Multimodality Through Twitter: Exploring the Alleyways of Seoul

Multimodality describes an anthropology across multiple media platforms--an anthropology that traverses film, photograph, theater, design, podcast, app and game (to name a few) as well as conventional modes of print representation.  But multimodality is a restless, protean concept, one that has already exploded its initial demarcation (modes of dissemination) into a spectrum of engagements.  Multimodality is about the platforms we use as we produce our work (social media, blogs, websites), and the social media that ripples out from it as people share, comment, re-mix and appropriate.  Finally, multimodality is the acknowledgement that people are engaged in anthropologies of their own lives, and that these productions (YouTube videos, Instagram photos) are worthwhile of attention as ethnographically intended media in their own rights.  By multimodality, then, we re-cognize anthropology along 2 complementary axes--a horizontal one that links together phases of ethnographic work that are oftentimes held distinct from each other, and a vertical one that links our anthropological work to the anthropologies of our collaborators.  Moreover, with the development of new media, new media platforms, and new forms of collaborative work, we would expect these axes to multiply.   Ultimately, multimodality takes the arbitrary divisions we make in our work and in our collaborations to task, and offers up new possibilities for old dilemmas.

Many visual anthropologists are, of course, multi-modal avant la lettre: their finished, ethnographic film is preceded by countless edits, photographic stills and recorded interviews.  But all of us are multimodal anthropologists; in an age of social media, anthropologists spread ethnographic filaments through multiple platforms before they engage in the "real" writing on their print monographs and journals.  At this level, multimodal research means tracing this arc through social media before, during and after ethnographic research.  

A short example:

In 2014-2015, I was doing research in Seoul on representations of the city through both mass media (novels, film, web comics) and through social media, particularly social media produced by neighborhood groups affiliated with various "village media" (마을 미디어) projects.  In particular, I was attracted to social media postings of alleyways and narrow roads, photos that looked like they were from the 1970s but were actually contemporary photos of the few remaining places in Seoul where you can see the old-style neighborhoods.  Decades of hell-bent urban development had developed (and re-developed) Seoul's neighborhoods beyond recognition, and narrow roads crowded with old-style homes (도시 한옥) were now a thing of the past--with the exception of specially designated tourist neighborhoods like Seoul's Bukcheon.  

What was left was a sense of loss and nostalgia, and rather than the "poverty porn" of similar photographs in the U.S. (and in my own city of Baltimore), these social media postings vacillated between sentimental longing for a time before Korea's "Apartment Republic," when crowded streets and narrow, connected homes meant that people knew each other in multifaceted, intimate ways, on the one hand, and the commodification of that nostalgia for capital gain, on the other.  Extremely popular programs like "Reply 1988" (응답하라 1988) were on television, steeped in nostalgia for the previous times.   It is no mistake that this television drama ends with the complete destruction of the neighborhood under a redevelopment scheme--this was the experience of an entire generation of people (the 386 generation) who came of age in the 1980s. 

(Final scenes of the old neighborhood in Reply 1988 (2015))

Similarly, Facebook and Twitter were filled with photographs and remembrances of vanishing neighborhoods, and I began to follow certain account and Facebook groups that were particularly rich sources of postings and re-postings of images of alleyways.  The first diagram shows tweets containing the keyword "alleyway" (골목길), ranging from "singleton" posts and photographs to others that were re-tweeted many times.  Photos from Ehwahdong (이화동), Bukcheongmaul (북정마을) and other neighborhoods were re-tweeted multiple times.  

On the other hand, people posting these photos located themselves in various ways that suggested a very cursory--or even incidental----identification with these neighborhoods and with place in general. The diagram below labels people's tweets about Seoul alleyways by the locations they've set in their profiles.  

While some locations (e.g., "In an alleyway") suggest a slightly cheeky identification with these places, others ("the world," "In bed") suggest a more alienated, fragmented relationship to life and sociality in Seoul.

I started to collect and archive these diverse media on "Storify", an SNS platform that allows you to aggregate and comment upon other SNS content.  Storify enabled me to keep a notebook in a digital age when the ephemerally of content could easily mean that a post to Instagram today may be very difficult to find again tomorrow.

(a screenshot of a Storify collection of social media posts about Seoul's "Jangsu Village".)

Finally, I began to take pictures of Seoul alleyways, starting with one from my old neighborhood in Gileumdong, and then posting them on Twitter.  Concerned with issues of privacy, I was careful to avoid photos of people and personal effects.  I confined myself to public streets that, while reflective of Seoul’s older development, did not suggest poverty. 

These images were re-tweeted and “liked” a few times, and were finally posted to a Facebook fan group collecting images of Korean alleyways.  The graph below shows users posting to the Facebook group, with their names replaced by the numbers of “likes” for each post.  The posts led to some online interviews about Seoul’s spaces and photography, but, by summer of 2015, much of this particular arc of photographic circulation had ceased.

Conclusions

This is not visual anthropology. And nor is this “ethnographic” in any complete sense—it’s a fragment of ethnographic work refracted onto different media, different digital platforms.  A key component of this multimodality is its social dimension.  This isn’t just me posting some mediocre photos of empty streets; my engagement with these media brings along the engagements of hundreds of other users together with the circulations of their media.  We’re linked—networked—in a way that undermines the pretensions of ethnographic author-ship (and authority).   With multimodality, we may not always get to say what we mean--or, rather, "saying" and "meaning" are the aggregate decisions of multiple nodes.  Multimodality pulls our work into different productions, different circulations and, ultimately, different meanings.  We can utilize various analytics to trace these differentiated contexts, but we must endeavor to do so in order to not just examine the way the significance of our ethnographic changes according to each configuration, but to also trace the socialities each platforms engenders. 

An Invitation

If you are also working along multimodal lines in your research, please consider submitting something to us in the "Multimodal Anthropologies" section of American Anthropologist.   

We are accepting essays (print and photo), review essays and reviews that explore the contours of multimodality for possible publication in American Anthropologist.  To submit a   manuscript, or for more information, please contact us:

Harjant Gill (hgill@towson.edu)

Matthew Durington (mdurington@towson.edu)

Samuel Collins (scollins@towson.edu)

@Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology

Towson University

8000 York Rd.

Towson, MD 21252

USA

Uncanny Anthropology

 

(The Somerset onion, from the Pitt Rivers Museum)

In his lyrical essay, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1982), Marshall Berman defines modernism broadly, as “a struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world” (6).  By that he includes art, poetry, but also political economy and philosophy; as an urban people, we are a moderns engaged in this daily struggle of sense-making and homeliness.  How we live in the world is a question that exercises artists, revolutionaries, cosplayers: in short, all of us suspended in a world not of our own choosing. 

But that modernist impulse is not without its push-back.  “Making ourselves at home” means finding the reality distinctly “un-homely,” or, as Freud defined it in his 1919 essay, as “uncanny” (unheimlich): that is, the hidden, mysterious and unexplained that invades the feeling of familiar, expected comfort.  The two ideas, as Freud explained, are related: “homeliness” has “unhomeliness” concealed within it like a family secret.  It is the unheimlich that is at the core of Benjamin’s bourgeois interior.  In his “The Exterior as Interieur,” Tom Gunning (2003: 107-108) goes back to an incident in Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” when the narrator, while bed-ridden and convalescing, is treated to a “magic lantern” show projected onto the walls of his bedroom:

"But my sorrows were only increased thereby, because the mere change of lighting was enough to destroy the familiar impression I had of my room, thanks to which, save for the torture of going to bed, it had become quite endurable.  Now I no longer recognized it, and felt uneasy in it, as in a room in some hotel or chalet, in a place where I had just arrived by train for the first time . . ." 

Of course, the “bourgeois interior” marks an uneasy truce with an outside world, one that continuously intrudes upon the “homeliness” of the inside, rendering the most familiar sights of bed and bedroom suddenly strange.

There can be no better synecdoche for the modern condition.  If we read Marx’s celebrated quote, “All that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned,” as a process, then it is one where we again and again take refuge in comforting truths, solid relationships and familiar routines, only to have these shift beneath us through, of course, perturbations in political economy, but also through the emergence of new discourse, new identities and transforming (and transformative) relationships with things and the world.   In other words, our world constantly confronts us with the uncanny: the comforting familiar that betrays our trust and acts in ways contrary to our experiences.

Anthropology has not always been concerned with the uncanny.  During the twentieth century, much of the power and popularity of anthropology was generated in the frisson of the exotic and familiar—a trope that still recurs in popular media’s occasional re-deployment of “primitive” tropes.  Of course, as many critics have pointed out, each evocation of the exotic led to the reification of culture and to the spurious identification of culture and place: in other words, the very opposite of the uncanny itself.

As James Clifford (1988: 120) writes,

“The ‘primitive’ societies of the planet were increasingly available as aesthetic, cosmological, and scientific resources.  These possibilities drew on something that more than older Orientalism; they required modern ethnography.  The postwar context was structured by a basically ironic experience of culture.  For every local custom or truth there was always an exotic alternative, a possible juxtaposition or incongruity.”   

Despite the violence wielded against the Other through widespread deployment of the “savage slot,” this was still the heyday of cultural relativism and, with it, the power of a cultural critique that denied the universality of narrowly conceived Western rationalism.  Unfortunately, the exotic could also readily appropriated into colonial and racist scaffoldings, only now cultural difference could be part of a process of reification that derogated the Other to the peripheries of development. 

With the critique of this exoticization, and the turn towards public anthropology, an anthropology premised on the juxtaposition of the familiar and the exotic seems like a relic from the past—albeit one resurrected at key moments to justify this or that imperialist enterprise.  Instead, we look to powerful structures and practices that buttress global inequality—once the exotic Other, now the marginalized global. 

We might see this turn as the end of enchantment and the triumph of Weber’s iron cage of rationality: “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’” (Weber 1946: 155).  If by “disenchantment,” we might include dismantling the various myths of savage and primitive that have been utilize to justify powerful inequality, then good riddance!  However, it hasn’t been that easy.  If some forms of enchantment have been “dispelled,” then others have rushed to take their place: mystifications of power wrought by media spectacles, by commodity fetishism, and by the systematically distorted discourse of the state. 

But there are other ways enchantment intrudes upon the anthropological consciousness.  To go back to one, well-known example.  In his work on behalf of the Pitt-Rivers Museum, and as proof of his theories of “survivals,” E.B. Tylor was continuously on the hunt for proof of magical superstition among England’s peasant classes.  Various magical implements (witch’s bottles, talismans, etc.) made their way to the museum through his network of ethnographers and folklorists.  In particular, one, old pub in Somerset yielded a rich trove of apotropaic artifacts that worked into Tylor’s typological schema perfectly, among them a bunch of dried onions with names written on the skins and pins stuck through.  Workmen found them concealed inside the chimney. 

Tylor then sent his dried onions to John Lubbock to examine, and then Lubbock claims to have sent them directly back.  But Tylor never received them.  After his inquiries at the post office yielded no onions, Tylor decided to consult with ghosts through a séance—a popular, middle-class pastime in England since the Fox sisters had introduced “spirit-rapping” to England in the 1850s.  Through the medium—one that he had come across during his anthropological researches into Spiritualism—Tylor contacted the spirit of a Native American, who told him that he would soon be reunited with the onions (Wingfield).  He never was.

It’s an extraordinary story, and an uncanny story.  Uncanny, of course, because of the séance, and the Native American spirit—Tylor may have believed what he’d witnessed.  But also uncanny because of the onions themselves.  Why did they disappear?  Where did they go?  Why was the post office unable to find them?  Things are, after all, uncanny when their familiarity shifts to strangeness: when the world’s regular workings open up to reveal a deep disquietude.  When the world, in other words, works in other ways than what we expect.

Even though there are many, many examples of the first sort of uncanny (that of the séance), it’s worth looking in more detail at the second.  When do things turn uncanny?  Freud suggested several scenarios: 1) inanimate objects animating; 2) the ‘doubling’ of objects; 3) the repetition of phenomena.  Each of these suggests uncanniness for a post-industrial age where biology becomes an engineered machine, and where the machine becomes fused in a cyborg assemblage.  In other words, the uncanny as a rooted experience of being modern. 

Systems of production, of power, of knowledge; structures of social life and education; discourses of identity, relatedness, nationality: all of these shift into uncanny topologies that reveal deep, contradictory strangeness.  E.B. Tylor’s experience was much the same: the same England that represented (for Tylor) the epitome of rationality and science could still kick up enough uncanny mystery to take him into a séance for answers. 

It is, therefore, anthropology that offers us a perspective on an uncanny world, one that acknowledges the inherent strangeness of our lives with reference to other peoples all over the world who are likewise at the mercy of uncanniness amidst their own home-making.  Similarly, the study of anthropology leads us inextricably to the uncanny; for example, following a commodity chain from its production under exploitative conditions in another country through to its incineration in a polluted neighborhood closer to home is doubly uncanny.  Just as Freud comes across a double of himself in a mirror reflection on a train and finds it instantly unlikeable, confrontations with the double of our commodity lives in their reflection through others turns even these familiar things into sinister reflections.

References:

Berman, Marshall (1982).  All That is Solid Melts Into Air.  NY: Penguin.

Clifford, James (1988).  The Predicament of Culture.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

Gunning, Tom (2003).  “The Exterior as Interieur.”  Boundary 2 30(1): 105-130.

Weber, Max (1946).  From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. 

Wingfield, Chris (n.d.). “Tylor’s Onion.” England: the Other Within [online]. Retrieved from

http://england.prm.ox.ac.uk/englishness-tylors-onion.html on 12/9/2011

Tales From the Remix Anthropologist

For anthropology, remix always sounded better than it looked in practice.  After all, even though it is hard to argue with Jenkins's writings on "Remix culture," it always seemed to mean more for music, art, literature and--primarily--for popular culture.  In anthropology, what does "remix" mean?  Does it mean self-plagiarism?  Does it mean taking images or media and re-using them in other contexts? Colonialism and cultural appropriation under another name?  As my colleague Matthew Durington and I write in our book, Networked Anthropology (70):

For anthropology, the problem of remix isn't that it's so new, but that it's so old.  What seems progressive and egalitarian when it comes to creating parodies of repressive legislation or "culture jamming" corporate hegemony looks decidedly less so when we apply the ethic to what gets defined as culturally or socially "other."  

Given the past of Western anthropology, it is not especially surprising that remix hasn't taken off in anthropological circles--it looks too much like what we've been doing since the 18th century.  The "freedom" to take content out of one context and place it into another looks more like oppression when it's practiced on ethnographic data gathered about people who are routinely denied the means for their own self-representation.

When we started our Anthropology By the Wire project--an NSF-funded effort to build a large corpus of collaborative media about neighborhoods in Baltimore--we naturally gravitated to a Creative Commons license--but we couldn't go the final step towards the "gold standard,"  one that "lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work."  Given the power inequalities and rampant racism of contemporary life in the U.S., it seemed too dangerous--and even unethical--to subject our work with communities in Baltimore to this kind of remix.

Needless to say, like us, other anthropologists have not been especially eager to enjoin remix in their own work, although they've certainly had their own work remixed by others, as when footage from Adam Fish got remixed for pro-Palestinian hip-hop.  Sometimes anthropologists have invited  remix, as Chris Kelty did after the open source/ creative commons Two Bits was published.  In good, open-source fashion, the book was "ported" by readers onto different platforms, but that seems to have been the limits to the monograph's "remix"--beyond that of traditional scholarly remix whereby influential texts shape the scholarship that comes after them.

Despite these somewhat tepid engagements with remix, and the ethical responsibilities we owe the communities with whom we work, we believe that remix can offer anthropologists some important possibilities, but not in the ways, perhaps, that Lessig and Jenkins originally envisioned.  Instead, we decided to remix ethnographic data about the community with members of the community.  To create, in other words, derivative works about our work with our community collaborators in order to better disseminate anthropological media to audiences on a different platform.

From 2013 until now, we've been experimenting with different app platforms, including ARIS and MIT App Inventor.   These both support geo-located apps, and we've produced some apps about Baltimore.  But the big impetus for our app remix has come in the form of a structured, plug-and-play platform for tour apps called "izi.travel".  It's readily available on Android or iOS platforms and is free (although not open source).  While it lacks the programmable interface of MIT App Inventor, it makes up for it in the capacity to upload multimedia onto the app, including text, video, photograph and audio, all accessible through a geolocated map.  With izi.travel, we move from a miscellany of media about a South Baltimore neighborhood to a remixed, multimodal experience that engages app users on multiple cognitive and sensorial levels.

There are several things to keep in mind when making your anthropological media into an app: 1) your media is going to be experienced by people walking around with a smartphone, so it needs to be short and simple: brief interviews, short clips, terse historical notes.  2) Smartphones allow you to use audio as well as visual media--take advantage of this by including some interview material with interlocutors and by turning some of your narrative into an audio tour.  3) Include notes on directions!  Even though our app comes with a Google map embedded in the smartphone interface, it's reassuring to have someone tell you to "turn right at the corner"--especially when you're encountering a neighborhood for the first time! 

In addition, there are several things are worth pointing out.  First, our app is free and the content we've loaded up is under a creative commons license.  Second, we produced the app with the same people we've worked with during Anthropology By the Wire--i.e., the derivative remix is also a collaborative work.  Third, we agree, as part of our ethical commitment to our interlocutors, to monitor how this multimedia data is utilized.  As we say in the our letter of consent (vetted by our institution's IRB):

If you do choose to allow us to place text, audio, photographs and/or film online, then we promise to monitor this content using different tools in order to find out how the material is being received, and how it's being used.  Similarly, if you discover that media we've made together is being used in a way you find inappropriate, please contact us immediately.   (from Networked Anthropology, p. 128)

The final product is the "Sharp Leadenhall Walking Tour".  What we hope we've produced is something that is anthropologically dense and critical, but that still gives people an opportunity to discover a beautiful neighborhood!