A fundamental premise of rethinking anthropology is indexicality. That is, the virtual world is no longer a complete fiction, it has its authenticity. Moreover, the real and virtual worlds are no longer completely separate, but intertwined. Thirdly, due to the different environment, compared with the real life, the social reality existing in the virtual society will change greatly. These are the reasons why we need to rethink anthropology at the digital era. However, in my opinion, digital anthropology has its limitations. First of all, there are contradictions in the authenticity of research materials. On the one hand, compared with the real world, people’s private relationships will not be adulterated in the virtual world and the anonymity makes people have less concern, therefore in the virtual community people seem more inclined to express their true feelings, so that researchers can deep into people’s hearts to get more realistic results. On the other hand, however, there are several factors undermining this authenticity. First of all, platforms in social networks provide opportunities for people to create themselves, so their behaviors may be performative to some extend. Secondly, compared with real life, virtual environment is more likely to become a tool of power. The virtual environment we see has been interfered by power through symbols or public opinion control. In addition, people’s activities in the network presents a symbolic feature. Different from the flexible and diverse expressions in real life, people only use words, pictures and videos as language in the Internet. Different from the more relaxed way of communication in life, the expression in the network is an active way of exposure, which makes people more cautious and careful. They tend to prefer a symbolic expression that is accepted by the public and thus can stay in a safe zone. Moreover, the birth of a symbol of means a elimination of thousands of possible results. It is difficult for people to spontaneously explore what they accept among the myriad possibilities. So when a symbol is born, people rush to it, thinking they have known what is good and what is bad. In this way, digital anthropology tends to present a stereotyped result when studying people’s activities. Man is no longer man, but different categories.

Anthropology is consist of four main fields: archaeology, anthropology, linguistics and human evolution. Basically, it is a subject that studies about all activities about humans such as culture, rituals and myths. With the development of digital products and internet, the social form has changed with the behaviors and habits of human. The world goes digital, so anthropology goes digital as well. What digital anthropologists have to do is not just about how people use digital products. It is also important to explore how these digital tools such as mobile phones, computers manipulate and effect the users, and how this leads to qualitative changes at the entire social level. In my opinion, digital anthropology is inextricably linked to discourse analysis, visual analysis, and platform study. They interact with each other.

Boellstorff (2012) pointed out the problem of virtual and actual in digital anthropology, he believes that ‘the notion of the digital has been met by a profound theoretical silence’, which means that if digital just turns out to be a synonym for internet-mediated, ‘then all anthropology is now digital anthropology in some way, shape or form’. It is important to think about how we engage in the research itself. On this issue, there is a debate in the academic world, that is, whether anthropologists need to combine online and offline research when doing research, or whether digital anthropology can be done online only.  

From my perspective, I agree with Boellstorff, that it is possible to conduct research exclusively online, because actual world might not be real such as games and fantasy, at the same time virtual world may not be unreal, these two are not totally fusing. ‘The virtual and the physical are not separate, but also not indistinguishably converged’ (Boellstorff, 2012).To some extent, the offline dataset would be projected online. If digital anthropology needs to be done online and offline, I guess that result would be just as what Boellstorff said, ‘digital’ will eventually become a synonym.

References

Boellstorff, T. (2012). Rethinking Digital Anthropology. Digital Anthropology, ed by. Heather A. Horst and Daniel Miller. 1st ed. 39-60. Bloomsbury Academic.

Boellstorff, T. (2016). For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real. Current Anthropology, 57(4), pp.387-407.

Macionis, J. and Gerber, L. (2011). Sociology. 7th ed.

As Boellstorff (2012) pointed out, digital ethnography is a written version of a set of methods. Thus, it is closely and highly connected to the methods we have learned before. When the word and images turn into the digital version, people represent them on the digital platform. Discourse analysis, visual analysis and platform analysis are all on the basis of digital virtualization. No matter what kind of research, its foundation is almost about human beings, always on the basis of people. Thus, as far as I am concerned, ethnography and anthropologyare the basis for researchers to conduct research or use other research methods properly.

However, when it comes to digital ethnography, there is an obvious gap between the actual and the virtual. The internet myths show many changes with offline and reality, which would also change the context that people live in. And most people’s activities nowadays cannot be separated from digital. Besides, the separation and the boundary is kindly problematic, which from my perspective, we need to rethink digital anthropology. As Boellstorff (2012) pointed out, researchers need to correctly understand the perception of the physical and the virtual at very beginning. At the same time, Boellstorff (2012) challenged the concept that the boundary between the virtual and the real is blurring which is currently supported by academia, through his own experience of playing an online game called Second Life. And then Boellstorff (2012) argued that the virtual and the actual are neither blurring, nor pulling apart from each other.

In addition, nowadays, researchers no longer need to do research physically, they can do it through electronic devices. In spite of this, Boellstorff (2012) pointed out that participant observation is still the core and could be the basic method for digital anthropology, for interviews sometime could be very separate and isolated.

In conclusion, I think such a method should do research and collect data both through the reality and the digital platform.

Reference:

Boellstorff, T. 2012. Rethinking Digital Anthropology. Digital Anthropology, ed by. Heather A. Horst and Daniel Miller. 1st ed. 39-60. Bloomsbury Academic.

From my perspective, platform plays a significant role in both users’ lives and for electronic devices, for it provides an interactive channel for users and devices. People use platform and social media as a tool, and electronic devices provide technical support to platform users.

As McLuhan (2008) pointed out, “medium is the message”, what he stated here is that the existence of media itself changes the way humans perceive, feel. In addition, the development of media also affect the world. The information conveyed by the media is relatively minor compared with the influence of the media itself on the development of human society. Thus, for me, platform analysis is of great importance because information transmitted through different platforms will have different characteristics, at the same time, the impact on people would be different as well. The analysis platform is able to help researchers to analyse more detailed in media research.

For example, the online food delivery platform “ELEME” we have done for case study is open for sellers, consumers, advertisers and sponsors. The role of this platform is as a supporter, to provide both business opportunities for sellers, advertisers and sponsors; at the same time, provides convenient and fast food delivery for consumers. Thus, it matches Suchman’s (2012) concept of configuration, which refers to imaginary and materiality joining together with the help of technology’s folding. Because “ELEME” is a platform with multi-function, which provides different support and help for different agencies.

However, once mentioned platform, there are still some disadvantages. For example, some ideas and creative things are easy to be used for other commercial use without permission, which means that creative things or some ideas are difficult to be protected.

In conclusion, platform plays an irreplaceable role in such a digital era, people should have more impeccable policy to make “platform” a better “tool”.

Reference:

Fuller, M. (2008). Software studies. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Sometimes people consider showing pictures a more convincing way when they want to persuade others; however, people can explain a photo from various perspectives. That is why I usually think it is quite controversial and confusing if we only use visual analysis as our methodology. Since photographers would choose a certain angle when they shoot a photo to better illustrate the meaning behind it, which is called connotation sometimes. Thus, what is showed in a certain photo is not the entire and real so-called reality; that is, it is not totally objective. Photographs are always constructed by people, for photographic connotation is an institutional activity (Barthes, 1977).

When it comes to news photography, it is difficult to show a whole event, its sequence and causation via a photo. In the meantime, audiences also have their own way to understand it. That is also why some people would like to use news photo as a ‘tool’ to trick audiences for their own purposes. In addition, under the category of photography, there are a lot of differences between commercial photography, anthropogeography photography, and news photography. Every type of photography has its own function and its own way to telling stories or something else; however, they are all illustrated from the photographers’ point of view, which is difficult for audiences to fully understand. When it comes to advertisement, the creative worker or photographer would like to apply some signs which have symbolic, social or cultural meanings to the picture, so as to connect or associate the products with the sign. Merchants or creative workers always use such a way to provoke consumption, as if once a consumer buy their product, the consumer would acquire the thing (more than the product) they demonstrated in the advert. Like the examples we have discussed in the class, they would connect the wooden house with the relaxing lifestyle, which is quite different from the house in the city; use awesome views like mountain and sea, with a gourgeous couple, to illustrate that our car is highly relevant to life of high quality.

However, when it comes to the concept of ‘traumatic images’, as Barthes (1977) pointed out, trauma is totally dependent on the scene that ‘really’ happened. Through traumatic, the photographers’ manipulation is weakened, the taken photo is not from someone’s angle. I think that is why he said “the more direct the trauma, the more difficult is connotation” (Barthes, 1977) then.

In conclusion, from my perspective, image is the real thing that exists beyond people but connotation is created by human being.

Reference:

Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography.First American edition. New York: Hill; Wang.

Barthes, R. (1978). The photographic Message with Stephen Heath (pp.15-27)Image-music-text. Flamingo.

In accordance with Foucault (1972)’s definition, ‘discourse’ is not simply equivalent to language or speech acts, but how language works to organise both the field of knowledge and practice. From my point of view, ‘discourse analysis’ is a great tool to analyse and excavate the reason and motivation behind a certain behaviour, for on the contrary to natural science, we are hard to analyse and do the research of ideology or thinking on the basis of objectivity. However, we can undermine the nature of a human behaviour, from defining a problem to analysing it by using discourse analysis. In addition, being different from discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis put more emphasis on how to establish and strengthen social power relations through language itself and the way people using it. Under such a circumstance, we can say that the most obvious difference from discourse analysis is that critical discourse analysis highlights structural inequalities in the areas of power asymmetry, exploitation, and education.

do the research of ideology or thinking on the basis of objectivity. However, we can undermine the nature of a human behaviour, from defining a problem to analysing it by using discourse analysis. In addition, being different from discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis put more emphasis on how to establish and strengthen social power relations through language itself and the way people using it. Under such a circumstance, we can say that the most obvious difference from discourse analysis is that critical discourse analysis highlights structural inequalities in the areas of power asymmetry, exploitation, and education.

In the cases we have read this week, we can see that discourse analysis has a wide range of applications, and many scholars use it to analyse many different news content and politicians’ speeches. Nonetheless, from my perspective, the advantage of such a method is precisely its limitation; that is, lack of objectivity. It is not like natural science, we can use scientific tools to minimise the error value to get an almost sure answer. Because the content broadcast on many news channel has a specific selected angle, and this angle needs to conform to the news channel’s own position. In the meantime, in most situations, what people are saying is not their own detailed thoughts, and behind the media reports, some people did not speak. I think that avoiding such an ‘error’ is a big problem in discourse analysis.

Reference:

“Discourse Analysis.” In Researching Society and Culture, ed by. Clive Seale, 405–423. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

In recent years, the term ‘platform’ has been frequently used for describing online services of content intermediaries, ‘both in their self-characterizations and in the broader public discourse of users, the press and commenters’ (Gillespie, 2010). Gillespie (2010) also mentioned that this term has its semantic richness and it might sometimes be ignored by the casual listeners and the speakers, which is able to give it discursive resonance. In media and cultural studies, what we usually do is pay more attention to the content itself and analyze it, so it is likely for us to ignore the role that platform plays, for example, the association between users and providers, how platform shape the discourse, policies and liability. Platform analysis cannot be counted as a methodology, but it contains some other methodologies when doing platform study, such as discourse analysis and visual analysis. Besides, what platform analysis focus on is more than texts and images. It is not only about the content, but also, more importantly, how the machine works. 

Even if platform analysis is not a methodology for media research, it is still necessary to do the study which comes a whole with discourse analysis, visual analysis and digital anthropology. Platform analysis is a relatively new field for media research, it comes with the development of the internet and online platforms. McLuhan (1966) stated that ‘medium is the message’, what he means is that compared to the content that the medium has conveyed, it is the medium which matters more. The medium itself is the most valuable message. If the content brings about a short-term attitude change, the form (medium or platform) is more of a long-term macro change. Therefore, the media itself is the subject that profoundly leads to the social changes. The development of the medium has a significant impact on how people perceive, feel and influence the world. As a result, platform analysis is necessary for media and cultural studies because what it explores is a long-term impact and it allows the research to be more in-depth and sustainable. 

Reference

Fuller, M. (2008). Software studies. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 

Gillespie, T. (2010). The politics of ‘platforms’. New Media & Society, 12(3), pp.347-364.

McLuhan, M. (1966). Understanding media: the extensions of man. New York: Signet Books. 

Visual analysis on photographs is a process of reading and decoding images. Basically, there are two stages of visual analysis: analyzing denotation and connotation, or, as mentioned above, reading and decoding. The first step is to look at denotation, which is to read the image and try to find out and list the visual elements of it. In this stage, we only focus on what it actually shows in the picture, for example, the focus, the composition, the colors, the light and shade, and the posture of the figures, etc. After listing those elements that we can see in the image, what follows is the connotation, which means to decode. To be more specifically, this step is trying to connect the elements that were found and put them in a broader social and cultural context, and then analyze the cultural meanings and associations of the images. 

In Roland Barthes’s book Camera Lucida, there are two concepts that are related to the interpretation of photographs: stadium and punctum. Barthes (1991) pointed out that there is no specific connection between stadium and punctum, they could just coexist. In my opinion, stadium and punctum could be two different ways of interpretation, and they would lead to different feelings. Stadium is more like a general interpretation that contains both denotation and connotation, and it tells the cultural meaning of the image by semiotic analysis. It is more conventional and rational; it makes the viewers be interested in the image. On the other hand, compared to stadium, punctum is more sensual. Barthes (1991) said that punctum is like a talent, which enables to offer him a new perspective on reading the photographs. Punctum is highly subjective, it is usually based on personal experience and cultural background; it could be like a needle that suddenly pierce the viewers’ heart, no matter it is joy or anger, punctum makes you be obsessed with the photo or just hate it. Sometimes when there is punctum, the stadium is likely to be ignored. 

Finally, for visual analysis, I think there is no “over interpretation”, because the process of analyzing is very subjective due to different experience and culture. So, there would not be only one answer. Different people might have different interpretations to one photograph. Moreover, this could also be explained by the concept of punctum, as Barthes (1991) mentioned, whether the punctum is triggered or not, “it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.” Punctum occurs because of the viewer’s interpretation. It is important to focus on the image itself and consider the intention of the photographer, but it cannot be wrong if analyzing in perspective of punctum which is subjective. 

Reference

Barthes, R. (1991). Camera Lucida. New York. The Noonday Press.

Online platforms are relevant to people’s lives. The analysis of them can reveal how they have changed people’s lives. According to McLuhan, media is message. Different network platforms present different characteristics and carry different information. The analysis of The network platforms should be carried out according to The functions of The platform Platform. For example, our group chose the case study of “Eleme”, which is a food delivery website. At first, we analyzed its appearance, including its color, buttons, And so forth. We found that its interface is very simple, and the buttons are clear. This is because as a food delivery site, It needs to provide people with efficient and fast service. A complex interface will affect people’s use of the platform. Then we analyzed its infrastructure — the components that underlie the operation They are stores, users, delivery team and investors. We can see from this that the operation of the platform mainly depends on the exchange of services and interests. For example, Customers pay for the food and delivery service and the store employs a distribution team. Similar to to platforms, and their operation modes are all relatively pure. When we analyze them. We pay more attention to the exchange of interests between different parts. There is another class of platforms that we need to see more of as we analyze them, like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. They are different from the mentioned platforms. People tend to expose themselves more on these platforms. Which makes these platforms related to culture. These platforms often shape and influence people’s cognition, So they are directly related to the trend of a society to some extent. And these platforms still have their own characteristics And impact on people. Twitter, for example, Related to politics. Hashtag is often used as a political movement on the Internet, such as the “me too” movement. People form a force in a short time to fight against some social phenomena, This forming a pressure of public opinion to force the government to make corresponding changes. These cultural factors should be taken into account when researchers are doing research.

Language is full of many uncertainties that researchers should pay attention to in the process of research. First of all, language is a symbolized expression, which functions through the connection between the signifier and the signified. However, such a connection is not stable, but constantly in a process of what Derida called “difference”. This makes the process of interpretation uncertain . There will inevitably be some emotional expressions in the research materials, which are more fluid and uncertain. The process of interpretation is to match emotional expression to a rational signified, which is a risk in itself. Therefore, the process of interpretation becomes an extremely personal process, and its validness is difficult to guarantee. Secondly, the text is a process of manifestation, which depicts and describes things. But at the same time, it also means that there are also many things hidden behind the manifesting things. We cannot say that only what is revealed is valuable. It is only because they are given the opportunity to manifest themselves, or because they meet the purpose of the operation of power or because they are acquiesced to it. Therefore, as text researchers, people also need to pay attention to the things that are hidden and the reasons why they are hidden. The complexity of language is also reflected in its culture. To some extent, language is not only used as a tool for communication, but also has great cultural significance. From a language, we can see different narrative rules, customs, character traits and so on. Sometimes when a text is translated into another language, the flavor it conveys is greatly reduced. Some specific texts, such as literary texts, also have their own unique artistic conception, which is inseparable from the wording, rhythm and arrangement of language. Therefore, when it is translated into another language, although the general meaning can be retained, something will also be lost. Therefore, cultural factors behind the language should be taken into account when doing research.