The Anthropology of Digital Practices : Dispatches from the Online Culture Wars by John Postill

The Anthropology of Digital Practices connects for the first time three distinct research areas - digital ethnography, causal ethnography, and media practice theory - to explore how we might track the effects of new media practices in a digital world. It invites media and communication students and scholars to overcome the field's old aversion to `media effects' and explores the messy, complex, open-ended effects of new media practices in a digital age. Based on long-term ethnographic research and drawing from recent advances in the study of causality and ethnography, this book tells the `formation story' of the anti-woke movement through a series of critical media events. It argues that digital media practices (e.g. podcasting, YouTubing, tweeting, commenting, broadcasting) will have `formative' effects on an emerging social world at different points in time. One important task of the digital ethnographer is precisely to distinguish between the formative and non-formative effects of specific media practices. This book makes three contributions to our understanding of media practices in the digital era, namely a theoretical, methodological, and empirical contribution. Theoretically, it furthers the `practice turn' in media and communication studies by engaging with the latest thinking on causality and ethnography. Methodologically, it serves as a compelling, up-to-date guide to doing digital ethnography, with special reference to the study of digitally mediated practices. Empirically, it is the first book-length study of the anti-woke movement, a major actor in the `culture wars' currently being fought across the Western world. With its accessible language and rich case studies, The Anthropology of Digital Practices will make an ideal supplementary textbook for a range of undergraduate and graduate courses in research methods, digital ethnography/anthropology, and digital activism.
Binding: Paperback / softback