Where's #Anthropology? Hashtag mayhem at #AAA2021Baltimore

The American Anthropological Annual Meeting has come and gone after a year hiatus. But, courtesy of the continued pandemic, it was not business as usual, and a combination of uneven face-to-face/online hybridity and a buggy app meant continued confusion throughout the conference. Adding to that confusion was the multiplication of conference hashtags, a continuing source of ambiguity that I have chronicled on this blog over the years. This year, #AAA2021Baltimore was joined by numerous, other hashtags: #AAA2021, #AAABaltimore, #AmAnth2021. Here’s a sociograph of different hashtags:

In the lower left of the graph, you can see #AAA2021Baltimore, the “official” hashtag, mostly deployed by @AmericanAnththro--accounting for the “hub and spoke” pattern of that cluster.. The largest clusters, though, belong to the AAA--that is, the Asian Artist Awards--and, in particular, the popular vote category, which generated at least 80 percent of Twitter traffic around AAA2021 (congratulations Kim Seon Ho!) in Korean, Japanese and Thai. Other hashtags referring to the Awards likewise commanded large numbers of likes and retweets, and anthropology was fairly occluded under the white-hot glare of K-Pop fans.

Here are the top Twitter accounts by “betweenness centrality”: top betweenness: starnewskorea jonah_writer unitedmongjis_ anneekarika yoonbwii gummy88888 tsukicooky fkfkfk_kfkfkf korb_blog weareoneexo yukaseon18 nuestnews jseolhee 1exoklwkn americananthro kimsoen08051986 biancaphd Wickedwitcheso1

Note that @americananthro was the only anthropology account in the top counts.

Here’s the top anthropology tweet by re-tweet counts: “Interested in reaching a wider public with your research? Join us and @SAPIENS_org on Friday in Baltimore at the @AmericanAnthro annual meeting for our public scholarship event! Looking forward to learning and sharing ideas with you! @NapaAnthro @WennerGrenOrg #aaa2021 https://t.co/b4k210aCYs” While here’s the top tweet by “likes”: “Speaking of sanctuary spaces she has found/created within anthro, Dr. Harrison says (and I paraphrase) "If I had to depend on a department of anthropology for my sense of self, I wouldn't be an anthropologist today!" SAY. THAT. AGAIN. #AAA2021Baltimore”

In terms of the resulting network of meaning, this resulted in a AAA with a distinctly KPOP feel to it. Here’s a semantic network that classifies tweets according to otheir overall theme:

“Obfuscation” is a term that Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum have used to describe the political mobilization of hashtags and other techniques to dilute messages, hide data or otherwise re-direct people for political ends. “Obfuscation is the deliberate addition of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection” (2015: 1). Brunton and Nissenbaum document the first instance of obfuscation in Russian attempts to quell protests over the 2011 parliamentary elections. By flooding the hashtag “#Triumfalnaya” (a Moscow public square where protests took place) with messages extolling Russian nationalism or just nonsense words, the Russian government rendered the hashtag useless as a rallying point and reference to protests resisting the Putin/Medvedev government. More recently, KPOP fans around the world have used to same technique to flood white supremacist hashtags with concert clips and KPOP news. But, here, we have the American Anthropological Association in essence obscuring itself through its dogged insistence on the “#AAA” hashtag, with AAA already a casualty of twentieth century efforts to select names that would appear first in the alphabetical yellow pages listings (AAA Bailbonds, anyone?).

Why does the AAA continue with this hashtag? I think it ultimately comes down to brand identity--in other words, placing the organization over the imperatives of its members who might use hashtags to build solidarity among anthropologists. And it also has to do with a firm misunderstanding of the way Twitter works. Events are temporal. Even though Twitter breaks the strict chronology of its feed with older tweets (“In case you missed it”), conference tweets are not going to persist more than a few days. And what is the goal? To communicate with anthropologists, or to increase the visibility of the American Anthropological Association? If it’s about anthropologists, then what about hashtags like “#Anthropology2021”? There’s no reference here to AAA at all, and the hashtag could be used by any anthropology conference. Why not? Are we afraid that this will compete with other anthropology conferences in late November? At a time when hybrid formats seem likely to persist, why not use hashtags to build links around the world to other anthropologies?

References

Bunton, Finn and Helen Nissenbaum (2015). Obfuscation: A User’s Guide. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Ghost Anthropologies and Other Spectral Possibilities

[Cross-posted from my column on Anthropology News]

As I write this, magazines, newspapers and blog sites around the world proffer their predictions for 2014.  Many of these are predictably banal; other prognostications are realistically pessimistic; many come from journalists, some from our social science colleagues.  But they are still predictions—extrapolations from present conditions into a future that is always a continuation of the past.  On the other hand, anthropology is conspicuously silent on the subject of 2014.  But what would we say?  Anthropological data seem utterly unsuited to annual prediction; the people and events we describe don’t fall along a linear path where the future can be neatly plotted like the price of gasoline.

1797 Phantasmagoria from Etienne-Gaspard Roberston. Image courtesy Wikipedia Commons.

And yet, it would be difficult to find a discipline more concerned with the future.  The 2013 annual meeting was a case in point; stimulated by the theme “Future Publics,” a record 573 papers dropped references to the future in their paper titles or metadata.  But with a couple of exceptions, these were not predictions.  Instead, they were acknowledgements of precarity, admonitions that conditions were in motion, and that culture was about unexpected emergence.  Perhaps this betrayed a general nervousness about our own future fates.  For most of us, the university of 2014 is not looking much like the university of our undergraduate years, and one can hardly avoid some reflexivity in the 2013 theme. What would our future be?

What many of us in cultural anthropology hope is that the future will be different—that it will give us critical alternatives to the problems we see now, that it will open up different possibilities for human freedom.   Yet, no 2014 predictions in journals or newspapers I’ve seen suggest much in the way of difference.  In fact, they really don’t suggest any critical future at all.  They are futures defined by degree: more or less unemployment, more or less consumption, more or less of the same.  On the other hand, I would argue that the future work implicit in this year’s Annual Meeting is the possibility of alternative futures; the hope here, asKim Fortun has written, is “to articulate something that could not be said, could not be brought together before.”

Allow me to suggest that the appropriate metaphor for this approach to anthropological futures is “ghost anthropologies”.  By this, I mean anthropology inflected by two, related technologies.  First, something very much like the idea of phantasmagoria—those magic lantern shows that projected ghostly images around 19th century parlors.  For Walter Benjamin, these spectral entertainments are the master symbol for the mystifications of bourgeois ideologies that suffuse reality with media and spectacle.  Living with these ideological ghosts makes it difficult to interrogate the present and say something new about the future—to achieve the“critical distance” from the present .  At the same time, the technology of the phantasmagoria represents the possibility for critical transformation; humans make these ghosts, after all.

This is exactly the state we are in right now with efforts to create what my co-author Matthew Durington and I are calling a “networked anthropology”.  All around us social life is suffused with highly instrumental social networks upon which we commodify ourselves with our media productions.  I am (literally) working for Facebook, for Google+, each time I lavish my leisure minutes embellishing their corporate sites.   And yet, through these same social networking sites, we may come to realize and question our commodified connectedness in ways that may ultimately upend the logic of the neo-liberal.  But what would this critical anthropology look like?  Here, the future becomes murky.  Can we imagine a networked ethnography that critiques social media even as it engages it?  Perhaps we can only evoke it.

eFluor Nanocrystals under UV-excitation. Photo courtesy of Travis Jennings and Wikicommons

But the idea of evocation seems overly poetic—as if we could only artfully hint at alternatives.  But I would suggest a second possibility, this one drawn from a more recent technology: “ghost imaging”—a technique that draws on quantum mechanics to describe unknown objects using entangled photons.  The detectors do not see the object; instead, the entangled photons allow scientists to image the object they cannot see.  That is, that object can be visible even though we have never seen it, through photons that are paired with the photons that did hit the object.

In other words, we see the ghost, but the object is real.  To carry the analogy, the goal here is to describe and document social and cultural alternatives that lie outside of ideologically loaded discourse.  The moment we turn to the language of Web 2.0 to describe our engagements with social media, we enter the realm of commodified user content.  The future, such as it is, is already set—a linear projection off of the status quo.  However, even within this society of the spectacle, there are emancipatory possibilities—even if they lie beyond the reach of our critical discourse.  So we grapple with other ways of describing.  But we’re still describing something; the real that we can’t articulate.

Over the course of 2014, “Ghost anthropologies” will look into other sites where these spectral investigations are taking place, where we engage both the mystifications and emancipatory potentials of phantasmagoria.  That will include areas of science and technology studies, but also other possibilities, as anthropologists (and others) strive to describe the indescribable.

Parasitic Twittering at the Anthropology Conference

I posted this at www.wfs.org as well . . .


I’m back from the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.  As expected, 6000 of us shuttled between two, huge, corporate hotels on Canal Street, soaking up hundreds of panels, poster sessions, round tables and workshops organized according to our association's unique calculus—unpopular panels (like mine) should be held in cavernous banquet halls, while popular topics should be granted a room the size of a bargain berth on a Carnival cruise.
  
But there was also Twitter.  By all accounts, a few thousand tweets from a handful of people before, during, and after our conference.  You can see them all archived with the #aaa2010 hash code.

There was “Kerim” (as he is known at the anthropology blog, “Savage Minds” [savageminds.org]), alerting anthropologists to the “Twitter Meetup” at a restaurant near the hotel.  “Ethnographic Terminilia” to a party at Du Mois Gallery (uptown).  The jazz funeral for Walter Payton, the celebrated New Orleans bassist.  A book signing at an uptown bookstore.  Hints on getting around town; kvetching about the water “boil alert” (from Friday to Sunday).

Not exactly South By Southwest, was it?  It depends on what you were expecting.

Last year, there was an avalanche of blogging about the political power of twitter in Tehran—later (and rather embarrassingly for journalists who ought to have been more skeptical) revealed to be far less of a revolution than originally depicted.  But it’s par for the course for our society, where technologies are regularly accorded tremendous power to affect social and political change.  Malcolm Gladwell critiqued this tendency towards hyperbole in a recent New Yorker article.  He warns,

"It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability.  It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.  The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient.  They are not a natural enemy of the status quo.  If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you.  But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause." (Gladwell 2010)

In many ways, Gladwell is spot-on in his critique.  Too many essayists and academics write about Twitter the way people write about iPads or cell phones or whatever—as pivotal, ultimately deterministic technologies that are going to change the world in some beneficial way.   This is where marketing and scholarship meet: sales hype finds its hyperbolic echo in academic scholarship.  When the reality is less than game-changing, you’d think that these kinds of proclamations would become less common.  But the same commentators just move on to the next social media.

Ultimately, this distracts us from considering what social media do, and what they might do in the future.  Looking back at the modest twitter presence at the anthropology meetings, it would be hard to suggest that twitter represented an alternative to the main conference.  Nothing of the sort, really—most of the tweets were actually commentary, summaries or advertising for papers and presentations at the conference.  But the stuff that got retweeted the most were announcements for off-site events: little challenges to the monopoly of the conference site in the form of meet-ups, gallery showings and book signings.  In other words, nothing there that represented an actual alternative to the conference (not a new way to conference), but little nudges to conference attendees to consider supplemental events outside.

Here, twitter reminds me of Michel Serres on “parasite logic,” the way that a outside, third party (or media) intercedes in a dyadic communication and opens the possibility for new meanings or new action.  As Brown (2002:16-17) writes,

“In information terms, the parasite provokes a new form of complexity, it engineers a kind of difference by intercepting relations. All three meanings then coincide to form a ‘parasite logic’–analyze (take but do not give), paralyze (interrupt usual functioning), catalyze (force the
host to act differently). This parasite, through its
interruption, is a catalyst for complexity. It does this by impelling the parties it parasitizes to act in at least two ways. Either they incorporate the parasite into their midst–and thereby accept the new form of communication the parasite inaugurates–or they act together to expel the parasite and transform their own social practices in the course of doing so.”

Twitter’s power lies in its ability to interrupt, supplement and catalyze different kinds of behavior: a media to impel people to (briefly) diverge from their expected scripts at the conference and, say, take a trolley uptown. This is a powerful potential—one that people like Clay Shirkey have made a career off of extrapolating upon.

But it is, ultimately, a parasite technology, one that requires the presence of more monolithic institutions to function.  That is, it supplements the school, the meeting, the demonstration, rather than moves to replace them.  More than that, its ontology rests on the presence of these more permanent, more powerful structures.  This hardly represents some grand failure on the part of social media—it’s a just a reminder to look to the social contexts of media rather than media themselves.

Doing so can also free us to imagine other parasite technologies—cascades of social media that nudge, prod, intrude, implore.  We move to a future where social technologies will consistently fail to be transcendent—will fail to utterly transform the way we exist and communicate. But ultimately, the parasitic itself can prove transformative.

References

Brown, Steven D. (2002). “Michel Serres.” Theory,
Culture & Society 19(3):1-27.
Gladwell, Malcolm (2010).  “Small Change.”  New Yorker 10.4.2010: 42-49.

How to avoid staying at the corporate hotel . .

I blogged a bit about my multi-agent systems-informed theories for de-centralized convention planning at the World Future Society . . .This, as the American Anthropological Association again prepares to meet at a non-union venue.