New Media, New Publics?

Abstract

In this special issue, we examine how publics are brought into being through historically specific media practices. We treat the question of new media as an invitation to explore changing conditions of communication across a number of ethnographic locations. We argue that these changing conditions have challenged our capacity to understand the nature of publics. It is important to emphasize that none of the contributors perceive new media as a coherent object of attention that can easily be isolated as an entity; nor do they locate its novelty in its digital format. Instead, they examine modes of mediation that entail the technological but are not reducible to it. This approach allows anthropologists to keep the referent of new media open and remain attentive to emerging forms of public life that are working outside of or adjacent to the logics of both the digital and the technological. Our hope is that this collection of essays contributes to an anthropological understanding of media that illuminates important aspects of the political economic present, attends to the erosion and reanimation of anonymity in public life, and captures dynamics of staging, projection, and response within and across ethnographic sites. 2In the opening scenes of Fahrenheit 451, firefighters raid a private home in search of books to burn. They are trainees whose search concentrates on the hiding places favored by those who illegally keep books in the interior of electric devices like lamps or heaters.In a scene of the film, a firefighter takes off the screen of a TV set and finds in its hollow space a stack of books. Instead of drawing our attention to the technological apparatus of the television we are directed to another medium: the book. What we are told in the film, however, is that the prime reason why books must be burnt has to do with the effects they produce upon the reading public. "Books disturb people. They make them anti-social," says Montag, the film's main character. The view of the authorities, we learn, is that books unnecessarily deepen and complexify the emotional and intellectual life of their readers, creating an obstacle to the light cheeriness and shallow conversation that make social happiness possible. Moreover, as fire chief Captain Beatty asserts, books are unfit to accommodate the rhythms brought by new media. The new technology in question is interactive television, a device that extends across much of the interior wall space within the home. Instead of the encumbering depths of human experience encountered in the book, television captivates its audience 3 with banal, mind numbing programs engineered to engender and protect the shallow psychology upon which both happiness and social harmony depend.Surveillance is omnipresent in Truffaut's imagined future. Throughout the entire film, a dim spot light illuminates the center of the screen, framing the action's capture by media, and signaling the presence of an invisible gaze originating at the same location occupied by the film's spectator. Within thi...

Reflections on COVID-19

“…However, my research demonstrates that multisite church pastors work to couple this diasporic church form with other Christian practices that, in fact, enable congregants to assume roles that might not be available to them in large, single-location churches. In a similar vein, as we begin an academic year of Zoom meetings and social distancing, we might reflect on the research that speaks to the co-construction of media and publics (Hirschkind et al 2017;Warner 2002). In Zoom after Zoom, what practices will be infrastructural to sustain modes of attention and inattention appropriate to our academic traditions (see Hirschkind 2006)?…”

Disturbance, Translation, Enculturation: Necessary Research in New Media, Technology, and the Senses

“…While anthropological studies of “new” media have been steadily increasing as of late (Askew and Wilk ; Ginsburg, Abu‐Lughod, and Larkin ; Hirschkind, de Abreu, and Caduff ; Horst and Miller ; Underberg and Zorn ), with the exception of Ginsburg, Abu‐Lughod, and Larkin () and Biddle (), few of these studies have focused on the cultural and artistic activism of Indigenous peoples in relationship to new media. Furthermore, the main focus of the large majority of this work on “new media” has been concentrated on the sociopolitical repercussions (and not necessarily aesthetic) of digital technologies in general, specifically challenging the myths of techno‐utopian progress and “newness” in the new media.…”

“…Furthermore, the main focus of the large majority of this work on “new media” has been concentrated on the sociopolitical repercussions (and not necessarily aesthetic) of digital technologies in general, specifically challenging the myths of techno‐utopian progress and “newness” in the new media. Such studies range from how media systems produce new forms of publics (Hirschkind, de Abreu, and Caduff ) and issues of participation (Kelty ) to ethnographic accounts of hacking cultures (Coleman ) or the new mediated image cultures of religions, such as contemporary Hinduism (Jain ).…”

Desconfianza, regímenes de verdad, conspiraciones y montajes en el contexto de la covid-19 en México

“…Las imágenes, los videos y los medios sociales de comunicación en esta pandemia han estructurado su orientación temporal hacia el futuro (Hirschkind, De Abreu y Caduff, 2017). Esta orientación tiene que ver con el hecho de que el SARS-CoV-2 es un virus 4 nuevo del cual se desconoce una vacuna, pero también por las emociones y sensibilidades que emergen a partir del uso de tecnologías visuales, como son la inquietud, la especulación y la desconfianza.…”