NEW BOOK. The Anthropology of Digital Practices: Dispatches from the Online Culture Wars by John Postill
Dear all I am very pleased to announce that my new book *The Anthropology of Digital Practices: Dispatches from the Online Culture Wars* (Routledge, 2024) is now out. The book connects 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 explore 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, namely Trump, Covid-19, George Floyd and Ukraine, with a Postscript on the Israel-Hamas war. The study 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. The key dramatis personae include Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, Tucker Carlson, Bret Weinstein, and Heather Heying. I hope it will be useful in both undergrad and postgrad teaching, incl. in media/digital anthropology, media and communication studies, digital politics, social movements research, and qualitative methodology. Happy to do guest talks on it. More info here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Anthropology-of-Digital-Practices-Dispatches-f... If you're on Twitter/X, please like or retweet this post: https://twitter.com/JohnPostill/status/1779804487680671788 Best wishes John Postill RMIT University, Melbourne
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John Postill