[Air-L] John Postill on the Anthropology of Digital Practices

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
This week on the CaMP anthropology blog, John Postill discusses his book,*
The Anthropology of Digital Practices: Dispatches from the Online Culture
Wars*, with Katrien Pype.

campanthropology.org

All the best,
Ilana

Press blurb: *The Anthropology of Digital Practices* connects for the first
time three distinct research areas – digital ethnography, causal
ethnography, and media practice theory – to explore how we might track the
effects of new media practices in a digital world. It invites media and
communication students and scholars to overcome the field’s old aversion to
‘media effects’ and explores the messy, complex, open-ended effects of new
media practices in a digital age.

Based on long-term ethnographic research and drawing from recent advances
in the study of causality and ethnography, this book tells the ‘formation
story’ of the anti-woke movement through a series of critical media events.
It argues that digital media practices (e.g. podcasting, YouTubing,
tweeting, commenting, broadcasting) will have ‘formative’ effects on an
emerging social world at different points in time. One important task of
the digital ethnographer is precisely to distinguish between the formative
and non-formative effects of specific media practices.

This book makes three contributions to our understanding of media practices
in the digital era, namely a theoretical, methodological, and empirical
contribution. Theoretically, it furthers the ‘practice turn’ in media and
communication studies by engaging with the latest thinking on causality and
ethnography. Methodologically, it serves as a compelling, up-to-date guide
to doing digital ethnography, with special reference to the study of
digitally mediated practices. Empirically, it is the first book-length
study of the anti-woke movement, a major actor in the ‘culture wars’
currently being fought across the Western world.

With its accessible language and rich case studies, *The Anthropology of
Digital Practices* will make an ideal supplementary textbook for a range of
undergraduate and graduate courses in research methods, digital
ethnography/anthropology, and digital activism.