Some helpful notes on common misconceptions that should be avoided (or at least reviewed) when talking about the use, implications, effects or consequences of digital technologies.
In his ethnography of Second Life, Boellstorff has shown that the dichotomy between virtual and real is not very useful: Someone who is selling virtual clothes in the world of ‘Second Life’ and making a living out of it will tell you that his or her business does have real-life implications. In a similarly way, it would be wrong to assume that human communication through digital media is less ‘social’ or ‘real’than face to face interaction.What’s more, anthropologists like Boellstorff are trying to show us that virtuality is inherent to human culture. He says:
‘It is not only that virtual worlds borrow assumptions from real life; virtual worlds show us how, under our very noses, our “real” lives have been “virtual” all along. It is in being virtual that we are human: since it is human “nature” to experience life through the prism of culture, human being has always been virtual being (Boellstorff 2009: 5).
However, Boellstorff does recognize the usefulness of distinguishing between ‘virtual’ or ‘digital’ and ‘actual’ (as in ‘physical’). Not only is the distinction meaningful to his informants in ‘Second Life’ (since participants would exclusively interact with other participants ‘in-world’) but also does the sole definition of ‘digital’ prohibit the assumption that those two categories could somehow fall together in the future (like Rogers ‘The end of the virtual’ suggests).
Read more: ‘Digital Anthropology’, by Daniel Miller and Heather Horst (2012)
community or community of practice: it’s more of a normative and cultural category (‘folk notion’) that is often used in public rhetoric. It doesn’t seem to have an empiric referent so it’s not an actual social group that we can study. Also, the notion of community (much like ‘culture’) sort of imagines a homogenous and bounded group. As Postill puts it ‘community of practice proponents have played down questions of power and conflict'(Postill 2011: 13). Postill suggests using Bourdieus concept of ‘field’ instead.
networks: conceptualizing the internet or digital technologies as ‘networks’ is an incredibly popular idea (especially in Internet studies). Reviewing the value of this concept can lead to more productive approaches. For example, thinking about the social ties in a certain group as a network oversees all ‘the constraints, tangles and disconnects that invariably accompany all human endeavour and should not be left out in a ethnography’ (Postill 2011: 15).
Read more: Localizing the Internet, by John Postill (2011); Bringing Things Back to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials, by Tim Ingold (2010)
When turning to a defined, physical place (like Silicon Valley or a neighborhood in Kuala Lumpur) in order to look at local uses, understandings and effects of digital technologies like the Internet we need to avoid the idea that a ‘seemingly stationary ‘local community’ is […]impacted upon by ‘global’ technologies'(Postill 2011: 11)
Rather, as anthropological scholars of Globalization teach us, not only is the ‘global’ produced within local structures but global structures themselves produce local ones!
Read more: The Internet, by Daniel Miller (2000); Modernity at large, by Arjun Appadurai (1996)
While we can not deny the ability of digital technologies to connect people globally and its potential of transforming society and culture as such, ethnographic work on the uses of digital technologies around the world show that there is no evidence of a universal digital experience. Instead, there are interesting approaches like Miller and Slaters concept of ‘expansive realization’ that triy to explain how digital media like the internet is ‘appropiated’ in different social and cultural contexts (with regard to the false opposition between global/local we should use the word ‘appropriate’ with caution)