Why the concept of indexicality in Boellstorff?
Blurring of virtual/physical worlds through connections, spatio-temporally and with meaning. Boellstorff wants to make a point about “indexical fields of reference” in that the virtual should be seen “as an emergent set of social realities that cannot be straightforwardly extrapolated from the physical world” (Boellstorff 2013). In other words, as Boellstorff asserts later, it is possible to become a closer friend with someone of Facebook without meeting that person in the physical world.
Boellstorff does argue, however, that there is general gap between the virtual and the physical, and that’s where participant-observation fieldwork and anthropology focuses on.
“As online socialities grow in number, size and genre, the density and rapidity of these digital transactions across the inter-indexical gap between virtual and actual increase exponentially” (Boellstorff 2013).
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New Media Technologies in the Home: Horst
The domestication of technology: “The ‘moral economy of the household’ is expressed through the process of objectification, incorporation and conversion, wherein new media technologies become a normal and accepted part of everyday life; they become domesticated” (Horst 2013)
3 issues:
- the management of space and time
- microdynamics of the household
- boundaries between private and public – work at home
the emergence of bedroom culture; from kitchen society to desktop society.
fan fiction as participatory culture – being fangrrl with a dial-up connection, and leaving your writing out of your academic career
While technology may seem like a search for the new and esoteric, much of its practice seems to look normative and routine.
(BTW, Rhett and Link are featured in YouTube’s first Super Bowl Halftime Show)
