Before reading this post you should consider this video clip from a talk by Michael Wesch, one of my favourite anthropologists, which also happens to be one of my favourite YouTube videos on remix culture.
The first time I saw this video I was an undergraduate student finishing my minor in Anthropology with a Monday evening class on Visual Ethnography. I remember sitting in class and coming to the end of the video and thinking “Wow. I have never thought about social media and remix culture that way before.”
That class, and this video, along with Wesch’s “Anthropological Introduction to YouTube” drastically altered my understandings and knowledge of social media (and what constitutes it) and forever coloured my perception of social media communities through the lens of digital ethnography.
What is digital ethnography?
Ethnography is a field of study within cultural anthropology, which:
is both an in-depth study of people within their own culture and based on their own words, and it is the detailed written record of that study. Often the ethnographer focuses either on the development of the culture and its operation over time or on how individual behavior and the culture relate to each other (Fleming, 2010).
Visual anthropology, on the other hand:
utilizes visual media to practice anthropology and to investigate the social realm (Vaughn & Englert, 2010).
Together, they can produce visual ethnography, which uses visual media to produce an in-depth study of people within their own culture and based on their own words.
Digital ethnography, takes visual ethnography into the digital realm to examine people in their own digital cultures. Essentially, it is, in a way, the study using digital media of digital communities of practice.
A digital community of practice (CoP):
is a term used to describe groups who share a deep interest in a project be it their collective vision or a new direction for a discipline. A CoP evolves organically due to members’ interests in a set of ideas that make up a domain and may be fostered through mutual knowledge sharing. It is through a process of sharing information and experiences that learning takes place thereby making it possible to develop personally and professionally (Lave & Wenger 1991). CoPs co-exist in digital contexts using social media such as blogs, wikis and web 2.0 tools (Digital Communities of Practice, 2016).
Digital communities of practice are everywhere on social media these days, not just on blogs and wikis. There are individual sites for communities, like Ravelry for knitters and An Archive of Our Own for fan fiction writers. There are also communities embedded within other social media sites, like the Storytime Underground Facebook group for children’s librarians. While the definition above describes CoPs as being primarily engaged with learning, I would argue that almost all forms of social media involve common ideas and mutual knowledge sharing that leads to learning, whether they are pedagogically focused or not. One could in fact argue that social media is, in effect, a vast collection of digital communities of practice.
Why is this relevant to libraries?
Even given the illegality of some aspects of remix culture, we are living in a time of deep creativity and collaboration within and between these digital communities of practice. Libraries and librarians often seem to be asking how to remain relevant and in-touch within their patron populations, discussing what platforms will be most useful for their user groups, and how best to reach them online.
Consider how differently this conversation might run if they considered instead what digital communities of practice their users are already a part of through digital ethnography. From this perspective, librarians would learn more by examining how their user’s digital communities have developed, how they have operated over time, and how individual behavior and the culture of these communities relate to each other. With an understanding of these communities it might become easier to become a member of them, or to establish a new digital community of practice around the library, and through that, to engage in more creative and collaborative media production.
In The Ethnographer’s Eye, Grimshaw states:
Ironically, it is the very marginality of visual anthropology with respect to the mainstream textbased tradition which opens up an important space for experimentation (2001, p. 3).
Perhaps by becoming more involved with digital communities of practice, libraries could also open up the marginalized space of library social media to become an important space for experimentation.
Digital Communities of Practice (CoPs). (23 Feb 2016). Retrieved Marc 1, 2016 from the HLWIKI International: http://hlwiki.slais.ubc.ca/index.php/Digital_Communities_of_Practice_(CoPs)
Flemming, I. (2010). Ethnography and ethnology. In H. J. Birx 21st century anthropology: A reference handbook(pp. 153-161). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd. doi: 10.4135/9781412979283.n15
Grimshaw, A. (2001). Ethnographer’s Eye. Port Chester, GB: Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from http://www.ebrary.com
Vaughn, L. & Englert, K. (2010). Visual anthropology. In H. J. Birx 21st century anthropology: A reference handbook (pp. 906-914). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd. doi: 10.4135/9781412979283.n91
Want more Michael Wesch?
Check out his channel on YouTube!