Not Sentient. Why Do People Say It Is? Robots can’t think or feel, despite what the researchers who build them want to believe. NYT, Aug, 2022.

vs.

Tariq Ali The Case against Artificial Intelligence [said he wanted to take anti-bot stance; vs. the above as pro-bot]

Ullman, Ellen. “Programming the Post-Human” Harper’s October 2002.

Christian, Brian. “Mind v. Machine” The Atlantic Monthly, Feb 9, 2011.

IRL Podcast: "Bot or Not"? Jan 2018 

‘Intelligent’ Policing and My Innocent Children, NYT, 2017.

Microsoft Created a Twitter Bot to Learn From Users. It Quickly Became a Racist Jerk. NYT 2017.

Not the Bots We Were Looking For, NYT Nov 2017

Instagram Bots, NYT June 2017

On Twitter, a Battle Among Political Bots, NYT Dec 2016

Bots are Back and They Might Even be Welcome, NYT April 2016

Trump Twitter Bots, NYT Oct 2015 

Mandatory office hours meetings with AV/Creative Consultants Tony, Joe, or Ann this week, in person or via Zoom: Beginning to conceptualize a final project.

Tues Feb. 14 Rethinking the Public Sphere

Jurgen Habermas. 1991[1962]. Introduction (excerpt), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge: The MIT Press, pp. 1-26. (ereserve).

Fraser, Nancy. 1992 Rethinking the Public Sphere. In Habermas and the Public Sphere, Calhoun, ed. MIT, pp. 109-142. (ereserve).

Jackson, John and David Kim. “Democracy’s Anxious Returns,” co-authored with David Kim, The ANNALS of the Academy of Political and Social Science, 637: 6-16 (September 2011). (ereserve).

Thurs Feb. 16 Publics and Counterpublics

Warner, Michael. 2002. Look for his seven defining elements of a 'public': FOCUS P. 65-78; SKIM: P 79-85, FOCUS: P. 86-92; SKIM: P. 93-98; SKIM (but pay attn to example of The Spectator): p. 98-106; FOCUS (Counterpublics and example of the She-Romps): P. 107-124; Ch. 2, Publics and Counterpublics, in Publics and Counterpublics. Zone Books. (~60 pp). (book reserve, ereserve)

• Performance of "One Last Time," from Hamilton, at the White House, 2017
  How many and what kind of publics are being addressed/created here? How, and with what potential consequences?
  
  

Agha, A. (2012). Mediatized projects at State peripheries. Language & Communication, 32(2), 98-101.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities.

Barker J. 2008. Playing with publics: technology, talk and sociability in Indonesia. Lang. Commun. 28:127–4.

Barrett, R. (2016). Mayan language revitalization, hip hop, and ethnic identity in Guatemala. Language & Communication, 47, 144-153.

Bonilla, Yarimar and Jonathan Rosa. 2015. #Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Politics, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States. American Ethnologist 42(1): 4-17.

boyd, d. 2007. Why youth (heart) social network sites: the role of networked publics in teenage social life. Macarthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning. David Buckingham. Ed. Cambridge: MIT Press 119–42 [boyd works for Microsoft]

boyd, danah. 2009. White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook. [boyd works for Microsoft]

Brink-Danan M. 2011. The meaning of Ladino: the semiotics of an online speech community. Lang. Commun. 31:107–1.

Calhoun, Craig, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere, MIT Press, 1992.

Cavanaugh, Jillian R. 2016a. “Anything Can Happen on YouTube (Or Can It?): Endangered Language and New Media.” In Cultural Anthropology: Contemporary, Public and Critical Readings , edited by Keri V. Brondo, 88–95. New York: Oxford University Press.

Clarke, Kamari Maxine. Rethinking Sovereignty Through Hashtag Publics: The New Body Politics . Cultural Anthropology, 2017.

Doostdar A. 2004. The vulgar spirit of blogging: on language, culture, and power in Persian Weblogestan. American Anthropologist. 106(4):651–6.

Christina Dunbar-Hester, Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism (MIT Press, 2014).

Eisenlohr, P. (2011). The anthropology of media and the question of ethnic and religious pluralism. Social Anthropology, 19(1), 40-55.

Eisenlohr P. 2004. Language revitalization and new technologies: cultures of electronic mediation and the refiguring of communities. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 33:21–4.

Fader, A. (2017). The counterpublic of the J(ewish) Blogosphere: gendered language and the mediation of religious doubt among ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23(4), 727-747.

Gal, S., & Woolard, K. (Eds.). (2014 [2000]). Constructing languages and publics: authority and representation. Languages and Publics: the Making of Authority. Manchester: Taylor and Francis.

Ginsburg, Faye. 1993. Aboriginal Media and the Australian Imaginary. Public Culture 5(3): 557−578.

Graber K. 2012. Public information: the shifting roles of minority language news media in the Buryat territories of Russia. Lang. Commun. 32:124–36.

Habermas, Jurgen. "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere. In Habermas and the Public Sphere. Ed. Craig Calhoun. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. 

Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Pres.

Hirschkind, Charles, Maria José A. de Abreu, and Carlo Caduff. "New Media, New Publics?: An Introduction to Supplement 15." Current Anthropology 58, no. S15 (February 2017): S3-S12.

Kelty, Christopher. 2005. Geeks, Internets, and Recursive Publics. Cultural Anthropology 20(2): 185−214.

Kunreuther L. 2014. Voicing Subjects: Public Intimacy and Mediation in Kathmandu. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Pres.

Lee and Lipuma. talks about perf creation of collective agency in circulation

Mazzarella, William. 2006. Internet X-Ray: E-Governance, Transparency, and Politics of Immediation in India. Public Culture 18(3):

Mazzarella, William. The Myth of the Multitude, or, Who's Afraid of the Crowd? Critical Inquiry, 2010.

Vincente Rafael, “The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines,” in Public Culture 15:3 (2003): 399-425.

Riha, Daniel and Anna Maj. Emerging Practices in Cyberculture and Social Networking. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2010.

Rutherford, Paul. Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public Goods. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

Special Issue: A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere? Theory, Culture, and Society. Volume 39 Issue 4, July 2022 [includes contribution by Habermas]

Spitulnik D. 1996. The social circulation of media discourse and the mediation of communities. J. Linguist. Anthropol. 6(2):161–8.

Strassler, K. (2014). Seeing the Unseen in Indonesia's Public Sphere: Photographic Appearances of a Spirit Queen. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 56(1), 98-130.

Swinehart, K. F., & Graber, K. (2012). Tongue-tied territories: Languages and publics in stateless nations. Language & Communication, 32(2), 95-97.

Taylor, Charles. 2002 Modern Social Imaginaries. Public Culture 14(1):91–124.

Thornborrow, J. (2001) ‘Authenticating talk: Building public identities in audience participation broadcasting’, Discourse Studies, 3(4): 459–79.

Urban G., Lee B. 2001. Metaculture: How Cultures Move Through the World. Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. Pres.

Weidman A. 2014. Neoliberal logics of voice: playback singing and public femaleness in South India. Cult. Theory Crit. 55(2):175–9.

Addressivity (coined by Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin)

Addressivity (Greg Morson)

The Addressive Process (Perinbanayagam, The Presence of Self)

Addressivity (Lempert and Silverstein, Creatures of Politics)

The Public Sphere: Debates

Jurgen Habermas 1929- (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Jurgen Habermas and the Public Sphere (Marshall Soules' Media Studies blog)

Kellner, Douglas. Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention (excellent critical overview of Habermas' famous paper and debates it generated over his career)

A Summary of Public Sphere Theories (Course project at University of Toronto)

Habermas and the Public Sphere (Vlog essay from Then & Now, 2017)

Tues Feb 21 Peircean semiotics

Peirce, C.S. 1998 [1894, 1907]. What Is a Sign? The Essential Peirce, Volume 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pp. 4-10. (ereserve).

Manning, Paul. 2012. Introduction to the Semiotics of Drink and Drinking. New York: Continuum. (book reserve, ereserve).

Slides: Peircean Sign Relations

Thurs Feb. 23 Mediated things and persons

**Snow Day Moodle Forum Class!! Check out Beq's discussion questions and choose ONE question to respond to in a 250-300 word written or audio post (hit 'reply'). Everyone should then read/listen to others' comments and respond to at least ONE of them by 3 pm Thursday.

Agha, Asif. 2011b Large and small scale forms of personhood. Language & Communication 31 (3): 171-180. (ereserve). [Try to grasp the difference and relation between "mediatization" and "mediation", as well as his arguments about "figures of personhood"; focus on pp. 171-177].

Manning, Paul. 2012. "Coffee" in the Semiotics of Drink and Drinking. New York: Continuum. (book reserve, ereserve). (22 pp)

Agha, A. (2007). Recombinant selves in mass mediated spacetime. Language & Communication, 27(3), 320-335.

Agha, A. "Commodity registers." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21, no. 1 (2011): 22-53.

Agha, A. (2012). Mediatized projects at State peripheries. Language & Communication, 32(2), 98-101.

Agha A. 2011b. Meet mediatization. Lang. Commun. 31: 163–7.

Ball, Christopher. 2017. “Realism and Indexicalities of Photographic Propositions.” Signs and Society 5 (S1): S154–77.

Chumley LH, Harkness N. 2013. Qualia. Anthropol. Theory 13:3–1.

Duranti, Alessandro. pp. 199-213 in Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997.

Hoopes, ed., "Introduction," (focus on pp. 7-9) Pierce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics by Charles Sanders Pierce, Chapel Hill: Univ. of N. Carolina Press

Keane, Webb 2003 Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things. Language and Communication 23(2/3):409–425. [Try to grasp one or two main aspects of his approach to materiality and things; then focus on pp. 417-423, where he introduces his take on "semiotic ideology"].

Jakobson, Roman. Ch. 6, On Language [attempts to reconcile Saussure and Peirce on the sign].

Kockelman, Paul, and Nicholas Enfield, eds. 2017. Distributed Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Manning, Paul. 2016. “Peircean Steamiotics: Technological Metaphors and Pastoral Designs.” Semiotic Review 4: n.p. https://www.semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/13.

Other recent publications also continue to refine our understandings of how indexical groundings point to and constitute realities. For example, in an article arguing that Peirce's conceptualization of secondness “bears the miniaturized imprint of the dawn of the age of machinery,” Manning (2016) focuses on the broader Peircean category of which indexicality is one aspect. In so doing, he highlights how secondness, which entails experience and encounter, is necessarily grounded in alterity. For example, drawing on Peirce's imagined scenario in which a train rider is startled from a peaceful reverie by a piercing locomotive whistle, Manning points out that any such experience requires at least two firstnesses (qualities of feeling): those experienced before and during the jolt of the whistle. Further, these qualities are not commensurable but rather engage in a “very unequal battle between the sense of stillness and calm” and the “soul‐bursting” train‐whistle (n.p.).

Parmentier, Richard. 2016. Signs and Society: Further Studies in Semiotic Anthropology. Indiana Univ Press.  ["Brilliantly articulating the potent intersections of semiotic and linguistic anthropology, Signs and Society demonstrates how a keen appreciation of signs helps us better understand human agency, meaning, and creativity."]

Pierce, Charles. Ch. 6 "The Principles of Phenomenology," (pp. 74-97) in Philosophical Writings of Pierce. Buchler, ed. New York: Dover Publications. 1955 (1940).

Pierce, Charles. Ch. 7 "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," (98-119) in Philosophical Writings of Pierce. Buchler, ed. New York: Dover Publications. 1955 (1940).

special issue of Signs and Society, titled “Qualia and Ontology: Language, Semiotics, and Materiality” (Ball 2017; Chumley 2017; Gal 2017; Harkness 2017a; Reyes 2017a; Roy 2017). Together, these articles remind us not to take qualia as given but to recognize the situated processes through which they both come to be and come to be perceptible.

Wilf, E. Y. (2013). From Media Technologies That Reproduce Seconds to Media Technologies That Reproduce Thirds: A Peircean Perspective on Stylistic Fidelity and Style-Reproducing Computerized Algorithms. Signs and Society, 1(2), 185-211. [Against the backdrop of a long research tradition in linguistic and semiotic anthropology that has focused almost exclusively on media technologies that reproduce Seconds, that is, specific texts in modalities such as sound and the visual image, this article focuses on media technologies that reproduce Thirds, that is, generative dispositions responsible for the production of such Seconds. It explores contemporary attempts in the United States and France to develop computerized systems that, with the aid of specific algorithms, can abstract and enact the styles of different past jazz masters, as well as the styles of players who interactively improvise with such systems in real time. Drawing on Peircean semiotics, the article offers an analysis of these media technologies, their present application in the field of online consumption, and the cultural specificity of the Third that plays a key role in their development and reception, namely, style.]

The Semiotics of Drinks and Drinking: Beer Commercials
How are drinks ordered by people and how do drinks themselves order people?

• Miller Lite Man up 1 (2010): skirt
• Miller Lite Man up 2 (2010): purse
• Miller Lite Man up 3 (2014): scarf
• Miller Lite Man up 4 (2014): skinny jeans (with Meghan Markle)

Starbucks Barista Rants

• Pet Peeves as a Starbucks Barista (2016)
• Working at Starbucks! Crazy Customer Stories (2018)
• Things Baristas Hate (2016)
• Starbucks Sucks: Barista Rant (2014)
• Starbucks Rant Song (2011)

• Smile You're Speaking Emoji: the Rapid Evolution of a Wordless Tongue (NY Mag, 2014).
• Chatting in Color: a new semiotic system? Colorchat app (Mashable, Feb 2020)

Weekend Film/Lecture: John Jackson at Reed, "Thinner Depictions, the Benefits and Hazards of Theorizing in Image and Sound," spring 2018 Keynote Lecture: Greenberg Media and Social Justice Lecture Series (Stream via Moodle)

Tues Feb 28 Rethinking the Digital

Tom Boellstor ff, Rethinking Digital Anthropology. In Digital Anthropology. Edited by Heather A. Horst and Daniel Miller, 39–60 (London: Berg, 2013). (Book, ereserve.)

Gershon, I. 2010. ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: Media Switching and Media Ideologies’. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20, 389–405. (ereserve).

Thurs Mar 2 Multimodality in Practice

Dattatreyan, Ethiraj Gabriel and Isaac Marrero-Guillamon. 2019. Introduction: Multimodal Anthropology and the Politics of Invention," American Anthropologist. Vol. 121, No. 1, pp. 220–228.(ereserve).

Howes, David “Multimodality and Anthropology: The Conjugation of the Senses.” Pp 225-235 in Carey Jewitt, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis, London: Routledge, 2009. (9 pp) (ereserve).

Jackson, John. 2004. “An Ethnographic FilmFlam: Giving Gifts, Doing Research, and Videotaping the Native Subject/Object.” American Anthropologist  106 (1): 32–42. (ereserve).

Debating Media Ethnography

Abidin, Crystal. 2018. We Have Never Been Digital Anthropologists. Anthrodendum blog.

J Bezemer, C Jewitt. Multimodal analysis: Key issues - Research methods in linguistics

Bird, Elizabeth (2003). “Media Ethnography: An Interdisciplinary Future,” in The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World. New York: Routledge

Tom Boellstorff, Digital Anthropology. In Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology. Edited by John Jackson. New York: Oxford U. Press, 2013.

Boellstorff, Tom, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor. Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method . Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Boyer, Dominic. 2010. Digital Expertise in Online Journalism (and Anthropology). Anthropological Quarterly 83(1): 73−96.

Burrell J. 2009. The field site as a network: a strategy for locating ethnographic research. Field Methods 21(2):181–99

Chang, Heewon. 2008. Autoethnography As Method. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Chin, Elizabeth. 2017. On Multimodal Anthropologies from the Space of Design: Toward Participant Making, American Anthro.

Coleman, E Gabriella. 2010. Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media. Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 487–505.

Collins, SamuelGerard, Matthew Durington, and Harjant Gill. 2017.“Multimodality: An Invitation.” American Anthropologist 119 (1): 142–46.

Collins, Samuel Gerald, and Matthew Slover Durington. 2014. Networked Anthropology . New York: Routledge.

Samuel G. Collins, Matthew Durington, and Harjant S. Gill. 2018. Minecraft Multimodal. American Anthropology.

Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan Arjun I. Shankar. Multimodal Ethnography and the Possibilities for Engaged Anthropology. Society for Visual Anthropology.

Des Freedman, Cheryl Martens, Robert W. McChesney and Jonathan Obar, editors. “Strategies for Media Reform: Communication Research in Action.” Fordham University Press.

Eubanks,Virginia. Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age (MIT Press, 2011).

Feld, Steven. 2015. “Acoustemology.” In Keywords in Sound , edited by David Novak and Matthew Sakakeeny, 12–21. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Gubrium, Aline, KristaHarper, and Marty Otanez. 2015. Participatory Visual and Digital Research in Action . London: Routledge.

Hamdy, Sherine and Coleman Nye. 2018. Drawing Culture, or Ethnography as a Graphic Art: The Making of Lissa. American Anthropologist.

Hart, Christopher. 2016. “The Visual Basis of Linguistic Meaning and Its Implications for Critical Discourse Studies: Integrating Cognitive Linguistic and Multimodal Methods.” Discourse & Society27 (3): 335–5.

Horst Heather A. and Daniel Miller. Digital Anthropology. (London: Berg, 2013). [boellstorf intro].

Howes, David. The Sensory Studies Manifesto: Tracking the Sensorial Revolution in the Arts and Human Sciences. Univ of Toronto Press, 2022.
The senses are made, not given. This revolutionary realization has come as of late to inform research across the social sciences and humanities, and is currently inspiring groundbreaking experimentation in the world of art and design, where the focus is now on mixing and manipulating the senses. This book tracks these transformations and opens multiple lines of investigation into the diverse ways in which human beings sense and make sense of the world.

Howes, D. (2022). The misperception of the environment: A critical evaluation of the work of Tim Ingold and an alternative guide to the use of the senses in anthropological theory. Anthropological Theory, 22(4), 443–466. https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996211067307

Jackson, John. “Theorizing Production, Producing Theory: Why Filmmaking Could Count as Scholarship,” Cultural Studies 28:4 (July, 2014). (intro to a special issue on this).

Jackson, John. 2012. ETHNOGRAPHY IS, ETHNOGRAPHY AIN’T, CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 27, Issue 3, pp. 480–497.
Using a notion of “the digital” as one of its master metaphors, a version of the term reliant on Kara Keeling's discussion of “digital humanism,” this piece argues that there is something about the nonlinearities defining digitality's difference that might help us to think about recalibrations in the ethnographic project itself. From a discussion of Marlon Riggs's filmic depiction of his own death (as one way to talk about the nondigital) to a machine that uses digital technology to play with temporality in broadcast television, this article wants to ask what the changing social relations (and existential realities) predicated on the ubiquity of digital media might mean for ethnographic research and writing today. With the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem as central ethnographic subjects, I argue that taking digitality seriously means redefining some of what ethnography is and ain't in a post–Writing Culture moment.

PR Kavanaugh, RJ Maratea. Digital ethnography in an age of information warfare: Notes from the field. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 2020

Robert V Kozinets. Netnography. The Essential Guide to Qualitative Social Media Research
Third Edition, Sage, 2019.

Machin, David. 2016. “The Need for a Social and Affordance-Driven Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies.” Discourse & Society 27 (3): 322–34

H McCann, C Southerton. FANGIRLS AND FAKE NEWS: DIGITAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE AFFECTS OF FANDOM. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research, 2019 - spir.aoir.org

Miller, Daniel and Don Slater. 2000. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. New York: Berg.

Peters, Benjamin. Digital Keywords [online pdf]

Pink, Sarah. 2011. “Multimodality, Multisensorality and Ethnographic Knowing: Social Semiotics and the Phenomenology of Perception.” Qualitative Research 11 (3): 261–76.

Sarah Pink and Simone Abram, eds., Media, anthropology and public engagement . New York, New York: Berghahn Books, 2015.

Aswin Punathambekar, Sriram Mohan. 2017. A Sound Bridge: Listening for the Political in a Digital Age. International Journal of Communication.
This article examines how catchy sounds (“Why This Kolaveri” [“Why This Murderous Rage”]) can function as sonic cues for political participation. Exploring the sonic dimensions and aural imaginaries at play in mediated public spheres, we show how #Kolaveri became a sound bridge that enabled potent encounters among journalists, politicians, and citizens embroiled in heated debates about corruption in India. Tracing #Kolaveri’s movement across media platforms, we analyze three dimensions of the sonic cue―its availability, performativity, and resonance―that gave it a catalytic charge. Suggesting that sound technologies and practices constitute vital cultural and material infrastructures on which a bridge between the popular and the political can be built, we argue that cases like #Kolaveri disclose new ways of listening for the political and new modes of participation―the expression of sonic citizenship―in a digital era.

Samuels, David W.  Louise Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa, and Thomas Porcello. 2010. Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology. Vol. 39, pp. 329–345.

Seaver, Nick. Bastard Algebra: Making Methods on the Shores of Big Data. In Data, Now Bigger and Better! Edited and with an Introduction by Tom Boellstorff and Bill Maurer (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2015). [contrib. by Bell questions the 'new empiricism' associated with big data]

Ruby, Jay 1975 “Is an Ethnographic Film a Filmic Ethnography?” Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 2, no. 2: 104–11.

Turner, Terence. 1995. Representation, Collaboration and Mediation in Contemporary Ethnographic and Indigenous Media. Visual Anthropology Review 11(2):102−106.

Underberg, Natalie M. and Elayne ZornDigital Ethnography: Anthropology, Narrative, and New Media. May 1, 2014.

Varzi, Roxanne. 2018. The Knot in the Wood: The Call to Multimodal Anthropology. American Anthropologist.

Wortham, S. E., & Reyes, A. (2015). Discourse analysis beyond the speech event. London: Routledge. [Intro+Chapter 5: discourse analysis of new media data]

Language and Sociality Online

Archambault JS. 2013. Cruising through uncertainty: cell phones and the politics of display and disguise in Inhambane, Mozambique. Am. Ethnol. 40(1):88–101. (ereserve).

Barker J. 2008. Playing with publics: technology, talk and sociability in Indonesia. Lang. Commun. 28:127–42. (ereserve).

Varis, P., & Blommaert, J. (2015). Conviviality and collectives on social media: Virality, memes, and new social structures. Multilingual Margins, 2(1), 31-45. (14 pp). (ereserve).

Aslaug Veum, Linda Victoria Moland Undrum. 2017. The selfie as a global discourse, Discourse and Society. (14 pp). (ereserve).

Jones G, Schieffelin B. 2009b. Talking text and talking back: “my BFF Jill” from boob tube to YouTube. J. Comp. Mediat. Commun. 14(4):1050–79. (26 pp) (ereserve).

Agha, A. (2007). Recombinant selves in mass mediated spacetime. Language & Communication, 27(3), 320-335.

Agha, A. "Commodity registers." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21, no. 1 (2011): 22-53.

Agha, Asif, ed. 2011. “Mediatized Communication in Complex Societies.” Language & Communication  31 (3): 163–274.

Tom Boellstorff, Placing the Virtual Body: Avatar, Chora, Cypherg. In A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment. Frances E. Mascia-Lees, editor. Pp. 504–520. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.

Bollestorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

boyd, danah, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale U. Press, 2014).

boyd, danah. 2012. “Participating in the Always on Lifestyle” The Social Media Reader. Michael Mandiberg, ed. NY: New York University Press; 71-76

boyd, d. 2007. Why youth (heart) social network sites: the role of networked publics in teenage social life. Macarthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning. David Buckingham. Ed. Cambridge: MIT Press 119–42

boyd, danah. 2009.  White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook. Nakamura and Chow.

Cavanaugh, Jillian R. 2016a. “Anything Can Happen on YouTube (Or Can It?): Endangered Language and New Media.” In Cultural Anthropology: Contemporary, Public and Critical Readings , edited by Keri V. Brondo, 88–95. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chin, Elizabeth. 2016. My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Cole, D., & Pellicer, R. (2012). Uptake (un)limited: The mediatization of register shifting in US public discourse. Language in Society, 41(4), 449.

Duclos, Vincent. 2017. INHABITING MEDIA: An Anthropology of Life in Digital Speed. Cultural Anthro 32:1,

Eisenlohr P. 2004. Language revitalization and new technologies: cultures of electronic mediation and the refiguring of communities. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 33:21–45.

Gershon, Ilana. 2010. “Media Ideologies: An Introduction.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology  20 (2): 283–93.

Gershon, Selling Your Self in the United States. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 37(2):281–295, 2014

Gershon, I. (2017). Language and the Newness of Media. Annual Review of Anthropology.

Gershon, I. and Bell, J. A. (2013) Introduction: The Newness of New Media. Culture, Theory and Critique 54:3, pages 259-264.

Gershon and Manning. Language and Media. Cambridge handbook of ling ant.

Graham, P. (2006). Hypercapitalism: New media, language, and social perceptions of value (Vol. 15). Peter Lang.

Hillewaert, S. (2015). Writing with an Accent: Orthographic Practice, Emblems, and Traces on Facebook. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 25(2), 195-214.

Hirschkind, Charles, Maria José A. de Abreu, and Carlo Caduff. "New Media, New Publics?: An Introduction to Supplement 15." Current Anthropology 58, no. S15 (February 2017): S3-S12.

Kapidzic, S., & Herring, S. C. (2015). Race, gender, and self-presentation in teen profile photographs. New Media & Society, 17(6), 958-976.

Keating, E. (2005). Homo prostheticus: Problematizing the notions of activity and computer-mediated interaction. Discourse Studies, 7(4/5), 527-545.

Keating, E., & Sunakawa, C. (2010). Participation cues: Coordinating activity and collaboration in complex online gaming worlds. Language in Society, 39(3), 331-356.

Kelty, Christopher. 2005. Geeks, Internets, and Recursive Publics. Cultural Anthropology 20(2): 185−214.

Jones, G., Schieffelin, B., & Smith, R.(2011). When Friends Who Talk Together Stalk Together: Online Gossip as Metacommunication. In Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media. Oxford University Press.

Ladousa, C. (2014). Subject to Address in a Digital Literacy Initiative: Neoliberal Agency and the Promises and Predicaments of Participation. Signs and Society, 2(2), 203-229.

Machin, David. 2016. “The Need for a Social and Affordance-Driven Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies.” Discourse & Society  27 (3): 322–34.

Manning P, Gershon I. 2013. Animating interaction. HAU: J. Ethnogr. Theory 3:107–37

Miller, Daniel. 2011. Tales from Facebook. London: Polity.

Moore, R. (2011). Overhearing Ireland: Mediatized personae in Irish accent culture. Language & Communication, 31(3), 229-242.

Nayar, Pramod K.. An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Pype K. 2016. “[Not] talking like a Motorola”: mobile phone practices and politics of masking and unmasking in postcolonial Kinshasa. J. R. Anthropol. Inst. 22(3):633–52

Vincente Rafael, “The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines,” in Public Culture 15:3 (2003): 399-425.

Howard Rheingold, Virtual Communities 

Riha, Daniel and Anna Maj. Emerging Practices in Cyberculture and Social Networking. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2010.

Sherouse P. 2014. Hazardous digits: telephone keypads and Russian numbers in Tbilisi, Georgia. Lang. Commun. 37:1–11

Spitulnik D. 1996. The social circulation of media discourse and the mediation of communities. J. Linguist. Anthropol. 6(2):161–87

Squires L. 2010. Enregistering Internet language. Lang. Soc. 39(4):457–92

Stæhr A, Madsen LM. 2015. Standard language in urban rap: social media, linguistic practice and ethnographic context. Lang. Commun. 40:67–81

Strassler, K. (2014). Seeing the Unseen in Indonesia's Public Sphere: Photographic Appearances of a Spirit Queen. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 56(1), 98-130.

Swinehart, K. F., & Graber, K. (2012). Tongue-tied territories: Languages and publics in stateless nations. Language & Communication, 32(2), 95-97.

Tannen, D., & Trester, A. M. (Eds.). (2015). Discourse 2.0: language and new media. Washington: Georgetown University Press.

Tannen, D. 2015. “The Medium Is the Metamessage: Conversational Style in New Media Interaction” in Discourse 2.0: language and new media. Tannen, D., & Trester, A. M. (Eds.). Washington: Georgetown University Press, 99-118

Thornborrow, J. (2001) ‘Authenticating talk: Building public identities in audience participation broadcasting’, Discourse Studies, 3(4): 459–79.

Thurlow C. 2006. From statistical panic to moral panic: The metadiscursive construction and popular exaggeration of new media language in the print media. J. Comput. Mediated Commun. 11(3):667–70

Vokes R, Pype K. 2016. Chronotopes of media in sub-Saharan Africa. Ethnos pp. 1–10

Walton S, Jaffe A. 2011. “Stuff white people like”: stance, class, race, and Internet commentary. In Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media, ed. C Thurlow, K Mroczek, pp. 199–219. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press

Wesch M. 2009. Youtube and you: experiences of self-awareness in the context collapse of the recording Webcam. Explor. Media Ecol. 8(2):19–34

Transduction

• Helmreich, "Transduction"
• Black, S. P. (2017), Anthropological Ethics and the Communicative Affordances of Audio-Video Recorders in Ethnographic Fieldwork: Transduction as Theory. American Anthropologist, 119: 46–57. doi:10.1111/aman.12823
• Silverstein, Michael. 2003, Translation, Transduction, Transformation: Skating Glossando on Thin Semiotic Ice. In P. Rubel and A.

Examples of Multimodal Work in Anthropology

• Multimodal anthropologies page: samples (scroll down)
• Matsutake Worlds Live (Anna Tsing and students' website at UCSD accompanying her book, mentioned in D. and M-G)
• Forensic Architecture (Multimodal forensic cases challenging official accounts of violence, mentioned by D and M-G)
• CAMRA (Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts) fosters interdisciplinary collaborations amongst scholars, sensory ethnographers, artists and educators within and beyond the University of Pennsylvania to explore, practice, evaluate and teach about multimedia research and representation. (mentioned by D and M-G)
• New Sound and Vision Section of Cultural Anthropology Journal (for multimodal work)
• Cultural Anthropology Journal Photo Essays
• Ethnographic Terminalia
  Ethnographic Terminalia is a curatorial collective grounded in a commitment to pushing the boundaries of anthropological scholarship and contemporary art through interdisciplinary exhibitions. Since 2009 we have been curating group exhibitions and projects in major North American cities. These projects demonstrate how contemporary artists, anthropologists, and institutions are engaging with ethnographic methodologies and art.
• Making Graphic Novels in Anthropology (scroll down for examples)
• Anthropology Goes Comics
• The Anthropological Comic Book
• AnthroPod: Cultural Anthropology Journal Podcasts (scroll down for my own interview on Tibetan self-immolation protest!)
• Best Anthropology Podcasts (2018)
• This AnthroLife
• Anthropology Now Podcasts
• Online Gods: a Podcast about Digital Cultures in India and Beyond
  Online Gods is part theoretical exploration into some of the key concepts in the anthropology of media, and part research into how increased online interaction is changing the public sphere. Taking India and the India diaspora as its focal point, the podcast continues in the great anthropological tradition of bringing the global and the specific into conversation with one another as it analyses what online discussions do to political participation, displays of faith and feelings of national belonging. We are also intrigued as to whether a podcast can produce ethnographic theory. We believe It is possible to be both sophisticated and yet comprehensible, and that the spoken form can bring forth an accessibility that is sometimes missing from the written form. We even wonder whether academic podcasting might herald a technologically-enabled return to the centrality of oral traditions in intellectual exploration – can podcasting weaken reading’s hegemonic hold on consumption of academic knowledge? Online Gods is a key initiative of the project ONLINERPOL and is cohosted with HAU Network for Ethnographic Theory. This podcast is hosted by Ian Cook.

Tues Mar 7 Religion, Mediation and Immediacy

Eisenlohr, Patrick. 2009. Technologies of the Spirit: Devotional Islam, Sound Reproduction, and the Dialectics of Mediation and Immediacy in Mauritius. Anthropological Theory 9(3): 273−296 (ereserve).

Meyer, B. (2011). Mediation and immediacy: sensational forms, semiotic ideologies and the question of the medium. Social Anthropology, 19(1), 23-39. (ereserve).

Handout Midterm Project Plan Guidelines

Thurs Mar 9 Zoom Workshop on Techniques and Goals of Editing with AV/Creative Consultants, Tony Moreno and Joe Janiga

You should have already captured/recorded something, even if it is just preliminary, rough or a trial run, so that you have your medium(s) and some project goals in mind.

Please upload at least one question on some aspect of creating/operationalizing your project by Thursday 10 am to our Thursday Moodle Workshop Forum.

Spring Break Mar. 13-17

Media, multimodality and religion

Allen, Lori A. 2009 Martyr Bodies in the Media: Human Rights, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Immediation in the Palestinian Intifada. American Ethnologist 36(1): 161–180.

Eisenlohr, P. (2011). The anthropology of media and the question of ethnic and religious pluralism. Social Anthropology, 19(1), 40-55.

Eisenlohr, P. (2011). Introduction: What is a medium? theologies, technologies and aspirations. Social Anthropology, 19 (1): 1-5.

Eisenlohr P. 2006. As Makkah is sweet and beloved, so is Madina: Islam, devotional genres and electronic mediation in Mauritius. Am. Ethnol. 33(2):230–45

Eisenlohr, P. (2011). Media authenticity and authority in Mauritius: On the mediality of language in religion. Language & Communication, 31(3), 266-273.

Eisenlohr P. Materialities of Entextualization: The Domestication of Sound Reproduction in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practices. Volume 20, Issue 2 December 2010 Pages 314–33.

Engelke, Matthew. A problem of presence: beyond scripture in an African church. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2007.

Fader, A. (2017). The counterpublic of the (Jewish) Blogosphere: gendered language and the mediation of religious doubt among ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23(4), 727-747.

Feld, Steven. 2015. “Acoustemology.” In Keywords in Sound , edited by David Novak and Matthew Sakakeeny, 12–21. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Handman, Courtney. Critical Christianity: Translation and Denominational Conflict in Papua New Guinea. 2014.

Hazard, Sonia, “The Material Turn in the Study of Religion,” Religion and Society: Advances in Research 4 (2013): 58–78.

Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hutchings, Tim and Joanne McKenzie, eds. Materiality and the Study of Religion: The Stuff of the Sacred. London: Routledge, 2017.

Jackson, John, Carolyn Rouse and Marla Frederick. Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment. NYU Press, 2016.

Keane, Webb. "The Evidence of the Senses and the Materiality of Religion," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14(1): 110-127, 2008.

Klima, Alan. 2001. The Telegraphic Abject: Buddhist Meditation and the Redemption of Mechanical Reproduction. Comparative Studies in History and Society 43 (3): 552 –582.

Meyer, Birgit, ed. Aesthetic Formations: Religion, Media, and the Senses (2009)

Meyer, Birgit and Annelies Moors, ed.s. Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere (contrib by Das, Asad, reviewed by Engelke; says besides Meyer, most do not engage ling anth, ).

Miller, Flagg. The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audio-cassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen.

Morgan, David. Religion and Embodiment in the Study of Material Culture. Oxford Research Encyclopedias. March 2015.

Christopher Pinney, “The Indian Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Media Worlds, pp. 355-369.

Seremetakis, Nadia. 2009. Divination, Media, and the Networked Body of Modernity. American Ethnologist36(2): 337-350.

Tues Mar 21

Larkin, Brian. 2008. "Introduction", Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (Bookstore, book reserve, ereserve). (16 pp).

Kunreuther, Laura. 2006. "Technologies of the Voice: FM Radio, Telephone, and the Nepali Diaspora in Kathmandu." Cultural Anthropology 21(3): 323−353. (ereserve). (27 pp).

New commentary blog partners

Thurs Mar 23

Larkin, Brian. 2008. Ch. 4 "Colonialism and the Built Space of Cinema," and Ch. 7, "Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy," Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (Bookstore, book reserve, ereserve). (~45 pp).

5-7 page Final Project plan or Storyboard sketch with 3-page text,
due Friday, Mar 24, 8 pm, upload to your Personal Moodle Blog (except for seniors!)

Cowen, Deborah. Intro, Ch. 1 and Conclusion. The Deadly Life of Logistics. [on global infrastructures/circuits of goods/services and security implications of: deals with data collection and management; makes clear military-corporate entanglements; logistics maps contemp imperialism; highlights politics of circulation; logistics space is biopolitical, despite its focus on inanimate objects; conclusion : intermodal assemblage of global supply chain=pushes back against dematerialization claims].

Ferguson, James. “Globalizing Africa? Observations from an Inconvenient Continent.” In Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 25-49.

Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population.

Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge; London: The MIT Press, 2016.

Kunreuther L. 2014. Voicing Subjects: Public Intimacy and Mediation in Kathmandu. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press

Kunreuther, L. (2010). Transparent Media: Radio, Voice, and Ideologies of Directness in Postdemocratic Nepal. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 20(2), 334-351.

Kunreuther, Laura. 2006. Technologies of the Voice: FM Radio, Telephone, and the Nepali Diaspora in Kathmandu. Cultural Anthropology 21(3): 323−353. (ereserve). (27 pp).

Kuntsman, Adi and Rebecca Stein. 2015. Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Larkin, Brian. 2013. The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology › Volume 42.

Tsing, Anna. Introduction. Friction.

Nigerian Film/Video/TV

Using Comedy To Strengthen Nigeria's Democracy (New Yorker, 2018)

Nigerian Anti-Movie Piracy ad (c. early 2000s?)

Older Nigerian video film: Abuja Connection (2003) English-language saga of two society ladies, Jennifer and Sophia, members of the same clan, who are business rivals in supplying prostitutes to members of the National Assembly.

Nollywood (Nigerian Film Industry)

• Nollywood (Wikipedia)
• Inside Nollywood, The Booming Film Industry that Makes 1500 Films a Year (PBS Newshour, 2017, conversation with scholar Elizabeth Flock on her book)
• Nollywoodpicturestv (Youtube channel)
• NollywoodMoviestv (Youtube channel)
• Nollywood ClassicTV (Youtube channel)

Weekend Film: Nothing to Hide, 90 mins, 2017 (View on Youtube)
"Independent documentary film dealing with mass surveillance and its acceptance in the public through the "I have nothing to hide" narrative."

Tues Mar 28 Algorithmic Surveillance and Terror capitalism in Xinjiang: limit case?

Wark, McKenzie. 2019. Introduction and Ch. 2. Capital is Dead. Verso Press. (ereserve, book reserve).

Byler, Darren. Ch. 1 Enclosure, Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese city. Duke University Press, 2022. (bookstore, ereserve, book reserve). (~28 pp)

Thurs 30 Dark Matters: Surveilling Blackness

Browne, Simone. Introduction and Ch. 3,"Biometrics and B®anding Blackness." Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015. (bookstore, bookreserve, ereserve). (~70 pp). *Content Notes: some graphic descriptions of torture of slaves, including branding bodies.

Ahmed, Shazeda. The Messy Truth About Social Credit Separating the fact from the fiction of China’s social credit system. [this is a great overview, very even handed, gives good context and compares w/similar, less overt practices in the US]

Andrejevic, Mark. "The Pacification of Interactivity," in The Participatory condition in the Digital Age, UMinn Press 2016.

Bear et al. Gens: A Feminist Manifesto for the Study of Capitalism. Journal of Cultural Anthropology. 2015. [Byler cites this]

• See a web comic version of the Gens Manifesto

Benjamin, Ruha. Race after technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press, 2019. [talks alot about racist coding in unexpected places]

Tom Boellstorff, Making Big Data, in Theory. First Monday 18(10) (online publication, no page numbers), 2013. http://firstmonday.org/article/view/4869/3750

Boler, Megan. Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. Cambridge; London: The MIT Press, 2008.

boyd, danah, and Kate Crawford. 2012 Critical Questions for Big Data. Information, Communication, and Society 15(5): 662–679.  (15 pp) [boyd works for Microsoft]

Byler, Darren. 2019. "Ghost World," Logic Magazine, Issue 7 China (中国).

Byler, Darren. 2020. Do Coercive Reeducation Technologies Actually Work? LA Review of Books.

Chow-White, Peter. 2012. "Genomic Databases and an Emerging Digital Divide in Biotechnology," in Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White, eds., Race After the Internet, Routledge. (Bookstore, book reserve). (20 pp)

Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014).

Coleman EG. 2009. Code is speech: legal tinkering, expertise, and protest among free and open source software developers. Cultural Anthropology 24(3):420–54

Duster in Nakamura and Chow.

Engle Merry 2016 The Seductions of Quantification Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking UChicago press [critique of rise of big data].

Foucault, Michel. Panopticonism. in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison. 1977.

Des Freedman, Cheryl Martens, Robert W. McChesney and Jonathan Obar, editors,“Strategies for Media Reform: Communication Research in Action.” Fordham University Press.

Gandy in Nakamura and Chow.

Olga Goriunova. The Digital Subject: People as Data as Persons [Deleuzian, not ethnographic, turns on metaphor of 'distance' and makes strange argument about indexicality]. Theory, Culture & Society. Apr 16, 2019.

Harney and Moten. Undercommons, [final sections on logistics/logisticality as the planned death of the subject, such that all things 'flow' thru, vs. 'friction' of staying/remaining/insisting on /refusal to be 'one' (Glissant, Tsing, see youtube vid of Harney on this]

Kathrine Hayles. How We Became Posthuman (1999).

Heyman, Josiah. Who Is Watched?Racialization of Surveillance Technologies and Practices in the US-Mexico Borderlands. Information and Society 57: 2.
The US-Mexico borderlands are disproportionately targeted by detection technologies, data tracing, and policing. Such technologies are applied to a population of millions who largely are racialized as Mexican in the United States. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star have explored how technologies of classification and applications stemming from them embody important racial divides in their study of apartheid in South Africa. This article moves the examination of racialized technologies from the microscale to the macroscale by looking at the framing of a distinctive region and the people most characteristic of it as a surveillance and enforcement target.

Hull, Matthew. 2003. The File: Agency, Authority, and Autography in a Pakistan Bureaucracy. Language and Communication 23: 287−314

Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge; London: The MIT Press, 2016.

Jusionyte, Ieva. 2015 Savage Frontier: Making News and Security on the Argentine Border. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Loubere, Nicholas and Stefan Brehm. 2018. "The Global Age of Algorithm: Social Credit and the Financialisation of Governance in China," 38-43 (5 pp, scroll down). Made in China, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2018. (online) 

Lury, Celia and Sophie Day. 2019. Algorithmic Personalization as a Mode of Individuation," Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 36(2) 17–37.

Matzner, Tobias. 2019. "The Human Is Dead – Long Live the Algorithm! Human-Algorithmic Ensembles and Liberal Subjectivity , Theory, Culture & Society," Vol. 36(2) 123–144. (ereserve)

McChesney, Robert. 2014. Digital Disconnect How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. The New Press. Ch. 7, Revolution in the Digital Revolution?

McChesney, Robert. 2014. Ch. 5 "The Internet and Capitalism II: The Empire of the Senseless," in Digital Disconnect How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. The New Press. (40 pp).

Masco, Joseph. ‘Boundless informant’: Insecurity in the age of ubiquitous surveillance Anthro theory 2017.

Monroe, Kristin V.  Tweets of surveillance: Traffic, Twitter, and securitization in Beirut, Lebanon . Anthro Theory, special issue on security.

Morozov E. 2009. How dictators watch us on the Web. Prospect. Vol. 165: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/11/how-dictators-watch-us-on-the-web/

Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White, eds., 2012. Race After the Internet, Routledge.

Nelson, Alondra and Jeong Won Hwong. 2012. "Roots and Revelation: Genetic Ancestry Testing and the Youtube Generation," in Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White, eds., Race After the Internet, Routledge. (Bookstore, book reserve). (20 pp)

Noble, Safiya. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. Eso Won Books, 2018. [talk at Reed, 2020]

O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction, [warns that we need algorithmic audits; featured in the 2020 Netflix documentary the social dilemma]
As mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination—propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process. Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.

Pype K. 2016. “[Not] talking like a Motorola”: mobile phone practices and politics of masking and unmasking in postcolonial Kinshasa. J. R. Anthropol. Inst. 22(3):633–52.

Nick Seaver, Bastard Algebra: Making Methods on the Shores of Big Data. In Data, Now Bigger and Better! Edited and with an Introduction by Tom Boellstorff and Bill Maurer (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2015).

Krystal Smalls, the “Black Body” in Digital Space: Digital Utterances and Anti-Black Epistemes, AAA 2019 presentation (see notes)

Smalls, Krystal. (in progress.) The Pot and the Kettle: Liberian Transnational Youth and the Semiotics of Anti/blackness in a Digital Age.

Smalls, Krystal. Racialized Masculinity in Digital Space” in Gender:Space, edited by Aimee Meredith Cox. MacmillanReference USA, (2018): 301-­‐‑315.  

Social Media, Politics and the State: Protests, Revolutions, Riots, Crime edited by Daniel Trottier, Christian Fuchs

Trottier, Daniel and David Lyon. 2012 “Key Features of Social Media Surveillance” in Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media eds. Christian Fuchs, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund and Marisol Sandoval. Routledge Press  89-105. (~25 pp).

Trottier, Daniel. 2012.“What Kind of Dwelling is Facebook?  Scholarly Perspectives” Social Media as Surveillance: Rethinking Visibility in a Converging World 33-60.

Turner, Fred. 2019. Machine Politics: The rise of the internet and a new age of authoritarianism. Harper's.

Virilio, Paul. Virilio's predictions about 'logistics of perception' - the use of images and information in war - (in War and Cinema, 1984)

Virilio, Paul. 2006 Ch. 12 in The Information Bomb, pp. 107-114. [state, power, globalization, mediation, surveillance]
Virilio's exploration of the relationship between technology, war and information technology.“Civilization or the militarization of science?” With this typically hyperbolic and provocative question as a starting point, Paul Virilio explores the dominion of techno-science, cyberwar and the new information technologies over our lives . . . and deaths. After the era of the atomic bomb, Virilio posits an era of genetic and information bombs which replace the apocalyptic bang of nuclear death with the whimper of a subliminally reinforced eugenics. We are entering the age of euthanasia. These exhilarating bulletins from the information war extend the range of Virilio's work. The Information Bomb spans everything from Fukuyama to Larry Flynt, the Sensation exhibition of New British Art to space travel, all seen through the optic of Virilio's trenchant and committed theoretical position.

Yu Zeng, Stan Hok-wui Wong. Social media, fear, and support for state surveillance: The case of China’s social credit system, China Information. April 20, 2022.

Films

NYT documentary on a yearlong study of govt bidding docs on surveillance tech, 2022. (14 min) [Good to pair with Byler]. Part of a 2022 NYT series on surveillance in China.

Digital Disconnect [film accompanying McChesney's book of the same name] [ordered for Reed library]

A Good Amercican- NSA Whistleblower Bill Binney & Government Controlled Big Data
"A GOOD AMERICAN is a gripping docu-thriller about a groundbreaking surveillance program, the brilliant mastermind behind it and how a perfect alternative to mass surveillance was killed by NSA management for money - three weeks prior to 9/11."

Through the crosshairs : reading the weaponized gaze (Reed has DVD) (47 min) Roger Stahl, film director, narrator, screenwriter.; Media Education Foundation, presenter, publisher.; ;Northampton, MA : Media Education Foundation 2018.

Videos

Simone Browne lecture: "Dark Sousveillance: Race, Surveillance and Resistance". Hosted at the Graduate Center, CUNY by the Digital Praxis Seminar and the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, December 9, 2013.

Simone Browne lecture: "Race and Surveillance Online," Mozfest 2017.

Imagine Otherwise Podcast: Episode 9 with Simone Browne: How is the history of slavery tied to modern-day surveillance systems? Is surveillance always a negative term? How can a gendered lens change the way we perceive privacy rights and policies? 2017.

McKenzie Wark

• McKenzie Wark at New School (includes links to her works)
• Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker's Manifesto. Harvard University Press, 2004
• General Intellects - with McKenzie Wark | Virtual Futures Salon Lecture online, May 2017
• Anthropocene Lecture: McKenzie Wark, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Jan 2018
• Capital Is Dead | McKenzie Wark in conversation with Verso Books, Nov 2019

The Panopticon and Surveillance Capitalism?

• Explainer: the Panopticon The Ethics Centre, 2017
• Slideshare: The Role of Panopticon in Panopticism
• What does the Panopticon Mean in the Age of Digital Surveillance? The Guardian 2015
• Inside an Abandoned Panopticon Prison in Cuba, Altas Obscura, 2017
• Foucault and Social Media: Life in a Virtual Panopticon. Philosophy for Change, 2012

The Rise of Sousveillance: Watching Wars?

• Sousveillance (Wikipedia)
• "Sousveillance," Steve Mann, 2002.
• Mann, Steve et al. "Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments." Surveillance & Society, 2003.
  This paper describes using wearable computing devices to perform "sousveillance" (inverse surveillance) as a counter to organizational surveillance. A variety of wearable computing devices generated different kinds of responses, and allowed for the collection of data in different situations. Visible sousveillance often evoked counter-performances by front-line surveillance workers. The juxtaposition of sousveillance with surveillance generates new kinds of information in a social surveillance situation.
• Sousveillance and Justice: A Panopticon in the Crowds, David Banks, Cybergology, 2011.

Big Data, Surveillance and the News

• House Rejects Privacy Safeguards (Jan 2018)
• Spying on a Budget Inside a Phishing Operation with Targets in the Tibetan Community
  By Masashi Crete-Nishihata, Jakub Dalek, Etienne Maynier, and John Scott-Railton. The Citizen Lab January 30, 2018
  
• Cambridge Analytica (Pro-Trump Propaganda Company) Steals 50 Million Facebook Profiles (March 2018)
  • How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions, New York Times, March 2018
  • Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: 'We spent $1m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles' (The Guardian, March 2018)
    
  • Did Cambridge Analytica play a role in the EU referendum? - BBC Newsnight
  • The Cambridge Analytica Files (The Guardian, March 2018)
• A Nation Tracked (New York Times interactive Expose on the emergent cellphone location data-selling industry) (NYT 2020).

Surveillance: Penn State's "Spot the Surveillance" Virtual Reality Exercise

Dark Sousveillance: Performances of Resistance (mentioned by Browne)

• Pamela Z. Baggage Allowance

• Adrian Piper "What it's Like, What it is #3"

• Caryl Phillips "The Cargo Rap"

• Hank Willis Thomas "Branded Series"

Biometrics and Anthropometry

• Algorithmic Justice League, Joy Buolamwini, social entrepreneur and computing science graduate student at MIT Media Lab calls for an "inclusive coding" movement to fight the "coded gaze".
• History of Anthropometry (Wikipedia)
• Ergin, Murat. Biometrics and anthropometrics: the twins of Turkish modernity. Patterns of Prejudice, 2008.
• Clarkson, Nicholas. Biometrics. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. 2014 [excellent critical overview of this keyword].
• Li Huaming et al. Facial Pose Estimation Based on the Mongolian Race’s Feature Characteristic from a Monocular Image, Advances in Biometric Person Authentication, 2004. (Institute of visualization technology, Department of Computer ScienceNorthwest UniversityXi’anP.R. China, funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China). [cited by Browne, uses anthropometric data collected from Mongolians as examples of the "Mongolian race".] [SpringerNature publications, which censors content in China]
• Gupta et al. Anthropometric 3D Face Recognition. Int J Comput Vis, 2009
  
• Wei Gao and Ai Haizhou. Face Gender Classification on Consumer Images in a Multiethnic Environment, Advances in Biometrics, 2009 (Computer Science and Technology Department. Tsinghua University Beijing, China) [cited by Browne]. [SpringerNature publications, which censors content in China]
• Song et al. 3D Face Recognition Using Anthropometric and Curvelet Features Fusion. Journal of Sensors, 2015. (Tianjin Polytech University, China). [SpringerNature publications, which censors content in China]
• Adelaja Abdulazeez Akinlolu. Facial biometrics of Yorubas of Nigeria using Akinlolu-Raji image-processing algorithm. Journal of Medical Sciences: Official Journal of National Defense Medical Center, Taiwan. (Department of Anatomy, Faculty of Basic Medical Sciences, University of Ilorin, Ilorin, Kwara State, Nigeria).

Weekend film: the Gig is Up: A Very Human Tech Doc, Shannon Walsh, Dir., 2021 (88 min) (Stream via Moodle)
" A very human tech doc, THE GIG IS UP uncovers the real costs of the platform economy through the lives of people working for companies around the world, including Uber, Amazon and Deliveroo."

Tues Apr. 4 Creating/Platforming Labor

Seaver, Nick. What Should an Anthropology of Algorithms Do? Cultural Anthropology 33(3), 2018 (8 pp) (ereserve)

Srnicek, Nick. Introduction and Ch 2 "Platform Capitalism," in Platform Capitalism, Polity Press. 2017. (~30 pp) (ebook or pdf downloadable online)

Roberts, Sarah T. 2016 “Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Laborers’ Dirty Work.” In The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class and Culture Online, edited by Safiya Umoja Noble and Brendesha M. Tynes, 147–59. New York: Peter Lang. (12 pp) (ereserve, book reserve)

Thurs Apr 6 In-class Workshop in Lib 17: Bringing your Idea to image/sound with AV/Creative Consultants Tony Moreno, Joe Janiga and Ann Matsushima Chiu

Please upload at least one question about how to render in image/sound your ideas on mediation and/or how to pare your project down/make it feasible by Wednesday 8 pm to our Thursday Moodle Workshop Forum. You will be asked to present your question in class. NOTE: the workshop will take place in Lib 17 (large classroom in the library basement). Bring your computers and headphones/earbuds for audio/video work!

Andrejevic, Mark. "The Pacification of Interactivity," in The Participatory condition in the Digital Age, UMinn Press 2016.

Solon Barocas, Sophie Hood, Malte Ziewitz. Governing Algorithms: A Provocation Piece. March 29, 2013.

Cowen, Deborah. 2014. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. Minnesota Univ Press.

Rachel Douglas-Jones, Antonia Walford, Nick Seaver. Introduction: Towards an anthropology of data Volume27, IssueS1. Special Issue: TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF DATA. JRAI. Pages 9-25. March 2021.

Harney and Moten. Undercommons, final sections on logistics/logisticality as the planned death of the subject, such that all things 'flow' thru, vs. 'friction' of staying/remaining/insisting on /refusal to be 'one' (Glissant, Tsing, see youtube vid of Harney on this).

Nakamura, Lisa et al. Technoprecarious. Goldsmiths Precarity Lab. 2020.

Alan Finlayson. Neoliberalism, the Alt-Right and the Intellectual Dark Web . Theory, Culture & Society 2021.

Matzner, Tobias. 2019. "The Human Is Dead – Long Live the Algorithm! Human-Algorithmic Ensembles and Liberal Subjectivity, Theory, Culture & Society," Vol. 36(2) 123–144

Cathy O’Neil. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, Penguin, 2016. [featured in the 2020 Netflix documentary the social dilemma]
As mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination—propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process. Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.

Pedersen, M.A.; Albris, K.; Seaver, N. The Political Economy of Attention. Annual Review of Anthropology. [2021 Actually pretty basic, their media references are very old]

Roberts, Sarah T. Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media. 2019 Yale University Press

Schinkel, Willem & de Vries, Patricia (2019). Algorithmic anxiety: Masks and camouflage in artistic imaginaries of facial recognition algorithms. Big Data and Society 6 (1).
This paper discusses prominent examples of what we call “algorithmic anxiety” in artworks engaging with algorithms. In particular, we consider the ways in which artists such as Zach Blas, Adam Harvey and Sterling Crispin design artworks to consider and critique the algorithmic normativities that materialize in facial recognition technologies. Many of the artworks we consider center on the face, and use either camouflage technology or forms of masking to counter the surveillance effects of recognition technologies. Analyzing their works, we argue they on the one hand reiterate and reify a modernist conception of the self when they conjure and imagination of Big Brother surveillance. Yet on the other hand, their emphasis on masks and on camouflage also moves beyond such more conventional critiques of algorithmic normativities, and invites reflection on ways of relating to technology beyond the affirmation of the liberal, privacy-obsessed self. In this way, and in particular by foregrounding the relational modalities of the mask and of camouflage, we argue academic observers of algorithmic recognition technologies can find inspiration in artistic algorithmic imaginaries.

Nick Seaver (2021) Seeing like an infrastructure: avidity and difference in algorithmic recommendation, Cultural Studies, 35:4-5, 771-791, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2021.1895248

Special Section: Algorithmic Thought. Theory, Culture & Society- Volume: 38, Number: 7-8 (December 2021)

• Beatrice Fazi Introduction: Algorithmic Thought 
•  Wolfgang Ernst Existing in Discrete States: On the Techno-Aesthetics of Algorithmic Being-in-Time
• Luciana Parisi Interactive Computation and Artificial Epistemologies
•  Beatrice Fazi. Beyond Human: Deep Learning, Explainability and Representation

Timothy Erik Ström. Journey to the centre of the world: Google Maps and the abstraction of cybernetic capitalism. Cultural Geographies. March 1, 2020

Tommaso Venturini. Online Conspiracy Theories, Digital Platforms and Secondary Orality: Toward a Sociology of Online Monsters, Theory, Culture & Society, Mar 5, 2022

Ziewitz, M. (2016). Governing Algorithms: Myth, Mess, and Methods. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 41(1), 3–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243915608948
Algorithms have developed into somewhat of a modern myth. On the one hand, they have been depicted as powerful entities that rule, sort, govern, shape, or otherwise control our lives. On the other hand, their alleged obscurity and inscrutability make it difficult to understand what exactly is at stake. What sustains their image as powerful yet inscrutable entities? And how to think about the politics and governance of something that is so difficult to grasp? This editorial essay provides a critical backdrop for the special issue, treating algorithms not only as computational artifacts but also as sensitizing devices that can help us rethink some entrenched assumptions about agency, transparency, and normativity.

The Gap Between the Haves and Have-Nots of Tech Widens. NYT, 2020.
Despite regulatory scrutiny and pressure from lawmakers, the industry’s wealthiest are continuing to grow at remarkable speeds for big companies.

The Precariat

What is the Precariat? Guy Standing Ted Talk video, 2017

Power to the Precariat. Guy Standing, Renegade, inc. video interview, 2021. (Youtube)

Standing, Guy. The Precariat: the New Dangerous Class. 2011.

Standing, Guy. "Meet the Precariat: the New Global Class Fueling Populism," World Economic Forum, 2016.

Yellend, Tannara. What the Fuck Is the ‘Precariat,’ and Why Should You Care? Vice Mag, 2015. (also in audio form!)

Nakamura, Lisa et al. Technoprecarious. Goldsmiths Precarity Lab. 2020.
 Technoprecarious advances a new analytic for tracing how precarity unfolds across disparate geographical sites and cultural practices in the digital age. Digital technologies—whether apps like Uber, built on flexible labor, or platforms like Airbnb that shift accountability to users—have assisted in consolidating the wealth and influence of a small number of players. These platforms have also exacerbated increasingly insecure conditions of work and life for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities; women; indigenous people; migrants; and peoples in the global south. At the same time, precarity has become increasingly generalized, expanding to include even the creative class and digital producers themselves. This collaboratively authored multigraph analyzes the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity. The authors use the term precarity to characterize those populations disproportionately affected by the forms of inequality and insecurity that digital technologies have generated despite the new affordances and possibilities they offer. The book maps a broad range of digital precarity—from the placement of Palestinian Internet cables to the manufacture of electronics by Navajo women and from the production and deployment of drones on the U.S.–Mexico border to the technocultural productions of Chinese makers. This project contributes to, and helps bridge, ongoing debates on precarity and digital networks in the fields of critical computing, postcolonial studies, visual culture, and information sciences.

Gig Workers Organize (2010s-present)

Gig Workers Rising (2018-)
At Gig Workers Rising, we believe that everyone who works via an app deserves a real voice in their job and the freedom that comes with good pay and real benefits. We believe that without gig workers, these corporations are powerless — so when gig workers stand together, you have the power to drive real change. We talk to gig workers at airports, parking lots and online groups, and we put them in touch with other platform workers who share similar sentiments.

Google's "Ghost Workers" are Demanding to be Seen by the Tech Giant. NPR, 2023
Demands by Google content moderators and raters for better pay and respect.

Office hours meetings with AV/Creative Consultants, Tony, Joe or Ann this week, in person or via Zoom: Finalizing your project plans.

Tues Apr 11 Racialization and (Digital) Mediation

Fanon, Franz. 2008(1952). "The Lived Experience of the Black Man," Black Skin, White Masks (Richard Philcox translation). Grove Press. (ereserve).

Nakamura, Lisa and Peter Chow-White. 2012. Introduction--Race and Digital Technology: Code, the Color line and the Information Society, in Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White, eds., Race After the Internet, Routledge. (16 pp). (Bookstore, book reserve, ereserve).

Thurs Apr 13 Making Black Counterpublics: Mediated Religion

Rouse, Carolyn, John L. Jackson, and Marla Frederick. 2016. Introduction (excerpt) and Ch. 5 "Race, Islam, and Longings for Inclusion: Muslim Media and Twenty-First Century Redemption," Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment. New York: New York University Press. (Book reserve, ereserve). (~50 pp).

Tom Boellstorff, Placing the Virtual Body: Avatar, Chora, Cypherg. In A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment. Frances E. Mascia-Lees, editor. Pp. 504–520. New York: Wiley-Blackwell

Bonilla, Yarimar and Jonathan Rosa. 2015. #Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Politics, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States. American Ethnologist 42(1): 4-17.

Boyd in Nakamura and Chow.

boyd, danah. 2009.  White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook

Brink-Danan M. 2011. The meaning of Ladino: the semiotics of an online speech community. Lang. Commun. 31:107–18

Bucholtz, M. (2011). Race and the re-embodied voice in Hollywood film. Language & Communication, 31(3), 255-265.

Campt, Tina. Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe” Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2012
Shankar: Tina M. Campt also draws on the concept of fugitivity in her landmark monograph Image Matters (2012) to examine the ways in which Black diasporic photography participated in community and identity formation in a hostile environment that negated Blackness

Chun, Elaine. 2016. “The Meaning of Ching-Chong: Language, Racism, and Response in New Media.” In Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race , edited by H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball, 81–96. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chun, E., & Walters, K.(2011). Orienting to Arab Orientalisms: Language, Race, and Humor in a YouTube Video. In Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media. Oxford University Press.

Clarke.  Rethinking Sovereignty Through Hashtag Publics: The New Body Politics
Kamari Maxine Clarke Cultural Anthropology, 2017.

Everett, Ana. 2012 “Have we become postracial yet? Race and Media Technologies in the Age of President Obama” in Race after the Internet.  Eds. Nakamura and Chow-White. 146-167

Haraway, Donna. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism.” In Simians, Cyborgs, Women and the Reinvention of Nature. 149-181.

Harney and Moten. Undercommons.

Jones, Rodney. Technology and display of the body, in Carey Jewitt, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis, London: Routledge, 2009.

Kafai, Yasmin B., Melissa S. Cook, and Deborah A. Fields, ‘‘Blacks Deserve Bodies Too!’’: Design and Discussion About Diversity and Race in a Tween Virtual World. Games and Culture 5(1):43–63, 2010.
In this paper, we investigate racial diversity in avatar design and public discussions about race within a large-scale tween virtual world called Whyville.net, with more than 1.5 million registered players of ages 8—16. One unique feature of Whyville is the player’s ability to customize their avatars with various face parts and accessories, all designed and sold by other players in Whyville. Our findings report on the racial diversity of available resources for avatar construction and online postings about the role of race in avatar design and social interactions in the community. With the growing interest in player-generated content for online worlds such as Teen Second Life, our discussion addresses the role of avatars in teen/tween identity development and self-representation, and the role of virtual entrepreneurs and community activists in increasing the diversity of avatar parts available.

Kapidzic, S., & Herring, S. C. (2015). Race, gender, and self-presentation in teen profile photographs. New Media & Society, 17(6), 958-976.

Keeling, Kara. 2005. Passing for human: Bamboozled and digital humanism, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory Vol. 15, Iss. 1.

Kyong Chun, Wendy Hui. 2012. “Race and/as Technology or How to Do Things to Race” in Race after the Internet eds. Nakamura and Chow-White pp.38-60.

Marez, Curtis. 2012. Cesar Chavez, United Farmworkers and the History of Star Wars, in Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White, eds., Race After the Internet, Routledge. (27 pp).

McPherson, Tara. 2012. U.S. Operating Systems at Mid-Century: Race and UNIX, in Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White, eds., Race After the Internet, Routledge.  (16 pp)

Nakamura Lisa. 2007. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. Press

Krystal Smalls, the “Black Body” in Digital Space: Digital Utterances and Anti-Black Epistemes, AAA 2019 presentation (see notes)

Smalls, Krystal. (in progress.) The Pot and the Kettle: Liberian Transnational Youth and the Semiotics of Anti/blackness in a Digital Age.

Smalls, Krystal. Racialized Masculinity in Digital Space” in Gender:Space, edited by Aimee Meredith Cox. MacmillanReference USA, (2018): 301-­‐‑315.  

Walton S, Jaffe A. 2011. “Stuff white people like”: stance, class, race, and Internet commentary. In Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media, ed. C Thurlow, K Mroczek, pp. 199–219. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press

Wilson and Chock. in Nakamura and Chow.

Henry Louis Gates and Genomic Race

• Gates on African American Lives TV show
• African American Lives 2 (PBS TV Show, 2008)
• Finding Your Roots (PBS TV Show)

Digital Minstrelsy

• The White Internet's Love Affair with Digital Blackface (Amanda Hess, Internetting, NYT, 2018) [See Hess' other videos on digital culture]
  
  
•  Jar Jar Binks and Minstrelsy
  
  • Jar Jar Binks Scenes Compilation (Youtube)
  • Stepin Fetchit in Miracle in Harlem (1948)
  • Horton, Price and Brown. Portrayal of Minorities in the Film, Media and Entertainment Industries. Poverty & Prejudice: Media and Race, 1999. [discusses Jar Jar Binks' resemblance to stereotypes of Caribbean men].
  • Carl Silvio, ‎Tony M. Vinci, ‎Donald E. Palumbo. 2017. Culture, Identities and Technology in the Star Wars Films. [discusses Jar Jar Binks character's links to Caribbean patois]

The Gap Between the Haves and Have-Nots of Tech Widens. NYT, 2020.
Despite regulatory scrutiny and pressure from lawmakers, the industry’s wealthiest are continuing to grow at remarkable speeds for big companies.

The Negritude Movement (discussed by Fanon, via Cesaire, Senghor and Sartre)

• Black Past.org (2008) The literary movement, Negritude, was born out of the Paris intellectual environment of 1930s and 1940s. It is a product of black writers joining together through the French language to assert their cultural identity.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2010) The concept of Négritude emerged as the expression of a revolt against the historical situation of French colonialism and racism. The particular form taken by that revolt was the product of the encounter, in Paris, in the late 1920s, of three black students coming from different French colonies: Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) from Martinique, Léon Gontran Damas (1912–1978) from Guiana and Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) from Senegal. 
• Africana Age (online exhibition) ...signaled an awakening of race consciousness for blacks in Africa and the African Diaspora. This new race consciousness, rooted in a (re)discovery of the authentic self, sparked a collective condemnation of Western domination, anti-black racism, enslavement, and colonization of black people. It sought to dispel denigrating myths and stereotypes linked to black people, by acknowledging their culture, history, and achievements, as well as reclaiming their contributions to the world and restoring their rightful place within the global community.
• Nielsen, C.R. (2013). Frantz Fanon and the Négritude Movement: How Strategic Essentialism Subverts Manichean Binaries. Callaloo 36(2), 342-352. doi:10.1353/cal.2013.0084.

The Rise of Genomics: Human Genome Project (HGP)

• All About the Human Genome Project (National Human Genome Research Institute)
• Human Genome Project (Wikipedia)
• "How White Supremacists Respond when their DNA says they are "Not White"", PBS Newshour, 2017.
• "They Considered Themselves White but DNA tests Told a Different Story," Washington Post, 2018.

In-class Film: When the Dogs Talked (2014) Karrabing Film collective (33 min)

Tues Apr. 18 Rethinking indigenous publics

Simpson, Audra, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, and Liza Johnson. 2014. “Holding Up the World, Part IV: After a Screening of When the Dogs Talked at Columbia University.” E-flux journal (51), October. (Online) [Simpson interview with Filmmakers EP and LJ].

Ginsburg F. 2008. Rethinking the digital age. In Media and Social Theory, DHesmondhalgh, J Toynbee, ed., London/New York: Routledge, pp. 127–44. (ereserve).

Fisher, Daniel. 2016. Prologue, and Introduction. The Voice and Its Doubles: Media and Music in Northern Australia. Berkeley: University of California Press. (bookstore, book reserve, ereserve).

Thurs Apr. 20

Fisher, Daniel. 2016. Ch. 1 Mediating Kinship: Radio's Cultural Poetics (p. 43-79), and Conclusion: an Immanent Alterity (p. 250-265). The Voice and Its Doubles: Media and Music in Northern Australia. Berkeley: University of California Press. (bookstore, book reserve, ereserve). (~50 pp)

Bessire, L. (2017), Glimpses of Emergence in the Ayoreo Video Project. Vis Anthropol Rev, 33: 119–129.

Cavanaugh, Jillian R. 2016a. “Anything Can Happen on YouTube (Or Can It?): Endangered Language and New Media.” In Cultural Anthropology: Contemporary, Public and Critical Readings , edited by Keri V. Brondo, 88–95. New York: Oxford University Press.

Michael Robert Evans. The fast runner filming the legend of Atanarjuat [Reed has ebook, good intro on the film]. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2010.

Ginsburg, Faye. 1991. Indigenous Media: Faustian Contract or Global Village? Cultural Anthropology 6(1): 92−112.

Ginsburg, Faye. 1993. Aboriginal Media and the Australian Imaginary. Public Culture 5(3): 557−578.

Ginsburg, Faye D. 2002 “Screen Memories: Resignifying the Traditional in Indigenous Media.” In Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, 39–57. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hansen, Magnus. Writing Irataba: On Representing Native Americans on Wikipedia. American anthro 2016.
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, is simultaneously an experiment in anarchic knowledge production and a realization of the long dream of modernity: storing all human knowledge. It is also a battleground for the politics of representation and for creating and circulating realities and “Wikialities.” I ethnographically describe how Wikipedians, most of whom are white Anglo-Americans, negotiate the representation of Native Americans as objects of encyclopedic knowledge and how the sins of our anthropological forebears come back to haunt us in this process. In 2015, I participated in the collaborative writing of the article on Irataba or Yara tav, who was an important leader of the Mohave people of California and Arizona in the late 19th century. This process brought representational dilemmas to the fore in the negotiation between the inadequacies of historical and anthropological knowledge and Wikipedia's policies establishing how to authorize and re-represent narratives. These dilemmas point out to us, as 21st-century anthropologists, that we have a responsibility for being the stewards of the knowledge created by anthropologists past as well as for correcting their mistakes and guiding the global public of readers and writers when they make forays into our traditional territories.

Nakamura, Lisa. Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture. American Quarterly 66(4):919–941, 2014.

Postill, John. Democracy in an Age of Viral Reality: A Media Epidemiography of Spain’s Indignados Movement. Ethnography 15(1):51–69, 2013.

Prins, Harold E.L. “Visual Media and the Primitivist Perplex: Colonial Fantasies, Indigenous Imagination, and Advocacy in North America,” in Media Worlds, pp. 58-74.

Juan Francisco Salazar. SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND VIDEO INDÍGENA IN LATIN AMERICA : Key Challenges for ‘Anthropologies Otherwise’ in Media, anthropology and public engagement, edited by Sarah Pink and Simone Abram. New York, New York : Berghahn Books, 2015.

Samuels, David. 2004. Putting a Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation. Univ of Arizona Press.
As in many Native American communities, people on the San Carlos Apache reservation in southeastern Arizona have for centuries been exposed to contradictory pressures. One set of expectations is about conversion and modernization—spiritual, linguistic, cultural, technological. Another is about steadfast perseverance in the face of this cultural onslaught. Within this contradictory context lies the question of what validates a sense of Apache identity. For many people on the San Carlos reservation, both the traditional calls of the Mountain Spirits and the hard edge of a country, rock, or reggae song can evoke the feeling of being Apache. Using insights gained from both linguistic and musical practices in the community—as well as from his own experience playing in an Apache country band—David Samuels explores the complex expressive lives of these people to offer new ways of thinking about cultural identity.

Cultural Anthropology, Indigenous Media Futures, Volume 33, Issue 2

• Indigenous Media Futures: An Introduction
  William Lempert
• Untidy Times: Alexis Wright, Extinction, and the Politics of Apprehension
  Daniel Fisher
• Digital Sutures: Experimental Stop-Motion Animation as Future Horizon of Indigenous Cinema
  Kristin L. Dowell
• Generative Hope in the Postapocalyptic Present
  William Lempert
• Arcticnoise and Broadcasting Futures: Geronimo Inutiq Remixes the Igloolik Isuma Archive
  Kate Hennessy, Trudi Lynn Smith, and Tarah Hogue
• The Road Forward
  Faye Ginsburg

Special Issue on Indigenous Media: Visual anthropology Journal

• “Tell me why, why, why”: A Critical Commentary on the Visuality of Settler Expectation Audra Simpson
• The Indigenous Uncanny: Accounting For Ghosts in Recent Indigenous Australian Experimental Media
  Faye Ginsburg
• Electric Beads: On Indigenous Digital Formalism
  David Garneau
• Disturbance, Translation, Enculturation: Necessary Research in New Media, Technology, and the Senses
  Chris Salter
• Afterword: Diorama, Defamiliarization, Indigenous Presence
  Fred Myers

Thorner, S. G. (2015), Inside the Frame, Outside the Box: Bindi Cole's Photographic Practice and Production of Aboriginality in Contemporary Australia. Vis. Anthropol. Rev., 31: 163–176.

Turner, Terence. 1992. Defiant Images: The Kayapo Appropriation of Video. Anthropology Today 8(6): 5−16.

Turner, Terence. 1995. Representation, Collaboration and Mediation in Contemporary Ethnographic and Indigenous Media. Visual Anthropology Review 11(2):102−106.

Wilson, Pamela and Michelle Stewart. 2008. Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, Politics. Duke U Press. [Includes essay by Faye Ginsburg]

Worth, Sol, and John Adair 1970 “Navajo Filmmakers.” American Anthropologist 72, no. 1: 9–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1970.72.1.02a00050.

Wortham, Erica “Between the State and Indigenous Autonomy: Unpacking Video Indigena in Mexico,” in American Anthropology vol. 106, no. 2 (June 2004): 363-368.

Indigneous Media Mentioned by Ginsburg (2008)

Isuma TV  (established by Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk)

• Zacharias Kunuk explains NITV local broadcasting by Internet (2016)
• Ningiuq (film by Christin Merhliot, 2014)
  animated story told by elder, In 2009, Rachel Uyarasuk, elder of the Inuit community of Igloolik (Nunavut), evokes the ancestors whose name she received at birth. She explains how this transmission ensured their return among the world of the living.
• Live Call-in Show (2012)
  live call-in about Baffinland Mary River Impact and Benefits Agreement (IIBA) and QIA negotiations, hosted by Lucassi Ivalu with QIA President Okalik Eegeesiak, Mary River Project Coordinator Solomon Awa, QIA IIBA negotiators Paul Quassa and Phillip Paniaq.

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Cannes Camera d'Or winner 2001) (Reed lib has)

• Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Wikipedia)
  2001 Canadian epic film directed by Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk and produced by his company Isuma Igloolik Productions. It was the first feature film ever to be written, directed and acted entirely in the Inuktitut language.
• Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner Trailer
• Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner Official website with supplementary material

Us Mob (First Aboriginal Children's TV series, Australia, 2002-)

• US Mob TV Show profile and links
• US Mob Series Creators' original blog (2005-2013)

Raven Tales (Animated Feature Film and TV series 2004)

• Raven Tales: the first All Native American Computer Animated Short Film (Animated News, 2004)
• Raven Tales: animated TV series (IMDB page, still streaming online!)
• Raven Tales animated series full episodes (Youtube)

Australian Aboriginal Media (mentioned by Fisher 2016)

• Redfern Oral History: Radio Redfern (activist radio station in Sydney, estab. 1980s)
• Barani: Sydney's Aboriginal History: Radio Redfern
• Radio Redfern (anthropologist filmmaker Sharon Bell's 1998 documentary film)
• Koori Radio
  Koori Radio is Sydney’s only First Nations radio station broadcasting 24/7 from Australia’s Black Capital of Redfern. Our Live ‘n' Deadly mix of music, news, community information and discussion draws a wide audience of listeners from Australia’s largest population of Aboriginal people, the many other First Nations people who have called Sydney home and ordinary Australians who share our tastes in music and our cultural views.

Weekend Film: The Social Dilemma, 2020. Netflix **Content Notes: brief footage of riot violence, state terror.

Tues Apr 25 Activism and Media-making: Methods and Ethics

Bonilla, Yarimar and Jonathan Rosa. 2015. #Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Politics, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States. American Ethnologist 42(1): 4-17. (11 pp). ereserve

Favero, Paolo. "For a Creative Anthropological Image-Making: Reflections on Aesthetics, Relationality, Spectatorship and Knowledge in the Context of Visual Ethnographic Work in New Delhi, India," in Sarah Pink and Simone Abram, eds., Media, anthropology and public engagement . New York, New York: Berghahn Books, 2015. (ereserve/library ebook) (20 pp)

Thurs Apr 27 The Cultural Politics of Media Activism: Imaging the Pain of Others

Sontag, Susan. 2003. Ch. 3. Regarding the Pain of Others. (ereserve)

Allen, Lori. 2009 Martyr Bodies in the Media: Human Rights, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Immediation in the Palestinian Intifada. American Ethnologist 36(1): 161–180. (16 pp) (ereserve.)

Final Multimodal Project, including 5-7 pages text due Tuesday, May 9, 8 pm (Seniors: Wednesday, May 10, 8 pm), upload to Class Google Drive Projects Folder (in your own named folder).
NOTE: title of the final file MUST be: Last Name, short Project Title, Semester Year [eg., Makley Montage Spring 2020]

Abu Hatoum, N. (2017), Framing Visual Politics: Photography of the Wall in Palestine. Vis Anthropol Rev, 33: 18–27.

Miriyam Aouragh. Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions. Oxford University, Oxford, United Kingdom,

Bail Christopher A. 2021. Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Black, S. P. (2017), Anthropological Ethics and the Communicative Affordances of Audio-Video Recorders in Ethnographic Fieldwork: Transduction as Theory. American Anthropologist, 119: 46–57. (10 pp). (ereserve)

Boler, Megan. Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. Cambridge; London: The MIT Press, 2008.

S Bjork‐James. Racializing misogyny: Sexuality and gender in the new online white nationalism. Feminist Anthropology, 2020.

Durington, M., Collins, S., Randolph, N. and Young, L. (2017), Push It Along: On Not Making an Ethnographic Film in Baltimore. Transform Anthropol, 25: 23–34. (12 pp).

Kamari Maxine Clarke Rethinking Sovereignty Through Hashtag Publics: The New Body Politics.
Cultural Anthropology, 2017.

Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton U. Press, 2013). [counterpublics, geek publics]

Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014).

Coleman EG. 2009. Code is speech: legal tinkering, expertise, and protest among free and open source software developers. Cultural Anthropology 24(3):420–54

“The Cultural Politics of Free Software and Technology within the Social Forum Process”  Insurgent Encounters 342-366

Cody, Francis. 2009. Inscribing Subjects to Citizenship: Petitions, Literacy Activism, and the Performativity of Signature. Cultural Anthropology 24 (3): 347 – 380.

Christina Dunbar-Hester, Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism (MIT Press, 2014).

Durington, M., Collins, S., Randolph, N. and Young, L. (2017), Push It Along: On Not Making an Ethnographic Film in Baltimore. Transform Anthropol, 25: 23–34. (12 pp).

Virginia Eubanks, Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age (MIT Press, 2011).

Allen Feldman, “On Cultural Anesthesia: From Desert Storm to Rodney King” in American Ethnologist vol. 21, no. 2 (May 1994): 404-418.

Alan Finlayson. Neoliberalism, the Alt-Right and the Intellectual Dark Web . Theory, Culture & Society 2021.

PL Forberg. From the Fringe to the Fore: An Algorithmic Ethnography of the Far-Right Conspiracy Theory Group QAnon. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 2021. [He was a sociology undergraduate at the University of Chicago when he published this! But also got a simultaneous MA and digital studies]

UU Frömming, D Wood. Social Media Activism and Networked Desires. Journal of Visual and Media Anthropology, 2021.

Gurak, Laura. 2003.  “Internet Protests: from text to web” in Cyberactivsm: Online Activism in Theory and Practice 25-46

Haraway, Donna. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism.” In Simians, Cyborgs, Women and the Reinvention of Nature. 149-181

Howe, Cymene. 2008. Spectacles of Sexuality: Televisionary Activism in Nicaragua. Cultural Anthropology 23(1):48−84.

CM Jarvis, SM Eddington. “My freedom doesn't care about your fear. My freedom doesn't care about your feelings”: Postmodern and oppositional organizing in# OpenAmericaNow. New Media & Society, 2021.

Juris, Jeffrey 2012. Reflections on #OccupyEverywhere: Social Media, Public Space and Emerging Logics of Aggregation. American Ethnologist 39(2):259-279.

Juris J. 2008. Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press

Jusionyte, Ieva. 2015 Savage Frontier: Making News and Security on the Argentine Border. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kelp-Stebbins, Katherine and Allison M. Schifani. 2015. The Medium is the Masses: Embodied Amplification, Urban Occupation. Media Fields Journal 9: 1-14.

King, Homay. 2012. Antiphon: Notes on the People’s Microphone. Journal of Popular Music 24(2): 238–246.

Kuntsman, Adi and Rebecca Stein. 2015. Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Susie Linfield, “Beyond the Sorrow and the Pity,” in Dissent 48:1 (2001): 100-106.

Joseph Masco. ‘Boundless informant’: Insecurity in the age of ubiquitous surveillance Anthro theory 2017.

McChesney, Robert. 2014. Ch. 7, Revolution in the Digital Revolution? Digital Disconnect How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. The New Press.

Meg McLagan, “Spectacles of Difference: Cultural Activism and the Mass Mediation of Tibet,” in Media Worlds, pp. 90-114.

Morozov E. 2009. How dictators watch us on the Web. Prospect. Vol. 165: http://www. prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/11/how-dictators-watch-us-on-the-web/

Murthy, Dhiraj. 2013. “Theorizing Twitter” and “Twitter and Activism” Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age. Polity Press 24-50; 92-114.

Ortner, Sherry. (2017), Social impact without social justice: Film and politics in the neoliberal landscape. American Ethnologist, 44: 528–539. (10 pp).

WC Partin, AE Marwick. The construction of alternative facts: Dark participation and knowledge production in the Qanon conspiracy. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet, 2020

Pedersen, M.A.; Albris, K.; Seaver, N. The Political Economy of Attention. Annual Review of Anthropology. [2021 Actually pretty basic, their media references are very old]

John Postill, Democracy in an Age of Viral Reality: A Media Epidemiography of Spain’s Indignados Movement. Ethnography 15(1):51–69, 2013.
The present article draws from fieldwork on the indignados (or 15M) movement in Spain to propose a new approach to the study of protest movements in the digital era: ‘media epidemiography’. This composite of the terms ‘epidemiology’ and ‘ethnography’ is used as a heuristic to address the research challenge of today’s swiftly evolving techno-political terrains. I argue that viral media have played a key role in Spain’s indignados movement, with Twitter as the central site of propagation. Protesters have used Twitter and other viral platforms to great effect and in a range of different ways, including as a means of setting the tone and agenda of the protests, spreading slogans and organizational practices, and offering alternative accounts of the movement. These developments may signal the coming of an era in which political reality is shaped by viral contents ‘shared’ by media professionals and amateurs – an age of viral reality.

Pype, Katrien. Aesthetics of Provocation and Mobilization in the Combattants’ Digital Activism. Ethnographic Notes on Media & Conflict.

Vincente Rafael, “The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines,” in Public Culture 15:3 (2003): 399-425.

Schiller, Naomi. 2013 Reckoning with Press Freedom: Community Media, Liberalism, and the Processual State in Caracas, Venezuela. American Ethnologist 40(3): 540–554.

Gareth Shaw, Xiaoling Zhang. Cyberspace and gay rights in a digital China: Queer documentary filmmaking under state censorship. China Information, Oct 30, 2017.

Jolynna Sinanan, Gabrielle Jamela Hosein. 2017. Non-Activism: Political Engagement and Facebook Through Ethnography in Trinidad. Social Media and Society.

James Slotta. The Annotated Donald Trump: Signs of Circulation in a Time of Bubbles. Journal of Linguistic AnthropologyVolume 29, Issue 3.
How does a communicative imaginary of bubbles—as a kind of less-than-public sphere—take shape? A significant catalyst, I argue, is the speech of Donald Trump. Here I focus particularly on the incoherent remarks and incredible claims that are a hallmark of Trump's oratory, as well as the media's annotations and fact checks that report and comment on them. Together, Trump's rhetoric and these genres of reporting serve as “signs of circulation” that delineate the communicative bubbles in which mainstream media audiences have discovered themselves to be enclosed. As an increasingly compelling communicative imaginary of the polity, these less-than-public spheres now serve as a framework through which people are reorienting themselves to their fellow citizens and their future together.

Stalcup, M. (2016), The Aesthetic Politics of Unfinished Media: New Media Activism in Brazil. Vis Anthropol Rev, 32: 144–156.

Winifred Tate, “Learning to Tell the Story,” in Counting the Dead: Human Rights Claims and Counter-Claims in Colombia.

TORCHIN, L. (2006), Ravished Armenia: Visual Media, Humanitarian Advocacy, and the Formation of Witnessing Publics. American Anthropologist, 108: 214–220.

Daniel Trottier, Christian Fuchs, eds. Social Media, Politics and the State: Protests, Revolutions, Riots, Crime

Tommaso Venturini. Online Conspiracy Theories, Digital Platforms and Secondary Orality: Toward a Sociology of Online Monsters, Theory, Culture & Society, Mar 5, 2022

Aimee Villarreal, John Jota Leaños. 2017. Animating Resistance. Anthropology News (May).

Algorithmic selves

Hey Watch This! Sharing the Self Through Media, Patricia Lange, dir., Vimeo, 2020.
"documentary that uses a case study of video sharing on YouTube to explore human mediation. The film engages with enduring and profoundly philosophical questions about how we relate to media as individuals and as a society. Issues include discussing where the “real me” is located, how we learn to make media, what counts as full participation on social media sites, and how we envision our digital legacies.

As an ethnographic film, Hey Watch This! analyzes the interactions, beliefs, and life ways of a social group. The director is an anthropologist who explores why people share themselves and engage in sociality through media. The film began by exploring video blogging but ultimately analyzes the astonishingly vast array of media that interviewees used to communicate and record their life stories. The film is oriented around interviews and observations recorded at participant-run, early YouTube meet-ups that the director attended across the United States and one in Canada."

Activist Media

Hands Up: 7 Playwrights, 7 Testaments (Curated by Emma Holland)
Last year a friend of the PDX Theatre community was severely profiled on his way to one of his rehearsals. He's a prominent director in town for Portland Center Stage, Artist's Rep, Profile Theatre, Portland Playhouse, and many more. He sent out a letter to the community reflecting on this experience while in rehearsals as a performer for this piece. This show took advantage of the #HandsUp and #Ferguson hashtag audience/followers and put on a free performance art piece about the experience of racial profiling from the perspective of Black Artists. They took the trend off Twitter and made it an embodied experience with some very important audience participation. "Selling out" space over and over with every performance, it was one of the more important experiences I viewed.

"A powerful set of monologues commissioned by The New Black Fest in the wake of police shootings of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and John Crawford III in Beavercreek, Ohio, and others. Seven black playwrights have been commissioned to write monologues that explore their feelings about the well-being of black people in a culture of institutional profiling."

• You can now view one early version of the piece (2014) here: If you are unable to commit the time to the full piece, please at least view from 1:19:11-1:30:44 
• Interview with director Kevin Jones on KBOO.More about the
• August Wilson Red Door Project:
  "To change the racial ecology of Portland through the arts. A collection of theater, film, literature, music, art, and dance that will open your inner red door"

Wide Angle Youth Media (Baltimore)

• Inaugural by Logan Young (Wide Angle Youth Media, Baltimore, mentioned by Durington et al)
  
• Poems, Protest and Power by Niajea Randolph (Wide Angle Youth Media, Baltimore)

Portland-Based Activist Media (curated by Molly Johnson and Sophie Spencer-Zavos)

Portland’s Resistance

• https://www.facebook.com/portlandsresistance/
• https://twitter.com/pdx_resistance?lang=en

Critical Resistance Portland

• https://www.facebook.com/CriticalResistancePortland/

• https://twitter.com/dontshootpdx?lang=en

Community Alliance of Tenants

• https://www.facebook.com/OregonCATs/

Portland Tenants United

• https://www.facebook.com/portlandtenantsunited

DEMOCRACY ON DEADLINE: The Global Struggle for an Independent Press follows teams of journalists into some of the most dangerous and secretive corners of the world to show how they obtain their stories in the face of suppression, lies, imprisonment and threat of physical harm. To highlight the central role a free press plays in building and preserving democracy, Producer/Director Cal Skaggs and his team combed through two hundred hours of footage to create this dynamic portrayal of independent-minded journalists. (PBS Independent Lens)

Social Media algorithms and extremism

• How Everyday Social Media Users Become Real-World Extremists, NYT, 2018.
  
• They Used to Post Selfies. Now They’re Trying to Reverse the Election, NYT, 2021
  Right-wing influencers embraced extremist views, and Facebook rewarded them.
• Fred Turner. Machine Politics: The rise of the internet and a new age of authoritarianism. Harpers, 2019.
• Bolter, Jay David. Social Media Are Ruining Political Discourse. The Atlantic, 2019.

Social Media Surveillance of Black Activists in the U.S.

• Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Provided Data Access for a Surveillance Product Marketed to Target Activists of Color (ACLU of N. California, Oct 2016) Provides details on the agreements Geofeedia had with the three corporations.
• ACLU finds social media sites gave data to company tracking black protesters (The Guardian, 2016) ACLU revealed Tuesday that Facebook, Twitter and Instagram gave ‘special access’ to Geofeedia, a controversial social media monitoring company
• How Police Use Social Media to Track and Target Activists of Color (Complex.com, 2016)
• Police surveillance of black protesters won’t stop the movement (Thinkprogress.org, 2016). Perspective of activists on surveillance.
• In Trump’s America, Black Lives Matter activists grow wary of their smartphones (Washington Post, 2017). BLM activist groups sue govt to obtain records collected on them.

Social Media Surveillance of Palestinian Activists

• Surveillance of Palestinians and the Fight for Digital Rights (al Shabaka.org, 2017).
• #Palestine 2017 Report: Palestinian online content targeted through mass surveillance, digital occupation and biased content moderation (7amleh.org, Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, 2017)
• Israel, Facebook and the fight for Palestinian digital rights (ifex.org, 2017)

Activist Responses to Digital Surveillance

• A Guide to Online Security for Activists (the Electronic Intifada, 2016)
• Social Media Visibility: Challenges to Activists (Julie Uldam, Media, Culture, Society, 2017)
• Review of Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (Slate, 2011)
• Activist or Protester? Surveillance Self Defense (SSD.EFF.org)

Beginning to Regulate Platform Capitalism

• The Era of Anti-Social Media, 2020 https://hbr.org/2020/02/the-era-of-antisocial-social-media
  three categories of digital campfires: private messaging, micro-communities, and shared experiences. Some digital campfires are a combination of all three.
• This Anti-social media campaign displays ugly truths about technology addiction. https://trueactivist.com/this-anti-social-media-campaign-displays-ugly-truths-about-technology-addiction/
• The problem with social media activism. https://medium.com/swlh/the-problem-with-social-media-activism-500b80e3ea7f
• https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/technology/meta-facebook-eu-gdpr.html?te=1&nl=evening-briefing&emc=edit_ne_20230104
  January 2023 EU ruling against Facebook forced personalized ads
• https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/technology/apple-privacy-changes-meta.html
  Apple allows iPhone users to turn off tracking 2021, stock prices of major companies tank 2022, google also talks about eliminating ad tracking in chrome.

The Turn to Decentralized Social Media

• Distributed Social Network (Wikipedia)
• Social.coop: A Cooperative Decentralized Social Network (Open Collective, 2017)
• 9 Working Examples of Platform Cooperatives (MIT Center for Civic Media, 2015)
• Decentralized Social Networks Sound Great, Too Bad They'll Never Work (Wired, 2017)
• Minds Aims to Decentralize the Social Network (TechCrunch.com, 2018)
• Towards a World Without Facebook (TechCrunch.com, 2018)