Panel: Anthropology and Social media: hopes and panics
Chair: Lenie Brouwer (VU); Discussant Johan Roeland (VU)
Since its rise in the early nineties, the internet has been a central object to many social fears, as well as social hopes. Utopian dreams predicted the end of political, physical, ethnical and racial borders, as well as the upsurge of ‘true’ community, due to the fact that virtual connectedness would replace the differentiating connectedness that characterizes the ‘ordinary’, physical world. Others have ventilated dystopian fears for individualization, social isolation, and political and religious radicalization, which would be inherent to the medium. Such opposite visions on the Internet ask for in depth research on the use and meaning of the Internet, and the social and cultural meaning of websites, blogs, forums and social media. For this panel, three researchers from different disciplines will reflect on these debates, on the basis of their own research.
Koen Leurs (UU, Dpt of Media and Culture Studies);
Title: Space invaders? Internetworked identifications of Moroccan-Dutch youth
Intensified patterns of migration and advanced forms of digital technology are reconfiguring the interface between the local and the global. Migrant youth are a privileged site to study these interactions as they also negotiate between different generations and national belongings while creating alternative modalities for self-expression. The analysis will focus on how these negotiations among multiple axes of belonging and creative self positioning takes place online as the internet is considered to be a place of virtual connectivity beyond physical and political borders and of liberation from markers of otherness, such as race, ethnicity, gender, which are particularly relevant in defining the migrant condition. Exploring how migrant youth become “space invaders“ (Purwar, 2004) of the digital realm an assessment is made of the ways in which old gaps have been abolished and how new divides have re-established themselves in the light of new technological innovations and corporate interests. The talk will report on how young Moroccan-Dutch' use various digital media applications to setup alternative interactive spaces that cut across cultures of origin and immigration, transnational diasporas and youth cultures.
Title: Contextualizing Virtual Togetherness. Beyond Dichotomous Debates on the Social Significance of Online Interactions
Ever since its early days, the interdisciplinary field of ‘internet studies’ has been characterized by a marked interest in virtual communities. The scholarly debate is dominated by descriptive questions of whether communities can exist online and whether specific online forums qualify as communities. Building on multiple case studies on the question of how different types of virtual togetherness can be understood in relation to offline social life, this paper moves beyond these prevailing dichotomous questions and presents an empirically-informed typology of virtual togetherness. Four types of virtual togetherness are distinguished among members of three theoretically selected online forums: they have constructed a refuge, a springboard, a social movement and a neo-tribe online, each with a specific relationship with offline social life. This typology is employed to shed light on various other dichotomous debates on the social significance of online interactions. When it comes to the alleged fleetingness of online interactions, ‘cyber-balkanization’, and the online-offline distinction, scholars tend to make one-sided statements about the Internet as an undifferentiated whole. The contextualized understanding of virtual togetherness developed in this paper demonstrates that it is unfruitful to try to determine which position is valid in general. Instead, it provides a way out of the deadlocks in which these dichotomous debates inevitably end up by suggesting in which instances online interactions are likely to display certain characteristics.
Lenie Brouwer (VU, Dpt Social and Cultural Anthropology);
Title: Arab Spring in Morocco: more than a facebook generation?
The recent events in Tunisia and Egypt, also called the Arab Spring, provided youths in Morocco the political opportunity to mobilize the felt discontent in society to collective action. In authoritarian Morocco with restricted freedom of speech facebook provided them an excellent space for lively debates and expressions of opinions. Although Morocco has a long history of social protests, the recent protests have a different character. Big manifestations were spread over the whole country, organized in more than fifty cities by the so-called February 20th movement, named after their first big demonstration organised on that date. In their first call for a demonstration facebook played a significant role, as the media was not covering the calls. In order to understand the meaning of this February 20th movement and the role of social media, insights of anthropologists and social scientists on the study of social movements will be used, in particular of new social movements focusing on identity and meaning in the network society (Castells in Salman & Assies, 2007).
About the conference (in Dutch:)
Antropologie en de toekomst 18 en 19 november 2011 Wat heeft antropologie met de toekomst? Op het eerste gezicht misschien niet veel, maar schijn bedriegt want een groot deel van de antropologische onderneming is direct of indirect altijd gestuurd geweest door de toekomst.
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