Jolynna Sinanan

How the World Changed Social Media

How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of nine anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and exploring the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet? Supported by an introduction to the project’s academic framework and theoretical terms that help to account for the findings, the book argues that the only way to appreciate and understand something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how people all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences.

Tactile digital ethnography: Researching mobile media through the hand

In this article we focus on the relationship between vision and the hand to develop an understanding of the experience of mobile media use which in turn informs a methodology for researching it; a tactile digital ethnography. Theories of knowing through the hand, and uses of the hand in documentary practice already highlight its significance. We bring these together with our video ethnographies of mobile media use, to show how a focus on the hand offers both new insights into other people’s digital worlds, and an approach to learning about these.

Lenders, borrowers and fellows: personal narrative and social entrepreneurship in online microfinance

Online microfinance promotes and encourages entrepreneurship as well as creating informal relationships between lenders and clients using social networking technologies. While much of the existing literature describes the quantitative success of online microfinance, little attention has been given to the social processes through which this has been achieved. This short discussion will take an interdisciplinary approach, focusing on the role of narrative production in facilitating relationships between online lenders in more affluent countries and client entrepreneurs in developing countries, using experience drawn from initial fieldwork conducted in Cambodia. Better understanding the relationships between online lenders, clients and the intermediaries who document the activities of client entrepreneurs may be useful in the design, modification or implementation of effective technologies to better enable all actors in the delivery of online microfinance services.

Non-Activism: Political Engagement and Facebook Through Ethnography in Trinidad

Despite scholarly and popular assertions that social media transforms the possibilities for political engagement, there is little investigation to the relationship between public life and political discussion on social media platforms in the everyday lives of people in different cultural contexts. Based on 15 months ethnographic inquiry in a Trinidadian town, this article examines a political event (the hunger strike of Dr Wayne Kublalsingh) as it unfolded and how those not directly involved with the issue or activism more generally engaged with the protest on Facebook. We find that confrontational political opinion and commentary risks unfavorable kinds of attention: the judgment of others and being the subject of gossip and scandal. We conclude that political engagement over social media needs to be better understood within public life and the cultural specificities of a given context.

Crafted assemblage: young women’s ‘lifestyle’ blogs, consumerism and citizenship in Singapore

Blogs categorised in the genres of fashion and lifestyle are often overlooked in discussions of blogging, politics and citizenship. This article examines lifestyle blogs with rich media content, authored by young Singaporean women. It argues through a content analysis and an analysis of the blogs’ aesthetic as assemblage that there is a significant relationship between women’s consumerism in Singapore and expressions of citizenship. These blogs have a crafted aesthetic that is both parochial (e.g. through their appeal to regional popular culture) and global (e.g. through their focus on particular globally circulated consumer products). As material-supporting inquiry, they also provide a means of examining these young women’s views on privacy and consumption, as well as their aspirations. The article concludes by suggesting that to effectively capitalise on such blogs as a means of understanding social life and ‘everyday politics’, we need to appreciate them not only as being culturally embedded but also as having a particular cultural aesthetic that is created by how bloggers craft and assemble their identities and narratives online.

Contemporary Comparative Anthropology – The Why We Post Project

ABSTRACT This paper confronts the disparity between a tradition that has defined anthropology as a comparative discipline and the practices which increasingly embrace cultural relativism and the uniqueness of each fieldsite. It suggests that it is possible to resolve this dilemma, through creating a vertical structure that complements the horizontal task of comparison across fieldsites. This vertical structure is composed of different methods of dissemination which make explicit a series of steps from a baseline of popular dissemination which stresses the uniqueness of individuals, through books and journal articles with increasing degrees of generalisation and comparison. Following this structure leads us up through analysis to the creation and employment of theory. This allows us to make comparisons and generalisations without sacrificing our assertion of specificity and uniqueness. We illustrate this argument though a recent nine-field site comparison of the use and consequences of social media in a project called ‘Why We Post.’

Social media and sorting out family relationships

Abstract Families and extended families already present an entangled terrain of emotional experience that is further complicated by the range of technologies available for communication. This chapter argues that choosing between platforms to convey different content is deeply embedded in relationships, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a small down in Trinidad. For this argument, “polymedia,” a term coined by Madianou and Miller (2012, 2013), is a particularly useful theory of communications for personal relationships. Polymedia captures how Trinidadians navigate the expectations and etiquette within the messiness of lived relationships, where resolving conflicts and tensions have consequences, face-to-face. As social media bridges different aspects of relationships, polymedia is particularly concrete when thought of in relation to transnational family connections. Most often, sorting out which platforms to use is heavily intertwined with sorting out relationships, where sparing emotions and keeping peace are valued among extended families living in small towns.