Digital anthropology

In the widest sense cyber anthropology is the branch of sociocultural anthropology which aims to understand the culturally informed interrelationships between human beings and those technological artifacts which can be imagined and described as cybernetic systems. These interrelationships decidedly include the attempts to fuse technological artifacts with human and other biological organisms, with human society, and with the socioecologically shaped environment. In these attempts all the mentioned elements are envisioned as cybernetic systems by the actors involved. This outlines the contours of cyber anthropology's broadest scope. However, in the wake of recent discourses growing around metaphors like globalization and information age/information society especially Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) move into cyber anthropology's focus. The complex 'human beings and ICTs' unfolds its relevance for sociocultural anthropology inside the following three main sectors:

1. ICTs as tools for sociocultural anthropologists both in teaching and research. The spectrum reaches from using a personal computer as a typewriter, using and/or generating online-databases and -catalogues, communicating with colleagues and peers via Internet-services, to keeping in touch with informants online, and the theory-based generation of new forms of representation for anthropological knowledge. The latter should especially profit by the 'writing culture' debate and visual anthropology.

2. ICTs in the field. The sociocultural anthropological observation, analysis and interpretation of the consequences of the introduction of ICTs into specific societies and/or groups. (It has to be emphasized that this comprises the whole world, and not "just those" in the traditional field of the discipline, but does not exclude "them" as well.) Concepts like 'cultural appropriation of technology' and 'ethnography of work' seem to be indispensable for this task.

3. 'Cyberspace' as field. The sociocultural anthropological observation, analysis and interpretation of the sociocultural phenomena springing up and taking place in the interactive 'space' ('cyberspace') generated by computer-mediated communication (CMC), the Internet-infrastructure and ICTs at large. This comprises national and transnational online-groups, but also movements like e.g. 'Open Source' and the according societal, economical, and juridical issues and problems.

To which degree the three sectors become mutually influential or even inseparable, depends on the specific research projects, the involved methods and the specific desiderata of understanding.

Sociocultural anthropology's unique potentials for contributing to the above mentioned understanding are gradually unveiled. This potential has already have been recognized by neighbouring disciplines. One symptom of this process is the adoption, or even appropriation, of 'ethnography', a generic method of sociocultural anthropology, by sociology, media studies, and other academic endeavours. The engagement by sociocultural anthropology in the last decade was somewhat weaker, but the trend is pointing stoutly upwards.

References

• Budka, Philipp and Manfred Kremser. 2004. "CyberAnthropology—Anthropology of CyberCulture", in Contemporary issues in socio-cultural anthropology: Perspectives and research activities from Austria edited by S. Khittel, B. Plankensteiner and M. Six-Hohenbalken, pp. 213-226. Vienna: Loecker.
• Escobar, Arturo. 1994. "Welcome to Cyberia: notes on the anthropology of cyberculture." Current Anthropology 35(3): 211-231.
• Fabian, Johannes. 2002. Virtual archives and ethnographic writing: "Commentary" as a new genre? Current Anthropology 43(5): 775-786.
• Hine, Christine. 2000. Virtual ethnography. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage.
• Kremser, Manfred. 1999. CyberAnthropology und die neuen Räume des Wissens. Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 129: 275-290.
• Paccagnella, Luciano. 1997. Getting the seats of your pants dirty: Strategies for ethnographic research on virtual communities. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 3(1).
• Sugita, Shigeharu. 1987. "Computers in ethnological studies: As a tool and an object," in Toward a computer ethnology: Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium at the Japan National Museum of Ethnology edited by Joseph Raben, Shigeharu Sugita, and Masatoshi Kubo, pp. 9-40. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology. (Senri Ethnological Studies 20)
• Wittel, Andreas. 2000. Ethnography on the move: From field to net to Internet. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research 1(1).