Digital technology has changed the lives of millions people’s life hugely for decades. Hence, Tom Boellstorff (2012) regards digital anthropology as the analytic target. In this paper, he treats the digital as a methodology instead of an object of study. Boellstorff makes it clear that ‘ Digital anthropology is a technique, … It is an approach to researching the virtual that permits addressing that object of study in its own terms.’ (Boellstorff 2012: 40). And the basic method is participant observation which is universally used in digital ethnography or ethnography. The benefit of this method is to emphasize the deep interaction between scholars and cultural participants and co-construct the meaning.
In the first part, Boellstorff provides us with ‘dubbing culture’ which is developed by himself to research into Indonesian term gay to explain deeply a conception that put forward by the British anthropologist Edmund Leach. He justifies that ‘Our task is to understand and explain what goes on in society, how societies work.’ ( Leach 1961 :6-7).
With the aid of the digital, the distinction between the virtual and actual can avoid of blurring. To prove his conception, Boellstorff insists the existence of the gap by examining the online virtual world known as Second Life in order to argue against the mistaken assumption that virtual/online worlds and the actual/offline world are fusing into one domain.
In conclusion, Boellstorff’s research enlightens us to reconsider the internet-mediated sociality. People use internet with different purpose. When doing digital anthropology research, it is necessary to take the social practice situation of users into consideration and keep cognitive framework in mind. This paper triggers self-examination of the openness and limitations of digital anthropology and more challenges from technology may be faced in the further research.
Reference
Boellstoff, T. (2012). Rethinking Digital Anthropology (pp.39-60). In H.A. Horst and D. Miller (eds.) Digital Anthropology. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Leach, E. R. 1961. Rethinking Anthropology. In Rethinking Anthropology, 1-27. London: Robert Cunningham and Sons.
By Weican Feng
MCS923 Group 5 