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Anthropology in the Digital Age

The document discusses how digital changes have impacted society and individuals. For most people, technological advances happen without their conscious awareness and they feel increasing pressure to adopt new technologies to participate in social life. At the same time, the technologies driving these changes have become more complex and hidden. This makes it difficult to have shared conversations about how digital technologies are reshaping personal lives and social power dynamics. The author describes themselves as an "anthropologist of the information society" who aims to understand how ordinary people experience and live with information technologies on a daily basis.

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81 views1 page

Anthropology in the Digital Age

The document discusses how digital changes have impacted society and individuals. For most people, technological advances happen without their conscious awareness and they feel increasing pressure to adopt new technologies to participate in social life. At the same time, the technologies driving these changes have become more complex and hidden. This makes it difficult to have shared conversations about how digital technologies are reshaping personal lives and social power dynamics. The author describes themselves as an "anthropologist of the information society" who aims to understand how ordinary people experience and live with information technologies on a daily basis.

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The birth of the personal computer in the 1970s, the graphical user interface in the 1980s, the

World Wide Web in the 1990s and today the 'Internet of Things' have launched our global
society into the so-called 'information age'. For a small group of people it is their daily job to
think consciously about what this actually means: scholars, hackers, artists, active bloggers and
some politicians have looked, for instance, at how democracy, capitalism, solidarity, intimacy or
the sense of physical presence work in a digital environment.
Yet for the vast majority of people, digital changes happen outside of their conscious perception.
They are merely confronted with constantly changing demands and requirements for their social
life: They need 'DigiD’s' for their communication with government institutions; they feel the
need to own a smartphone and maintain a Facebook page to keep in touch with their family or
they feel the constant pressure to update their computer software and hardware in order to “keep
up”.
At the same time, the technologies and processes that are behind these changes have become
ever smaller, more complex, and more hidden in our daily physical environment. It is difficult, in
short, to find a shared language, shared concepts and shared ways of conversation that involve
large and diverse groups of people in the question how our personal lives and social power
relations are actually changing in relation to digital technologies.

Anthropology of the Information Society

I am one of those people who try to reflect on what it means to live in an information society. I
call myself an “anthropologist of the information society”. Anthropologists are generally
interested in how social and cultural phenomena that we often describe in abstract terms
(politics, religion, bureaucracy, capitalism or globalization) are experienced and “lived” in the
everyday settings of ordinary people. As an “anthropologist of the information society” I focus
on the question how people all over the world increasingly live their lives with, inside and
through information technologies.

Most of the time I find myself wrestling with one of the core tensions in the current western
information society: on the one hand, people increasingly make their sense of self-determination

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