Network Ghosts in the Age of Generative AI

 

What are faculty thinking about generative AI? In my role at our faculty center, I speak to faculty often on the problems they face teaching in the era of AI, and the workarounds they've come up with. The advent of publicly available generative AI platforms was not something people in my field (anthropology) or other faculty in the social sciences and humanities were clamoring for. And yet here we are. This has led to many responses: anguish, certainly, but also ways of incorporating--or at east channeling--the usage of generative AI in the classroom.

But what about faculty outside of my university? I used NodeXL to download Reddit data from the "/Professors" subreddit using the keyword "AI." This generated records of about 2500 users posting, commenting or replying for a total of 7000 contributions to the debate. I then grouped the data in clusters of similar postings, and abstracted the top words from each group as indicated by "up-vote" (which functions as more of a "like" in Reddit). As you can see, faculty were not particularly optimistic about AI in 2024. Yes, there were a couple of more computopian posters (and at least one computer scientist) who chided the community for rejecting what they saw as inevitable. But most worried that their efforts to teach writing, critical thinking, methodology and analysis were thwarted by student reliance on generative AI. Cynically, they predicted their university's tolerance for AI cheating, and speculated over their ability to continue as faculty under these conditions.

In 2024, Reddit sold their content to Google to train their large language models. This would have been been more objectionable, perhaps, if it wasn't already abundantly clear that generative AI have already been trained on Reddit, which maintains a relatively open API at a time when most social media have monetized their social network data. But what happens to that Reddit data when its re-constituted by generative AI? I decided to prompt Microsoft's Co-Pilot (to which I have enterprise-level access) to generate a spreadsheet of a Reddit conversation on AI between professors. Here's the prompt: "I would like you to generate an excel file similar to a Reddit conversation on a subreddit called "professors." The posts should discuss ChatGPT and student work from the perspective of the professor, and should include comments and replies to those comments. There should be 4 columns in the spreadsheet: A (person commenting or replying); B (person whom A is replying to); C (the text of the comment or reply); and D (the date of the reply or comment). Please populate the spreadsheet with at least 20 comments and 350 replies to those comments."

Co-pilot returned a network with with just 10 users, with 350 edges representing multiple re-postings(?) of user posts. Re-posting really isn't a thing with Reddit, so perhaps there's some confusion here with XTwitter. Since this is a much smaller network, I just labeled the 10 nodes with key words from their posts. The comments are a near "upside down" to the actual Reddit discourse over 2024, generally praising the efficiencies of generative AI and, when critical, speculating over the need for faculty at all (hence the precarity). Of course, there's a snarky comment on "Clippy," the irritating Microsoft assistant. The network itself, while smaller, is also structurally different. The actual Reddit network has a density of .001158737. In network measures of density, "1" would represent 100% connection--everyone connected to everyone else. So .0012 may not seem like much, but it's typical of social media networks where, after all, most of us don't feed the trolls and we save our replies for issues (and users) that we really care about. On the other hand, my AI-generated network has one of 0.966666667--an almost perfectly connected network where everyone has replied to everyone in a style of a polite and ploddingly inclusive panel discussion.

So, I guess that Co-Pilot does a lousy job simulating a subreddit? Yes, but, I think, more than that. It wasn't that long ago (2023) when XTwitter adopted a fee-based model for API access. That decision placed Twitter data beyond the reach of most of us. When social media data disappears behind paywalls, we (ordinary researchers) no longer really have access to the "connected action" of social media. While we can certainly look at social media, this only exposes us to our respective corners of the media platforms we inhabit and the structural components of social media are lost. But what happens when social media content is sold to OpenAI or Google Gemini? When social media disappears into a large language model, both the content and the connections are lost, and the simulated networks produced through generative AI manage to misrepresent social media on both fronts. Since Co-Pilot's inner workings are opaque to us, it is unclear if these results are the result of deliberate choice, unintended bias or something else.

Gap Capitalism: Commodifying Zeno's Paradox

By Own screenshot, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26632754

I watch people on the Seoul subway playing 쿠키런 (Cookie Run) while we barrel towards Chongno. It's the successful colonization of the two minutes between stations--just one among many in regimented lives that have become moments to produce and consume.  Will capitalism ever run out of space to subsume into its extractivist logic?

Zeno's paradox of motion describes the impossibility of ever arriving; there is always infinitely divisible space remaining: first 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8. Mathematically, this isn't a paradox at all, but, really, capitalism depends on Zeno's chicanery. There's always a fraction left to exploit. And this goes in both directions. We're used to thinking about capitalism as an expansive system, constantly locating new sources of profit, but it also goes down, to the molecular level and beyond. Finally, capitalism turns to the between.

 

For Bandak and Janeja (2020: 2), this "gap" is fundamental to the social and cultural processes of waiting they document in their edited collection, "Ethnographies of Waiting": "In a modern conception of time, human beings are situated in a gap, in an interval where there is an engagement with different forces." While undoubtedly universal, and taking its place among other temporalities (anticipation, duration, etc.), this "gap" becomes politicized under modernity, where people and ideas are oftentimes forcibly rendered between. But modern tragedy is a also a source of profit.

Driven by imperialism and colonialism, capitalism is constantly looking for new markets, new resources, new possibilities for profit. In the process transforming all that it touches in the style of Marx, "all that is solid melts into air." But it is also true that capitalism is an uneven process, one that develops, but also under-develops, that produces workers, but also impoverishes populations.

If capitalism is predicated on spatio-temporal changes, then those shifts are hardly uniform. The distance between the the periphery and the metropole describes one, but time and space are produced irregularly throughout human lives, like a stamping die that cuts sheet metal into parts and patterns, but that always produces leftover scrap. You can re-use some of that scrap, certainly, but there will always be scrap in the end. This is what I'm calling the ideology of "gap" capitalism. Pace Zeno, there will never be complete exploitation - there's always something left over.

Many of these "gaps" are already familiar. Think arbitrage as the exploitation of a momentary pricing difference. Or interstitial spaces where brownlands or other in-between zones await urban re-development. The exploitation of leftover space and time (Phelps and Silva 2018). 

The popularity of mobile games is an example of the proliferation of technologies of waiting. We can pick them up for moment or a minute, play in a line, in a doctor's office, on a subway platform. They are designed for the emptiness created by a regimented, spatio-temporal system that simultaneously generates action and inaction, vitality and passivity, attention and inattention.

Digital music is another triumph of gap capitalism, with half of people in the US wearing headphones/ earbuds for their entire day, streaming music that vacillates across layers of consciousness, filling moments between events and social encounters. Not the soundtrack of your life (i.e., music keyed to pivotal memories of events), but what exists in-between: semi-conscious musicality in the intervals.

Social media exploit the gap between stranger and acquaintance, acquaintance and friendship. That gap is simultaneously temporal. If we think of something like triadic closure, the tendency over time is for relationships to close gaps within clusters, social media are anticipatory across a relationship gap (Huang 2015). The genius of social media is in the commodification of these in-between relationships and statuses--both as something to be pursued as pleasurable by users and as a source of fungible value in their own right.

This is a brief sketch of a larger study, certainly. And one that has engaged a number of critics. Ultimately, it begs the question of limits. Where can the exploitation of the gap take us? What can be commodified? And where does commodification cease? Gaps between perception and cognition? Synaptic gaps? The space between cardiac arrest and brain death? 

Outside of undergraduates in introductory logic courses, it would be hard to find someone flummoxed by Zeno's paradoxes. That sleight-of-hand reasoning no longer works; it only does if there's an interlocutor that accepts the (false) correspondences between dissimilar units. This is the same with capitalism: only if we accept time or space in this way - as an infinitely divisible unit to be be developed - spent - then it becomes fuel for capitalist exploitation. If the factory's clock-time is revealed as a capitalist ideology, if people no longer accept land as a source of exchange value, then the artifice of "gaps" must also disappear.

References

Castree, Noel (2009). The Spatio-temporality of Capitalism. Time & Society, 18(1), 26-61.

Huang, H., J. Tang, L. Liu, J. Luo and X. Fu (2015). "Triadic Closure Pattern Analysis and Prediction in Social Networks," IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 27(12): 3374-3389. 

Janeja, Margaret and Andreas Bandak (2020). "Introduction." In Ethnographies of Waiting, ed. by Janeja and Bandak, pp. 1- 40. NY: Taylor and Francis. 

Keogh, B., & Richardson, I. (2018). Waiting to play: The labour of background games. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 21(1), 13-25.

Phelps, N. A., & Silva, C. (2018). Mind the gaps! A research agenda for urban interstices. Urban Studies, 55(6), 1203-1222.

Qiao, Mina (2019). "Consumption on the Orient Express." Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 6(1): 79-94. 

The Last Moon Village: A Proposal for a Multimodal Anthropology

 

 

 

You’ll see them in film, k-dramas, music videos, webtoons and video games: narrow Seoul alleys (골목길), old restaurants with peeling wallpaper, protagonists drowning their sorrows in tent bars (포장마차). Sometimes these images are deployed for critical purpose: e.g., the 반지하 (semi-basement) that the Kim family lives in the 2019 film “Parasite.” And sometimes for nostalgia–with multiple documentaries and websites on the “last urban moon village” (마지막 달동네) of a Korean city. But this is not the Seoul–nor the Republic of Korea (hereafter Korea)--that most people inhabit. Over the last 50 years, urban life in South Korea has been transformed in many ways, with successive waves of state-sponsored gentrification that has culminated with “New Town” developments of block upon block of orderly apartment complexes with mall-like commercial strips between them (Chen et al 2019; Song et al 2019). Here, Korea parallels (and anticipates) urban development elsewhere.

However, this proposed project is not a critique of urban (re)development (재개발), but an inquiry about what remains. Here and there, amidst the gleaming office towers and high-rise apartments of Seoul and other Korean cities, there are older neighborhoods with housing stock from previous decades–small islands of the past. On the one hand, these represent surplus neighborhoods for later redevelopment schemes. On the other, older neighborhoods evoke nostalgia for the past and for what people frequently characterize as a less alienated time. “Moon neighborhoods,” so-called because many were constructed on squats in hills and mountains that were not thought suitable for apartment development, remind people of the struggle and determination of past generations. What happens to these places in the interstices of ubiquitous housing blocks?

If we were doing this research in the United States, the answer would be clear enough: gentrification, abandonment and displacement, the legacy of post-War urban development that may have moved into more hybrid strategies in a neoliberal age, but that still remains devastating to people in working-class communities (Logan and Molotch 1987; Durington and Collins 2019). In South Korean cities, however, “touristifcation” may instead be the result. Rather than move into neighborhoods of older homes without access to infrastructure and amenities, tourists visit instead to snap photos for Instagram posts and to explore (Kim and Holifield 2022). In some cases, the state has facilitated this process by painting colorful murals on neighborhood walls–literally enabling Instagram-able moments. The result is a digital gentrification without the physical displacement of people (Hartmann and Jansson 2024).

My proposed research project is on the way community identity is physically and digitally negotiated in older neighborhoods that have become sites of state intervention, touristifcation and nostalgia.  My earlier work in Seoul included places like Ihwa-dong and different neighborhoods along the old city walls (e.g., Bukjeong Maul). These have been the targets of urban regeneration, media representation and tourist development (Nam and Lee 2023; Yun and Kwon 2023). Older housing stock, narrow alleys and colorful murals attract location scouts for k-dramas and film, as well as busloads of domestic and international tourists. But people live in these places as well, people who have little to show for the mediatization and fetishization of their communities. Yet it would not be accurate to conclude that they are powerless against the onslaught of touristification and hallyu media. For one, residents have occasionally risen up against the commodification of their communities, as in the vandalism of artistic murals in Ihwadong in 2016 (Oh 2020). In addition, as one of the most wired nations on Earth, Koreans engage in social media productions across multiple platforms, and document their neighborhoods and their lives in ways that diverge significantly from the Instagram posts and hallyu tours. Finally, communities host events, gallery shows, media broadcasts and other projects that constitute genuine place-making, and stake a claim not only to their homes, but additionally establish what their communities mean (Kim and Son 2017; Kang 2023).

My perspective on these negotiations is one of multimodality, a recent, anthropological turn I have explored through numerous articles and a recent, co-authored book (Collins and Durington 2024). In anthropology, multimodality recognizes the anthropological practice in non-anthropologists as they seek to document, represent their communities, and intervene in the futures of those places. People are ultimately anthropologists of their own lives, and I have helped to develop a methodology that integrates this insight into a more collaborative, and more de-centered work that considers multiple, community-produced media alongside more “official” anthropological analysis (Collins and Durington 2015; Collins and Durington 2024). Here, I propose looking to neighborhood identity as a collaborative, negotiated and occasionally fraught negotiation of meaning, place and identity. My insights have been very much informed by fieldwork - in South Korea and in Baltimore. And it’s these same insights that I propose to bring into the classroom in a series of methodologically focused, participatory courses that task students with documenting the anthropologies of their own communities. What I hope to accomplish through this research and teaching will ultimately work towards an understanding of global processes in an age where the physical and the digital occupy overlapping spheres in the lives of people and in the futures of communities.

 

Precursors

Years ago, I became interested in a general nostalgia for the narrow streets and claustrophobic spaces of older neighborhoods, including “taldongne” (달동네)—clusters of homes that originated as unofficial housing in the heavy urban migrations after the Korean War, and that are characterized by a lack of planning and infrastructure. Perhaps the most iconic moment for me was the huge popularity of the “Reply 1988” (응답하라 1988), a nostalgic, family drama/comedy that unfolds against the backdrop of the Seoul 1988 Olympics and takes place in a modest neighborhood of 1970s-era homes and narrow streets. The end of the series finds the old neighborhood abandoned and slated for re-development–and end to a more simple time. Indeed, by the 1970s, many of the residents of older neighborhoods were being forcibly (and even violently) evicted, and large-scale apartment developments put up in their place. This trend accelerated through the early 21^st century with the establishment of “new town” developments radically transforming the urban fabric of multiple South Korean cities. Predictably, perhaps, the disappearance of these older, largely working-class neighborhoods was accompanied by a longing for community and an appreciation for these organic, eclectic spaces, in dramatic contrast to the huge developments that now house the majority of people in Korea.          

That nostalgia extends across multiple media, from television and film to webtoons, games and apps—and, of course, social media, where the search for selfies and more aesthetic photography sends millions of domestic and international tourists to the few, extant working-class neighborhoods in search of the perfect pictures for their Instagram accounts. In my 2014-2015 fieldwork, I analyzed numerous “alleyway” social media accounts, and set off with local photography clubs (1 Korean, 1 Korean and non-Korean), taking pictures of narrow streets, rusted grates and broken latticework. Globally, the neighborhoods are iconic, connoting “Korea” even as their existence fades from Korea’s urban fabric; it would be difficult to find a k-drama that didn’t have some romantic moment set in one of these places. Yet the vast majority of Koreans have never lived in them.

Nevertheless some neighborhoods still remain. My previous work in Seoul coincided with a period of relative openness in the form of urban regeneration policies that were just beginning under the leadership of then-Mayor Park Won Soon (Nam and Lee 2023). Through government programs, non-profits and museum exhibitions, people in Seoul looked to these communities as something that deserved, at least, some measure of preservation–in sharp distinction to the policies of Park’s predecessors that had accelerated the frenetic pace of urban redevelopment. Along with this came calls for a more textured and genuine urban life where people might develop attachments to each other and to their neighborhoods (Lee 2011). Along the way, new public spaces, sidewalks, and parks were all constructed to make Seoul a more livable city.

Yet, people in older neighborhoods must still negotiate with the combination of touristification and gentrification that have encroached upon their lives. Touristification in the form of busloads of people coming to neighborhoods that were once avoided by non-residents, and gentrification in the form of up-scale teashops and bars that have grown up in “edgy” and “artistic” areas. There are a variety of means to resist these forces, but I became interested in the ways that residents have utilized diverse media in order to form counter-representations of life that contest the romantic commodification from tourism and, to some extent, from the state. YouTube, film and podcasts are generated alongside print magazines, gallery shows and other events in order to give voice to residents and to underline their placemaking. The irony here—and there are many ironies—is that, in their resistance, residents are instantiating the very community ethos over which people and media have waxed nostalgic.

 

Multimodal Methods in Anthropology

Today (April 26, 2024), our book, "Multimodal Methods in Anthropology" is released into the world. Here's a song I've created for the moment using Udio, a text-to-song Generative AI model: https://www.udio.com/songs/m5HMHSZ2exSgEWE7f8AaAr

And here's a code for a discount on this book from our publisher, Routledge Books:

The Future of Social Media in Anthropology

From the conclusion to my contribution on "Social Media" in Wiley's "The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology:"

Anthropologists are still coming to terms with social media and its impact on every
level of our lives.  No matter what new SNS platforms develop, though, it is certain that
social media will continue to be a source of controversy in the field. The reasons for
controversy may vary, but they will all pivot on the essential liminality of social media.
By definition, it occupies spaces between worlds: between people, between online and
offline, between official and unofficial, between private and public, between resistance
and accommodation, between horizontality and verticality. For all of these reasons,
anthropologists are unlikely to be entirely comfortable with the social media they and
their interlocutors utilize, whatever new platforms may develop in the future. But that
discomfort can also be a source of strength, one that can help to highlight and perhaps
help to overturn persistent inequalities in the field, all the while revealing dimensions
of our work that may have been suppressed or sublimated in the past. 

 And I think I still agree with that-- social media continue to be leaky and messy: the dishes you haven't yet washed in your intellectual sink.  

The Partial Truths of Big Data

Last July I was using R to do some social network analysis of Instagram tags.  After lots of package downloads, App Developer’s applications, etc., I couldn’t get it to work, only to discover that Instagram had changed its policy the months before.  Like many social media platforms, Instagram had restricted access to data through its API (Application Programming Interface).  For some, this could be welcome news—after all, third party developers having untrammeled access weakens privacy and serves to expose more and more of our lives to commodification.

But this isn’t the whole story.  Just because I (a researcher at a mid-tier state university) was having trouble gaining access doesn’t mean that large corporations were having trouble, or the National Security Agency, or Instagram itself.  Rather, what we’ve seen with the rise of Big Data as a research object is the progressive commodification of social media.  The social network analysis that began as a recondite branch of anthropology, sociology and mathematics has become an indispensable tool in business development.  Social media data are money, and the tightening of restrictions represents another digital divide, this one between corporations and governments that can gain access to the “firehose” of complete data, while the rest of us work with a fraction of that under whatever restrictions are placed upon data access through APIs.  In this latest chapter of the digital divide, some people (and entities) get Big Data, and some of us get “partial” data.

This has prompted some scholars to question the involvement of academics in Big Data analysis in the first place: “How much of a difference does it make for academics to gain access to Big Data, after all, when the logics of commercial enclosure of social media data may [have] already begun to run deep?” (Chan 2015: 1080).  It certainly doesn’t look good for cultural anthropologists—our “n” in a research study rarely exceeds one hundred.  Compare that to the 2016 update of a 2011 study from Facebook that looks to social distance and weak ties among its 1.5 billion users, concluding the geodesic distance between anyone on the planet is about 3.57 “degrees of separation” (Bhagat et al 2016).  It would be hard for anthropology to compare their work to this.  And yet, as Tricia Wang (2013) has reminded ethnographers, we have little choice but to work with the Big Data science around us: “Otherwise our work will be all too easily shoved into another department, minimized as a small line item in a budget, and relegated to a small data corner” (Wang 2013).  One strategy here is to point out the obvious.  “Big Data” (however construed) does not interpret itself; it needs context, theory, narrative—in other words, the work of anthropology.  In their often cited 2012 paper, dana Boyd and Kate Crawford urge researchers to critically engage the emergent hegemony of Big Data by pointing to the limits of the data these social media platforms aggregate.  “Do numbers speak for themselves?  We believe the answer is ‘no’” (boyd and Crawford 2012: 666).

But this means more than stressing the importance of history and political economy to the quanta of data we emit.  We need to ask more subversive questions.  What kinds of numbers are generated in the space of social media?  What, for example, does Facebook know about me?  On the one hand, it undoubtedly knows a great deal.  Not only am I updating Facebook with personal information (photos from family trips, political opinions), but I’m also “liking” groups, causes, music, etc. on Facebook and, furthermore, Facebook harvests cookies from my non-Facebook internet perambulations in order to “better serve me” advertising targeted to my demographic and political leanings.

But none of this, I would suggest, is really “anthropological” data—instead, it’s consumer data, information about what I buy, and what I might be tempted to buy.   It’s tempting to leap from this to insights into culture, society and social action, but that’s not really what Facebook is collecting.   The numbers are numbers about consumers—users who click on links, who link to each other, who can be profiled in order to sell more.  When we do other things on Facebook: “like” a group or respond to efforts to organize for a cause, we do so through a consumption frame.  Not surprisingly, this has led to several critiques of slacktivism: it looks like consumption without a credit card number.  In any case, Facebook data is not, as Boellsstorff put it, “raw data.”  Instead—it’s already been thoroughly “cooked”, data as emanating from an individual consumer (Boellstorff 2013).

As far as Facebook is concerned, though, this is all that’s important.  Facebook thinks it knows the whole truth, and, from the perspective of an enormous, monopolistic corporation, it knows all it needs (or cares) to know about my identity, habits and social relations.  And yet, it does not.  The emergent, the collective, the alternative, the subaltern, becoming-animal, the multitude—Facebook will never start the revolution, because Facebook can only know our social lives through the reified perspective of commodification.  Of course, activists have utilized Facebook (and other social media) for their work, but they do this in spite of the platforms themselves, media frames that will gamely struggle to track shopping and supply advertising to even the most ardent revolutionary’s account.  Big Data, then, is always “partial” data.

In other words, Facebook (and other social media) disclose “partial truths.”  I deploy this term from Clifford’s often-cited (and often excoriated) introductory essay to “Writing Culture,” a collection of essays that is widely credited with issuing in anthropology’s “postmodern” age.  There, Clifford (1986: 10) focuses attention on the ways ethnographic accounts “construct” culture and, in particular, the ways these genre conventions both enable and delimit anthropological truth:

"'Cultures' do not hold still for their portraits.  Attempts to make them do so always involve simplification and exclusion, selection of a temporal focus, the construction of a particular self-other relationship, and the imposition of a power relationship."

In focusing on the constructedness of the ethnographic encounter, Clifford led a generation of anthropologists to experiment with the ethnographic form and to reflect on their dyadic, field encounters.  But by directing our attention to the dyadic encounter, he deflects our attention from other contexts, among them political economy, social activism, postcolonial struggle and the work of the different communities in which anthropologists site their work.  As many critics have since concluded, anthropology is only in the last (and reified) instance, the ethnographic representation of a dyadic encounter.

There is, nevertheless, truth in Clifford, but it is a truth that serves to conceal other truths.  As Taussig writes of magic in general, “The real skill of the practitioner lies not in skilled concealment but in the skilled revelation of skilled concealment” (Taussig 2003:273).  A momentary glimpse into one secret serves to conceal another; for anthropology, the truth of ethnography served to conceal the onslaught of neo-liberalism.  This is where we can re-define Clifford’s titular perspective: not just a “part,” and not just biased, but a truth that obscures other truths.

With Big Data, the magic is the same.  There are truths to Big Data, but the focus upon them obscures other insights that may lead us to critical alternatives.  The same theories and methods that graph connected action and aggregate millions of data points also serve to deflect the eye from local process, or from action that unfolds over a longer timeline, or non-episodic phenomena that continue without defining “events”.    

In his 2011 book, Rob Nixon introduced the concept of “slow violence,” “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2).  Ordinary violence—along with other temporally discrete phenomena—is particularly amenable to social media.  How many examples of police violence, for example, have been rendered visible through their felicitous recording on smartphones, the resulting videos uploaded to Facebook?  But slow violence proceeds without these—incremental tragedy impacting health, education and psychology.  Nixon concentrates his analysis on the slow violence of environmental degradation, and, particularly, on the ways that marginalized communities suffer through policies that enable corporations and governments to concentrate pollution in communities that cannot defend against it.  But slow violence can take many other forms, including processes of structural violence, de-industrialization, de-funding, under-development, infrastructure decay, pathologization.  None of these may spark social media storms, but these “slow” processes have the same, calamitous consequences in neighborhoods in both urban and rural areas.

This is where the data of anthropology and the “Big Data” available through social network analysis seem to diverge the most, but the onus is upon us to attempt to identify the lacunae and, when possible, use our methodological understandings to move in these interstices.  And it can mean using Big Data in ways contrary to the social media platforms that aggregated it in the first place—e.g., researching food deserts through Instagram (Beck 2016).  It is, however, not an easy task to take images that reflect the commodification of daily life and the drive towards the “quantified self” and appropriate them to advance social justice.  And it is here where the ethnography that seemed so beside the point suddenly becomes vital.

References

Beck, Julie (2016).  “The Instagrams of Food Deserts.”  The Atlantic [accessed on November 1, 2016 at www.theatlantic.com].

Chan, Anita (2015).  “Big data interfaces and the problem of inclusion.”  Media, Culture & Society: 1080-1086.

Bhagat, Smriti, Moira Burke, Carlos Diuk, Ismail Filiz and Sergey Edunov  (2016).  “Three and a half degrees of separation.”  Facebook Research [retrieved from research.fb.com on November 10, 2016].

Boellstorff, Tom (2013).  “Making big data, in theory.”  First Monday 18(10).  [Retrieved at firstmonday.org on January 6, 2017].

boyd, dana and Kate Crawford (2012).  “Critical Questions for Big Data.”  Information, Communication & Society 15(5): 662-679.

Clifford, James (1986).  “Partial Truths.” In Writing Culture, ed. By James Clifford and George Marcus.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nixon, Rob (2011).  Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Taussig, Michael (2003) “Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism.”  In Magic and Modernity, ed. By Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels, pp. 272-306.  Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Wang, Tricia (2013).  “Big Data Needs Thick Data.”  Ethnography Matters [retrieved from ethnographymatters.net on September 3, 2013].

Steve Toutonghi's Join and Notes on a Networked Anthropology of the Future

There are many interesting formations that might be called networked phenomena.  Homophily and the tendency towards triad closure.  Scott Feld's Rule (I'm more likely to make friends with someone who has more friends than me).   Cascading behaviors (i.e., virality).  Small world phenomena (those 6 degrees of separation).  In all, a series of social forms that complicate typical binarisms like individual v. group.


Instead, these behaviors are simply networked--explicable through linked nodes.  In other words, not an 'individual'; but not an amorphous, superstructural group.  These have all kinds of implications for social action, cognition, identity and feeling.  As Sampson (2012) writes,

Decision are not, as such, embedded in people, or in the voluntary exchanges with others, but in the very networks to which they connect.  It is, like this, the network relation that leads the way. (168)

But what happens when more and more of our personal and social lives are organized as networks?  This is, of course, exactly what is happening.  Yes, online social networks themselves have become more popular, but, more than that, highly localized social networks have become more popular--SNS platforms that support networks characterized by high density and centrality.  These are social networks for cliques (or complete graphs) where everyone knows everyone else, and everyone talks to everyone else.

In Korea, users engage multiple social media in their daily lives, and platforms like Facebook and Instagram have been extremely popular.  However, there has also been a concomitant growth in proprietary platforms that support social media sharing among a close circle of intimates: KaKaoTalk is one of those--with nearly 100 percent adoption in South Korea, it is the app of choice for online discussion and media sharing.  BAND is another.

Both of these suggest what Ichiyo Habuchi has called "tele-cocooning"--a term that describes a small group of friends that spend a large portion of each day in intimate, digital communication.  Or, as Ito et al define it in their Living and Learning with New Media:

    The practice of maintaining frequent and sometimes constant (if passive) contact with       close friends and/or romantic partners.

And people in South Korea are hardly alone in these proclivities.  In my ethnographic work, and in classroom assignments with my students, I have found that most social media communication takes place between small groups of confidants.  The idea of "virality" that is coveted (and occasionally feared) in YouTube videos or Twitter content is the tiny exception to a towering corpus of online media shared with a very small group of compatriots.  We tend to think of social media in expansive forms, mostly because a combination of hope and fear.  The hope (for some) is that their content will reach millions.  The fear, of course, is exactly the same.  And yet most of us interact almost wholly within a small circle--well below Robin Dunbar's number!

However: with its connotations of passivity and introspection, "tele-cocooning" may not be the best way to describe this process.  "Tele-cocconing" connotes insular lives, summoning up images of teens camped out on the sofa texting for hours, or, in Korea, a rash of phone zombie injuries where oblivious people absorbed in their phones fall down holes or get hit by cars.  But the circle of intimates that "cocoons" is simultaneously encountering and engaging the world.  For almost 2 decades, social scientists have written convincingly on the ways social media enables various forms of collective action.  What about groups of connected friends?  What kinds of social action do these groups undertake?  What do they do, and how is that different than people who lack those intimate, everyday social networks?

In a slightly different context, Steve Toutonghi take on these questions in his 2016 novel, Join, a near future where people "join" with each other, taking on a new, collective identity that is an amalgam of all of the individuals (the "drives") who have been incorporated.  The main characters, "Chance" and "Leap," are further subdivided into the men and women who make up the join: Leap One, Leap Two, Leap Three.


Joins are different from ordinary humans ("solos" or, more pejoratively, "ferals") in at least 2 respects.  First, joins are never alone.

His parents used metaphors--it's like being more attuned to all of who you are, all your different desires and fears; it's like clearly remembering who you were ten years ago, before events changed you.  They said the awareness of being more than one person included a comforting sense of companionship. (9)

Second, they are theoretically immortal.  With each drive possessing the memories of its joined alters, memories and identity might continue indefinitely.

If Chance Five dies, then Chance--and therefore Javier Quispe--will live on through other drives in the join.  That can continue forever.  In a perfect join, human beings lose both their existential sense of isolation and their mortality. (10)

This constant connectivity and simultaneity presents some challenges for Toutonghi.  How to narrate action?  The usual strategy in narrative omniscience is to switch from perspective to perspective--much harder to do here when the perspectives are both the same and different.  For the most part, Toutonghi limits the confusion through simply separating his drives by geography.


But the reasons why the narrative is challenging (and why it occasionally falters) is the reason why this is an interesting novel.  How do we conceive of distributed cognition and connected action on an everyday level?  How do we understand and narrate the decisions we make when liberal assumptions about individuality must be dismissed?


In an anthropological spirit (and his undergraduate major was in anthropology), Toutonghi explores joins as a total social fact--as a different modality of thinking and socializing, as a different politics generative of different inequalities.  The plot revolves around a malady unique to joins, a "flip" that involves one of the joins rejecting the union, precipitating a cascade effect that ends in dysfunction and death.


And it also includes a social critique.  The proliferation of joins among elites leads to a "narcissistic" introspection that supplants other, more linear, concerns.  Entranced by their own transcendence of time, other, resolutely temporal problems like social inequality and environmental degradation seem insignificant.

There has been a slow and continual erosion in the size of the refuge that the Earth can offer.  Chance has watched for years as its edges have crept inward and its center has weakened.  Death is impatient, and suffering multiplies, but not yet for joins.  They just don't notice it, as each successive catastrophe is quickly buried beneath the limitless weight of individual days and years.  For now, Chance's fellow joins are comfortable, which seems to be enough for them to continue minutely examining the mysteries of life. (332)

With de facto immortality, joins train their attention on the longue duree, to the detriment of timely concerns in the present.  And after all of this Bruno Latour-esque evocation of networked action, Toutonghi channels a bit of Sheri Turkle and Robert Putnam in the insistence on face-to-face engagement in real communities.


But, ultimately, what draws me to this novel is the quotidian life of the join.  While networked decision making has long been a topic in HCI, and more recent scholarship from people like Larissa Hjorth has investigated the affective dimensions of networked lives, the questions of everyday speech and interaction have not really been addressed.  To be sure, networked behavior is not a new phenomena, but the ubiquity of online social networking means that we have more and more opportunities to behave as chains of linked confidants.  In this context, as in other cases of networked action, interactions with place and with each other may be less explicable with theories that rest on the either/or dichotomy of individual self and social structure.  But how would that look?  How do we talk when the "I" is always chained in a network of relations?  Sometimes phrases seem familiar: "We did the homework."  "We decided to meet downtown."  But what about: "We bought a shirt" or "We ordered the cannelloni"?  Do these still make sense when we're talking about the behaviors and actions of a single(?) person?  


References



Ichiyo Habuchi, “Accelerating Reflexivity,” in Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, ed. Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

Zombie in the Armchair: Anthropologists as Connective Agents

One of the community groups we work with has a book out.  Another has just won a major victory for environmental justice.  A third is looking for new staff.  Another has posted an incredible collection of photos from the Baltimore Uprising.  My responses?  Depending on the social media platform, “Like”; “Retweet”; “Share”; “Follow”.  Perhaps those aren’t even “responses”.  I haven’t done anything—I haven’t even moved from my chair!  Even J.G Frazer had to get up to pick up another tome of hermetic folklore.  But I would be remiss not to engage in this slacktivism.  Not only remiss, I would be endangering our relationship to our Baltimore interlocutors.  Public anthropology takes many forms—including advocate, gadfly and cultural critic.  What about zombie?

The digital, networked world in which we live has enabled unparalleled access to the tools of content creation.  All of us can make a movie, write a novel, publish photographs; after all, “Web 2.0” is supposed to blur the distinction between producer and consumer.  But for every would-be filmmaker who uploads their work on YouTube, there needs to be agents that propagate media through a network.  This is the moral dilemma of slacktivism: despite the particularly tepid support a “like” or a “share” represents, political action undertaken through digital networks require agents to “route” messages through their own networks, and to do so while limiting their own commentary or added content.  In other words, digital creators need armies of people to pass along messages to all of their friends.  Conversely, they don’t need other people to appropriate and remix their message—they just need us to do what we’re told.  To go back to my examples above, it would seem inappropriate and disingenuous to piggy-back on my informants’ successes with my own self-aggrandizing thoughts: “Nice photos.  See my recent article on de-industrialization in Baltimore for more context.”  Shouldn’t I just pass these social media along?  Without subjecting them to my own hermeneutic violence?  In other words, the Internet needs mindless zombies.

I’ve been reading Tony Sampson’s Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks and find much there for anthropologists to consider in terms of their own work.  Nineteenth century social theorists were keenly interested in this process of creation and contagion; in an era of social unrest and popular rebellion, it was a symptom of their fear of “the crowd.”  In Gabriel Tarde’s formulation, the crowd could be explained with reference to an “imitative ray” that “comprises of affecting (and affected) noncognitive associations, interferences and collisions that spread outward, contaminating feelings and moods before influencing thoughts, beliefs, and actions” (Sampson 2012: 19).  Tarde’s subjects “sleepwalk through everyday life” (ibid., 13), the unwitting host to a parasitical message that will leap from them to other sleep-walking subjects along a networked chain of imitation.  In their urge-to-imitate and reproduce, subjects leave their free will behind.  In Sampson’s terms, “Social man is a somnambulist” (13).

It is safe to say that this is not how most anthropologists would like to be described.  We are, after all, the ones who are supposed to be doing the interpreting.  Our informants may produce anthropologically intended media, they may interview each other, and they may post insightful commentary; but these are data that wait for us to collect, collate, analyze, interpret and publish.  Even if we do so for all of the right, public anthropology reasons, we very much mean to have the last word; this will-to-subjectivity is readily evident in the texts and media we create.  Critical of rational choice theory and Western, 19th century models of subjectivity, anthropologists rest on their authority to create, to measure, to rationate.  Moreover, the qualities of the zombie—passivity, submission, thoughtlessness—are also associated with the terrifying domination of the person under advanced capitalism.  We live in a world where increasing numbers of people have had their own wills ripped away away from them as they are forced into prisons, migrant camps, homelessness.  And at the same time, Tarde’s “imitative rays” have been harnessed by corporate capital in order to denude all of us of our capacity to judge for ourselves.

But there is another side to Tarde’s model, one where imitation is still premised on a mutual relationship.  Sampson continues:

Tarde’s notion of hypnotic obedience reveals a complex reciprocal relationship in which subjects are not simply controlled by deep-seated fears and phobias but also tend to copy (on the surface) those whom they love or at least empathize with. (170)

Obviously, this can (and certainly is) manipulated by corporations and governments, but the relationship need not only be one-sided.  Our own, social media lives suggest a more egalitarian relationship.  Our friends post something—we duly send it along.  We post something, and we expect that they will do the same.  We are all full of pithy, political insights, hilarious jokes, mad photo-shopping skills: we deserve to be copied, shared, re-posted.  In the age of social media, to be friends means to be ready to take the role of the zombie.

For anthropologists, this means that sometimes we may be the imitated, and sometimes the imitator.  After all, our informants may not always need our sagacity—but they will always need our support.  And that support will take many forms, some more active and agential than others.  But following our informants is an important role, indispensable to a networked world.  Sometimes, in other words . . . BRAINS . . . .

Twitter's Time Effects: Why Twitter Needs to Become a Time Lord Social Media

As Twitter continues to flounder as a business, many have tendered their advice for the struggling company.  On the other hand, people at Twitter have responded by introducing what appear (to some) to be "innovations" that are already shared by multiple, social media.  All this has prompted me to think about my own fascination with the platform.  Even though I've blogged here many times about Twitter's relationship to physical and social space, I find myself most often thinking about Twitter's time effects. 

Like other social media, part of the allure of Twitter is the way it allows users to manipulate space--i.e., using social media to "be there" even when you're very far away.  But time is also a resource that people manipulate through their social media.  While some social media emphasize the present (or the "expanded present"),  other platforms allow for other, sometimes subtle, temporalities.  This powerful combination of space and time effects is nowhere more evident than the current popularity of dating apps for the 18-34 set.  As a recent Pew study suggests, by allowing people to connect to each other through non-contiguous space across asynchronous time, online dating apps utilize space and time effects to maximize opportunities for meetings.  In other words, the attraction of social media is more than just a condition of "speed"; it's the combination of sychrony and asynchrony that makes social media so compelling. 

Ostensibly, Twitter (like other social media) displays content along a linear timeline, with the most recent tweets at the top of your reader.  You can think of this (as, perhaps, people less familiar with social media might) as similar to print-based content like newspapers and magazine articles.  But this isn't quite right.  On my desk, for example, is the excellent 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary, a "curated" collection of tweets from young people during the 2015 Baltimore Uprising.  As a book, it's taken all of the linear, temporal tweets and bound them up into a single, syntagmatic diorama.  As a temporal event, the book of the tweets collapses the Uprising into a single plane of discourse, and reading the book is a very different experience than live-tweeting the event.

However, this obvious difference discounts the structure of the social media platform as, ultimately, a heterogeneous chronotype.  Twitter looks like our experience of Newtonian time; to the casual observer, our experiential "now" is the "now" of Twitter.  Scrolling down the timeline takes us into a past that looks like our past.  But Twitter time operates according to very different rules than our ordinary, everyday understanding of temporality.

For one thing, there are many practices that can disrupt Twitter's apparent linearity.  First, you can re-tweet, summoning up content from earlier in the Twitter timeline and magically depositing it in the present.  Events that transpired in the past suddenly become the "now"--not as memory or echo, but as coeval with unfolding Twitter time.  The only indication of the asynchrony is the time-stamp.

Threading your tweets is another common form of time manipulation.  While most users seem to use this "self-reply" function to articulate longer, more complex thoughts, there are also numerous time effects.  For example:

The differences between 4 and 37 minutes are collapsed through the 3 tweet thread.  Moreover, the linear flow of Twitter is reversed, since the oldest tweet appears first.  The above example is certainly less dramatic than a days or weeks-long gap between tweets in a single thread, but the power of this function (or what Fast Company calls a "hack") is to collapse temporally discontinuous discourse into a coeval frame.

You can also manipulate time-lines with hashtags.  By utilizing a hashtag, a user affiliates their content with other tweets that use the same, even if those tweets are temporally distance.  The effect of a search query, then, folds time into tweet content.

Or, rather, hashtagging sets up another timelines--this one relativistically yanking events out of their original timespace and setting up a chronological alternative.

In addition, Twitter (and third-party sites) offer a variety of tools to help users manipulate time. 
There's "TweetDeck," which allows a combination of specialized timelines and scheduled tweets across multiple accounts--a kind of time dashboard where users can work within multiple threads across time zones.  And there are others as well--"tweet4.me"--that are more user-friendly apps that allow users to do the same.  While the intent of these tools is to enable users to always be "on," they really constitute a form of time travel, with the content I post now existing only in a shadowy future.  Discursively, the Twitter user can follow the same path as Robert Heinlein's protagonist in "All You Zombies" and go back in time to give birth to himself.  

Finally, there are a variety of tools to freeze time altogether.  Your own archive of tweets is one example of this effect, as are third party apps like Storify, that let users create social media narratives with custom (and fungible) timelines that additionally allow you to mix multiple social media platforms, and then arrest the linearity of social media through "publishing" your story.  Here's part of one I did a few months ago on a small neighborhood in Seoul:

 With all of this time traveling, and the all of the chronological disjunctures this implies, it's not surprising that recent features ("Moments" and "Home Timelines") are also temporal features, but I can't help but think that Twitter could do much, much more.  For example, time zones can be manipulated by a user through scheduled tweets, but not by your timeline--a difficulty not only for those of us interested in Twitter traffic in, say, Korea, but also for the general health of public discourse.  Another possibility would be to develop a more Bergsonian app for Twitter.  When you read someone's tweet, re-tweet or reply, you're reading it out of their, individual Twitter-time.  What were they writing or commenting upon before and after this tweet?  Yes--you could find out (just as you could simply run searches to read tweets from other time zones), but why couldn't Twitter make these into new features?  

Twitter needs to consider it's relationship to time--to become a Time Lord, and to share their power with users taking control over their own temporalities. 
 

Tweeting the Hell Train

Moving Across Scale and Platform in Seoul

Walker, Rider, Smartphone Talker

In Ryu Shin’s 2014 Seoul Arcade Project, the author, in the persona of the “walker” (구보), explores Seoul through Benjamin’s “Arcades Project,” focusing on the phantasmagoria of Korean capitalism and spectacle over the course of a day’s travel from Gangnam to Gangbuk and back again.  That said, there are some significant differences between Ryu’s project and Benjamin’s, notably in the presence of two technologies altogether absent from Benjamin’s unfinished masterpiece: the smart phone and the subway.

More than just communication and travel, Ryu’s subway and smartphone combination fuels his narrator’s journey across multiple forms of transit to Seoul’s diverse spaces.  Here, the project is a renewed call for analyses of urban mobility systems, but not only that—it’s a call to look into the ways urban practice involves this assemblage of movement, technology and communication.  The challenge for anthropology is to be able to nimbly navigate these networked trails.

Seoul Metropolitan Subway, from Wikipedia Commons

The 1980s called, and they want their Cyberanthropology Back

In a curious artifact of the 1980s, anthropologies of digital life tend to concentrate their attention on those technologies to the exclusion of other technologies, relationships and spaces.  When they interview their interlocutors, it is in relation to those selfsame technological platforms: “What do you think about blogging”?  And yet, it seems obvious that life is lived across platforms, and nowhere more so than in our urban perambulations.

The idea of our networked lives as a complex assemblage is nothing new in Korea.  After a relatively slow start in the 1980s, college students began rapidly acquire beepers (삐삐) or, more formally, 무선호출기.  Each subway or bus station had lines of payphones for people who had received a page to call and (hopefully) rendezvous with their friends.  That is, the system worked in combination: telephone-beeper-subway-telephone.  Although the few, remaining payphones in subway stations are a curious anachronism, the smart phone-subway combination is the undisputed heir.  This is nowhere more obvious than in the adoption of Wibro (Wireless Broadband) on Seoul’s subways in 2009, an inestimable public service which provides free WiFi and, in the process, fuels the formation of new systems of digital mobility and communication.

Boarding the Hell Train

Let’s consider what’s often called the hell train (지옥철)—Line 2 of the Seoul subway.  It circles the downtown area, bringing crushing crowds of commuters and general despair.  Diving down a little deeper: Seoul City Hall Station lies on both Line 1 and Line 2.  It is also sits at the cross-roads of politics, tourism and culture in Seoul—next to plazas, palaces, Korean chaebol, embassies, etc.  It lies on

Tweets made between October 16 and 19th mentioning “City Hall Station”

the Sejong-no—and in doing so maintains a link to the city’s beginnings in the Joseon dynasty as well as its occupation by the Japanese and by the U.S. (the old City Hall was built during Japanese occupation).  It is also the subject of countless tweets.

Like most twitter graphs, the different components—comments, fragments of conversation–are unconnected, the thoughts and missives of people literally passing through.  Nevertheless, we can broadly characterize these tweets by their frequency:

Tweet Content	Number of Tweets
Events and happenings near the station	86
Characteristics or incidents at the subway station	27
Transferring at the station	16
People and incidents on the train	14
Meeting at the station	8
Restaurants near the station	8
Passing the station (while walking, driving, etc.)	8
Meeting near the station	3

What’s interesting here: the lion’s share of tweets takes people outside of the station to meet people in physical spaces.  That is, twitter combines with the subway to facilitate an encounter or a meeting outside of the station in the city.

One of the small clusters of tweets (in the upper, right-hand corner) is for a particular meeting: the “시청역 동네잡지/ 시청역의 점심시간” (City Hall Station Neighborhood Magazine/ Lunch Time at City Hall Station).  The neighborhood magazine started with its editor’s (Hyeong-jeong Kim) curiosity.  As she explains to Hangyoleh21 Magazine, “[I wanted to know] the faces and the stories that these people that you pass quickly every day at the subway station on their way to buildings in this area and back again.”  After initial meetings for lunch, they decided to start making a neighborhood magazine with contributions from people who rode the subway together and worked in the same neighborhood: familiar strangers of the city.

Kim started organizing meetings on Facebook, announcing meet-ups, deadlines and new issues to people who had “liked” the page.  In this graph, the different clusters (represented by different colors), are each linked to different issues of the magazine and to related events, including calls for participation, meetings, classes, production and publication announcements: the posts succeed each other likes waves radiating different centers to reach a diverse group that includes the core team members, contributors, and members of the community including people overseas.

Graph of Facebook Community page showing co-likes and co-posts

Each magazine issue features prose and poetry from contributors that ranges from thoughts about restaurants around City Hall Station (“People Feeding You Around City Hall Station”) to meditations on summer trips (“My Summer Vacation”). The upcoming issue, “Patronage” (단골), takes readers into area coffee shops, restaurants and bathrooms (“Grading City Hall station bathrooms by order of priority”).

In addition to the magazine content, networks extend from this work to the different restaurants and coffee shops where the magazine is being distributed, to area non-profits who are affiliated with the magazine through their website or their Facebook page.  The network begins broadly, contracts to a point, and then expands again in the creation of new edges and new nodes—the digital rhythm of life in a networked city.

Where Digital Scholars Fear to Tread

When we’re looking at social media, the tendency is to just examine the social media.  And yet, the examples here form complex systems that include space, mobility and digital communication: an actor network made up of subway + subway station + twitter + face-to-face meetings + Facebook + physical magazines and, like Line 2 of Seoul’s subway, back again.  The jumps in scale and platform are not, I would submit, incidental to this process: they trace social action in a complex environment made up of varying systems of mobility, social connection and communication.  This is a trail only an anthropologist can follow.  Accordingly, next steps for this research include interviews and observations of everyday life–for these are ultimately the quotidian ways we organize our lives in a networked world.

[This post originally appeared in Anthropology News].