I won’t tell if you don’tTO SOME, Facebook, Twitter and similar social-media platforms are the acme of communication—better, even, than face-to-face conversations, since more people can be involved. Others think of them more as acne, a rash that fosters narcissism, threatens privacy and reduces intelligent discourse to the exchange of flippant memes. They might even, these kinds of arguments go, be creating a generation of electronic addicts who are incapable of reflective, individual, original thought.
A topic ripe for anthropological study, then. And such a study, the “Why We Post” project, has just been published by nine anthropologists, led by Daniel Miller of University College, London.
The participants in “Why We Post” worked independently for 15 months at locations in Brazil, Britain, Chile, China (one rural and one industrial site), India, Italy, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkey. They embedded themselves within families and their surrounding communities. That, the team believes, let them form a nuanced view of the roles of social media in their study sites which could not be gained by analysing...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1UBHXNB
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