Anthropology would align with other social sciences in having a long tradition of studying both human sociality and communication, the obvious foundations for the study of social media. With respect to soci-ality, perhaps the best known contributions associated with anthro-pology are on the one hand the study of kinship58 and on the other the role of gifts, debt, exchange and reciprocity as often what constitutes a social relationship.59 However, we see as the foundation for anthro-pology a word that we do not usually use every day – the normative.60 What does ‘the normative’ mean? We believe that people grow up from infancy to be socialised into what for their given group or society will be regarded as appropriate or inappropriate behaviour. When a child does something a parent may say ‘that is not how you are supposed to behave’ or ‘what do you think people will say if you do that in public?’
With praise and punishment we ‘teach’ proper behaviour. Much more is absorbed simply through observing what those around us do and refrain from doing. The reason people grow up to be ‘typical’ Kenyan farmers or Siberian nomads is not genetic. A child adopted at birth will become ‘typ-ical’ of the society he or she is socialised into, not the one into which the child was born. These norms of appropriate and inappropriate behav-iour are not fixed rules; they can be imaginatively interpreted or indeed flouted. In our ethnographies we try to present characteristic ways in which people in Trinidad, for example, use social media, but also give a sense of the wider range and exceptions surrounding this, since no one is merely ‘typically Trinidadian’. In this manner anthropology studies norms not as rules, but as the analysis of what people actually do and why, including the variations from these norms. In anthropology this is generally called the study of ‘practice’.61
If the spine of anthropology is the study of normativity mainly within social relationships the discipline also has many limbs, one of which is a flourishing anthropology of media. In 2002, prior to the spread of social media, two collections helped to consolidate what had developed as a sustained tradition of media studies;62 there are now var-ious groups and associations dedicated to anthropological research on media.63 More recently two attempts have also been made to summarise the contribution of anthropologists to the study of digital media, and more specifically of social media.64 One of the foundations for our study was the establishment at University College London of the first MSc in Digital Anthropology, which several of the authors of this book previ-ously took as students.
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Other than media studies and sociality per se, perhaps the main drive towards a specifically anthropological study of new media has come from the latter’s importance for migrants and diasporas, often the results of political disruption or the requirements of our modern political economy. Examples include an edited collection concerned with indig-enous populations and their diasporas,65 and Bernal’s66 research on the Eritrean diaspora. Other disciplines have similar concerns, for example Greschke’s study of South American migrants in Spain.67 More recently we find anthropological studies that look specifically at the impact of social media itself on these diasporic groups, whether Brazilian, Filipino or Uyghur.68 One small caveat to the growth of such a focus within the study of social media is that it can lead people to simplify the prior expe-rience of offline communities in contrast to those online.69 In reality we have always been subject to various forms of rupture.
More generally for anthropology, as with every other discip-line, when social media became ubiquitous research fragmented into diverse and more specific topics. These range from Coleman’s70 work on Anonymous and Hacker groups to Uilemon’s work on arts students and visual identity in Tanzania.71 Relatively few anthropologists have tackled the issue of cultural diversity in itself.72 There is an obvious overlap with studies of life online, such as that by Boellstorff and others,73 and further overlap with studies of development and especially movements such as ICT4D,74 which also focuses upon the impact of media.75 Many of these approaches unite around a concern with global inequality, which we share with approaches from sociology and elsewhere.76 Particularly helpful has been the work of Graham within the neighbour discipline of human geog-raphy, serving graphically to illustrate the inequalities of internet, com-munication and information geographies.77 Other contributions focus upon issues of politics78 or work.79 Most characteristic of anthropology, however, would be the rise of studies with a regional focus.80
Curiously, though, it has been hard to justify one of anthropolo-gy’s strongest claims, which is to comparative studies. Despite discus-sion and advocacy for comparison,81 and the tradition of small regional comparisons on topics such as African divination systems or honour and shame in Mediterranean societies, this is largely an unfulfilled promise.
Anthropologists have been better at cultural relativism82 and the claim that each place is unique, while ceding generalisations to theory or other social sciences. This proved to be the main challenge for the research outlined here. Could we somehow manage the kind of genuinely com-parative study that the discipline sometimes claims is the very definition of anthropology?
The problem is that a comparative study of many sites should not be at the expense of the depth of commitment to each individual site represented by ethnography. Indeed to characterise properly the research discussed in this volume, the emphasis would be as much on ethnography as anthropology. Chapter 3 provides an outline of our ethnographic approach and our methodology more generally. Yet anthropologists are not the only people to use ethnography. Many of the studies that are discussed in this chapter come from a broader qualitative approach. Those that we most respect, such as Nancy Baym, danah boyd or Sonia Livingstone, may also employ a mix of methods that are ethnographic, interview- based and also quantita-tive. The main difference is that our approach, coming specifically from the discipline of anthropology, has a focus upon the compara-tive study of cultural diversity, which may be present in these other studies but usually features as a smaller component. This book also contains a chapter (Chapter 4) about our quantitative results. It will indicate not only why the project embraced quantitative methods, but also why the results have been treated with far more scepticism than has evidence that is primarily qualitative.
The aim of this chapter is not to argue that any one approach can possibly suffice for a comprehensive understanding of the use and con-sequence of social media. All approaches have their advantages and commensurate disadvantages. Anthropology provides depth and com-parison, but presents considerable problems with respect to general-isation and tends to be relatively ahistorical. If we have emphasised that approach, it is because this is a book that presents the results of an anthropological enquiry. Yet clearly the more that our findings can be situated alongside historical, linguistic, communication and other stud-ies, the broader the understanding that may be achieved.
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