Debate regarding how to conduct digital anthropology is currently contested, with two primary methodologies emerging: researchers who conduct projects wholly in cyberspace, and those who look at the use of digital technologies by their informants, contextualised in the offline world. This paper suggests a third way, arguing that immersive cohabitation is possible where online and offline fieldsites are viewed as part of a larger blended field. This paper builds on two years' ethnographic fieldwork with Instagram to call for immersive cohabitation as a new method to be considered by digital anthropologists and ethnographers. Further to this blended approach, this paper argues for a move beyond participant observation to working as observing participants in the virtual. This dual approach restructures current anthropological methods for digital working to enhance the quality and depth of data collection whilst ensuring the continued currency of the anthropologist in a rapidly modernising and increasingly digitised world.
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What does men’s fashion say about contemporary masculinity? How do these notions operate in an increasingly digitized world? To answer these questions, author Joshua M. Bluteau combines theoretical analysis with vibrant narrative, exploring men’s fashion in the online world of social media as well as the offline worlds of retail, production, and the catwalk. Is it time to reassess notions of masculinity? How do we construct ourselves in the online world, and what are the dangers of doing so? From the ateliers of London to the digital landscape of Instagram, Dressing Up re-examines the ways men dress, and the ways men post.
The Westminster Menswear Archive, housed at the University of Westminster held an exhibition in 2019 entitled ‘Invisible Men’. The purpose of this show was to “shine a light” on men, or more accurately menswear which had been hitherto neglected by scholarship and exhibitions featuring dress (Groves and Sprecher, 2019). This article draws on research conducted at this exhibition to ask anthropological questions as to the nature of menswear both in the gallery space and beyond. Fundamentally this will question the invisible nature of menswear and whether such invisibility really exists. In order to accomplish this, this article will suggest a new theory of the gaze that exists in the gallery or exhibition space – the gallery gaze – and use it to provoke analysis of the ethnographic material presented. This article acknowledges a distinction between intellectual, semiotic and symbolic invisibility but suggests a different approach, arguing for an (in)visibility of progressive degrees.
In an increasingly digitized modernity, traditional societal tropes are vulnerable to rapid and substantial change. Social media platforms such as Instagram allow for digital selves to be constructed in a landscape made up of networks of like-minded individual actors. This article examines how traditional Western notions of masculinity are beginning to change through this enactment of digital relations. Built on 24 months of digital ethnographic fieldwork with sartorially inclined men on Instagram, this article examines how the consumption and production of digital images can alter notions of self, and what this means for those of us who compulsively use social media. This leads to a call for a radical reassessment of masculinity by asking whether the concept of specific forms of masculinity has begun to shatter. If, as this article claims, masculinity has lost specificity in the digital age, then a new type of man has been born: the post-particular man.
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