Digital Anthropology and The Absence of "Place"

This past week, I had the pleasure of hearing Wade Wallerstein, Bay-Area-based Digital Anthropologist and Founder/Director of Silicon Valet, speak at one of my classes. To be honest, I had no concept of what digital anthropology was, and a quick hour-long deep dive into some extremely dense theory and a rapid-fire overview of important observations eventually coalesced into a few important takeaways:

• Digital interactions are Real. It is reality, experienced through a digital lens.

• The collective meaning-making we do in the real world, turning “spaces” into “places”, exists just as strongly, yet entirely uniquely, in the digital domain.

Maybe the thing that hasn’t quite sat right with me about all these Zoom calls over the last year is nestled alongside this claim: The potential for “reality” in digital interactions, when homogenized and sterilzed, only then becomes a poor attempt at human communication.

Touching back on Digital Anthropology, for a moment, I want to tease at some of the ways in which I’ve started to reconsider how I/we all engage online. There are a whole bunch of terms and concepts that have been coined over the last 30 years, and it’s a bit of a highlight reel of things to consider: How does the literal physical interface of the computer affect our interaction? How do we engage with our bodies’ “algorithms” (say, touching your hair when you get nervous) in a mediated space? Can a digital experience, by virtue of being played through some unique combination of hardware, software, and environment, ever be truly the same? Has the seamlessness fluidity of modern social media platforms totally squashed away any sense of “community”?

As a slight counter to the fatalist “all community is dead”, it does show up in various ways: Reddit, fandoms, discord, twitch communities - all somewhat-personalized ways for folks to gather and experience. If that sounds interesting, here’s a bit of a deep dive into one particular corner: Musicologist George Reid speaking brilliantly on some of the ways in which “fandom”, nostalgia, and music overlap in the identity-and-community-making of the chiptune music scene in this interview

While these are all good questions - what’s the tie-in? At least for me, this seems to fit naturally into the work I’m doing for my thesis at NYU. Digital communication is currently stunted, impersonal, and simply difficult to navigate. I’ve sat for dozens of zoom meetings, and yet Zoom doesn’t feel like a “Place”. It’s the same window into the same emotionless, awkward-conversation-prone consumption of sound, only for people I’d otherwise be forging lifelong bonds with (and myself) to hit the “Log Out” button exactly at the top of the hour. So what’s the remedy?

This room easily defined my first few years of undergrad. Image from.. 2014?

I don’t have a perfect answer, but maybe a potential attempt. I recently met (via Zoom) with some fellow alumni from my music fraternity back at Michigan, Phi Mu Alpha. We used to run a student cafe during my first few years, but it got axed during a building renovation before we graduated. As we were chatting, it hit me: That is place. It’s almost perfect: the literal space doesn’t even exist anymore, yet, as we all sat there reminiscing on zoom, memories of “The Lounge” brought us right back into a sense of togetherness that felt like it had been gone for nearly 6 years. I realized “what if the missing ingredient is Place”?

So, using my newfound skills in Blender, I set to work. There’s still much to be done, but maybe a virtual hang in a spot so filled with memory will be the extra “oomph” we’ve been missing lately. In a world of sterilized, one-size-fits-all communications and social media platforms, what we’re missing is what the early internet had in spades: AIM away messages. Myspace pages. Some little corner of the internet where people got to be themselves, and in doing so, carved out a genuine place in that vast ocean of bits.

It’s certainly a start.

Also texturing is a thing! Wow it’s hard.