Digital Media Practices Research Articles

Digital hustling: ICT practices of hip hop artists in Grahamstown

Abstract Hip hop artists are early adopters of digital media in the township areas of Grahamstown. This article describes the emergence of particular media ecologies that depend on a do-it-yourself ethic where young people are always ‘hustling’ to get hold of data bundles, software and computer parts, and assembling them in novel ways. This mobile-first generation are increasingly adopting desktop and laptop computers to supplement their media production, and could provide insights into the evolution of low-income digital media practices and the transition from mobile-only to mobile-first (computer-second) practices, as well as how the computer’s increased affordances for production influence such digital media practices. Living in backyard shacks made from corrugated iron and mud, where there are makeshift electrical connections criss-crossing the roof and no flowing water inside, here there is indeed Internet connectivity, although exclusively through the mobile phone. These hip hop artists are supported by various digital service providers, such as WAP-site designers who hack together sites that function both to promote and distribute local media as well as pirated content, to backyard computer repairers who cannibalize parts from discarded old PCs to create workable township machines. This article will provide a digital ethnography of these young people and how they work collectively to record and mix music, design posters, album covers and avatars, and then distribute these through their phones via Bluetooth and online social media. The article will tie these digital practices to the identity formation of these young people, who resist ­succumbing to the despair of unemployment through embracing notions of themselves as artists, hustlers and ‘explorers of technology’, identities they attribute to the local culture of hip hop music production and its values of consciousness, creativity and resilience.

“Citizen Journalism” in the Syrian Uprising: Problematizing Western Narratives in a Local Context

This article analyzes the term ‘citizen journalism’ against the backdrop of the Arab uprisings in order to show how it overlooks the local context of digital media practices. The first part examines videos emanating from Syria to illustrate how they blur the lines between acts of witnessing, reporting, and lobbying, as well as between professional and amateur productions, and civic and violent intentions. The second part highlights the genealogies of citizenship and journalism in an Arab context and cautions against assumptions about their universality. The article argues that the oscillation of Western narratives between hopes about digital media's role in democratization in the Arab World and fears about their use in terrorism circumscribe the theorization of digital media practices.

Learning to look beyond the frame: reflections on the changing meaning of images in the age of digital media practices

Changing the way in which we produce, store and share images, new technologies have modified our ways of relating to and addressing the visual field. The importance of these changes resides not so much in the increased speed and size of production and distribution of images around the world, but rather on the practices that are emerging in parallel to this. Alongside with the spread of new technologies, the last decades have witnessed the growth of new image-making practices that are more attentive to context, social relations and materiality, and hence to the world surrounding the frame. The present paper aims to explore this topic by addressing two separate fields of contemporary image-making practices. It will first address the world of interactive (or multi-linear) documentaries and discuss the capacity of this new filmic genre to push viewers, against conventional stereotypes, away from the screens and into the material and social contingencies of everyday life. The second example, instead, will offer reflections on digital images’ growing embeddedness in spatial networks and relations. Because of their ever-increasing entanglements with geolocative media, images today contain new (invisible) layers of information which are interesting not only from an epistemological and ontological point of view, but also from a methodological one. Overall this article constitutes an invitation to further integrate, in our understanding of images today, the field of visual culture with that of digital culture.

Ethical Dilemmas in Qualitative Research with Youth On/Offline

Research on the digital and online environment poses several ethical questions that are new or, at least, newly pressing, especially in relation to youth. Established ethical practices require that research has integrity, quality, transparency and impartiality. They also stipulate that risks to the researcher, institution, data and participants should be anticipated and addressed. But there are difficulties in applying these to an environment in which the online and offline intersect in shifting ways. This paper discusses some real-life ‘digital dilemmas’ to identify the emerging consensus among researchers. We note the 2012 guidelines by the Association of Internet Researchers, which advocates for ethical pluralism, for minimizing harm, and for the responsibility of the researcher where codes are insufficient. As a point of contrast, we evaluate Markham’s (2012) radical argument for data fabrication as an ethical practice. In reflecting on how researchers of the digital media practices of youth resolved their dilemmas in practice, we take up Markham’s challenge of identifying evolving practice, including researchers’ workarounds, but we eschew her solution of fabrication. Instead, we support the emerging consensus that while rich data is increasingly available for collection, it should not always be fully used or even retained in order to protect human subjects in a digital world in which future possible uses of data exceed the control of the researcher who collected them.

Digital Divide: Navigating the Digital Edge

This article considers how the digital media lives of Latino and African American youth are evolving. Latino and African American youth are just as likely as their white and Asian America counterparts to go online, manage a social networking site, and use a mobile phone. The shifting digital media practices of black and Latino youth raise crucial questions and suggest that producing a more equitable digital future requires more than access to technology. Even as black and Latino participation in the digital media world continues to evolve, we know little about the content or the context of their digital lives. One of the most urgent challenges regarding technology, diversity, and equity is the need to expand digital literacy. That is, the development of young people's capacity to not only access digital media but also use digital media in ways that are connected to the everyday lives and situations of youth and their communities. Finally, the article considers the extent to which Latino and African Americ...

Digital Expertise in Online Journalism (and Anthropology)

This article explores the connection between digital media practices and digital (self-) understandings in western news journalism today. I describe how German and US online journalists translate their experiential familiarity with a plethora of digital information and communication technologies into narratives of digital expertise that contrast their "non-linear," "iterative," "interactive," and "network" modes of thinking from the journalistic expertise of traditional (broadcast) journalism. I view online news journalists' narratives of digital expertise as exemplary of the cybernetic and informatic epistemologies that developed in the wake of the industrialization of computation before the Second World War and that exerted a profound influence over the analytic methods and theories of the postwar human sciences as well. I thus compare digital thinking in news journalism and postwar anthropology in order to illuminate how technically-enabled practices of knowledge formation influence expert modes of understanding human social life.

Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method

Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method