Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: General Anthropology Division

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Students

Primary Theme: Technology

Secondary Theme: Social movements

(4-0495) Searching for Community in Digital Data Discourse

The contemporary iconography of (big) data commonly advances notions of both a unifiable self and of a singular humanity that can be rendered as a comprehensive database, as a community of data points. The logic of personal and social unity is both familiar to digital discourse and a novel departure from the language of “networks” and “networking” that has until recently, Tom Boellstorff notes,  more commonly described the way information systems bring people and things together (Boelstorff 2017).
 
Contemporary interest in "community" in digital discourse can also be read against the longstanding critique in anthropology of “culture” as a reified unit of analysis. Since the height of cultural relativism social theorists have argued that difference cannot be easily brought together or made commensurate. Not only is there rhetorical power in allowing differences of opinion to surface, but the power dynamics underwriting images of cultural cohesion and translation undercut any easy assembly of difference into equitable, continuous, or seamless wholes.

We welcome submissions that critically engage with and complicate the notion of “community” in contemporary digital discourse, paying particular attention to the way "community" interoperates with the broader discourse on digital data.
 
Potential questions may include but are not limited to:
• In what ways does the notion of “community” in digital discourse articulate with familiar anthropological writing on culture?
• Does digital “community” revitalize cultural relativism?
• Do contemporary calls for “community” in digital life echo earlier agitations for an inclusive multiculturalism that touted national and even global diversity as a “salad bowl” of difference? 
• Why has fostering community increasingly become a centerpiece of digital work?

Work Cited:
Tom Boellstorff, “Zuckerberg and the Anthropologist: Facebook, Culture, Digital Futures, Culture Digitally, February 27, 2017. http://culturedigitally.org/2017/02/zuckerberg-and-the-anthropologist-facebook-culture-digital-futures/

Presenter(s)

• Jamie Sherman

  Intel Corporation

• Tara Mahfoud

  Postdoctoral Research Associate
  King's College London

Organizer(s)

• Yuliya Grinberg

  Columbia University

Chair(s)

• Yuliya Grinberg

  Columbia University

Presenter(s)

• Yuliya Grinberg

  Columbia University

• Patricia G. Lange

  Associate Professor
  California College of the Arts

• Samantha Gottlieb

  Independent Researcher
  National Science Foundation/Tuple Health

Discussant(s)

• Tom Boellstorff

  Professor
  University of California, Irvine

Organizer(s)

• Jordan Kraemer

  Wesleyan University

Chair(s)

• Jordan Kraemer

  Wesleyan University

Presentations:

• 10:15 AM - 10:30 AM

  Diversity, Community, and Technological Infrastructure in Virtual Worlds
  Jamie Sherman – Intel Corporation
• 10:30 AM - 10:45 AM

  Data Communities: The politics of unification and integration in European neuroscience
  Tara Mahfoud – King's College London
• 10:45 AM - 11:00 AM

  Blurred Lines: Critical Revaluation of the Quantified Self as a Community
  Yuliya Grinberg – Columbia University
• 11:00 AM - 11:15 AM

  Contingent Community and Participatory Arrhythmia in Digital Life Cycles
  Patricia G. Lange – California College of the Arts
• 11:15 AM - 11:30 AM

  “The Community Is So Big, That's Where You Start To Get The Weakening Of Cultural Norms:” Hacking Type 1 Diabetes and the Open Source Community
  Samantha D. Gottlieb – National Science Foundation/Tuple Health
• 11:30 AM - 11:45 AM

  Discussion
  Tom Boellstorff – University of California, Irvine