How the World Changed Social Media

Daniel Miller · Elisabetta Costa · Nell Haynes · Tom McDonald · Razvan Nicolescu · Jolynna Sinanan · Juliano Spyer · Shriram Venkatraman · Xinyuan Wang

feb 2016 · Why We Post Libro 1 · UCL Press

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How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and explores the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet? Supported by an introduction to the project’s academic framework and theoretical terms that help to account for the findings, the book argues that the only way to appreciate and understand something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how people all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences

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Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at UCL, author/editor of 39 books including How the World Changed Social Media, Social Media in an English Village, Tales from Facebook, Digital Anthropology, (Ed. with H. Horst), The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach (with D. Slater), Webcam (with J. Sinanan), The Comfort of Things, A Theory of Shopping, and Stuff. Elisabetta Costa is Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the British Institute at Ankara (BIAA). She is an anthropologist specialising in the study of digital media, social media, journalism, politics, and gender in Turkey and the Middle East. Nell Haynes is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the American University in 2013. Her research addresses themes of performance, authenticity, globalisation, and gendered and ethnic identification in Bolivia and Chile. Tom McDonald is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD in Anthropology from UCL in 2013 and has published numerous academic articles on internet use and consumption practices in China.Razvan Nicolescu is a Research Associate at University College London, from where he obtained his PhD in 2013. Trained both in telecommunications and anthropology, he has conducted ethnographic research in Romania and Italy. His research interests focus on visibility and digital anthropology; political economy, governance, and informality; feelings, subjectivity, and normativity.Jolynna Sinanan is Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at RMIT University, Melbourne. From 2011-2014, she was Research Fellow in Anthropology at UCL. She is co-author How the World Changed Social Media (with eight others) and Webcam. Her areas of research are digital ethnography, new media, migration and gender in Trinidad, Australia, and Singapore.