Alice Marwick, Webthropologist

I have recently taken to calling myself a ‘webthropologist’ when asked what I do. Last night, at the Mashable party, I met Alice Marwick, who is a PhD candidate at NYU, who is living amongst the digital natives here in San Francisco as part of an anthropological study into the way that status accrues in our technorati world: a true card-carrying webthropologist.

[from Dissertation Research Explained: The Basics]

[…]

When we talk about Web 2.0 as participatory, creative, freeing, liberatory, or various other positive adjectives, we’re drawing from a discourse of computerization that assumes more computers = better. Likewise, Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, and many writers and thinkers, start from the assumption that social media is a positive thing. I’m choosing to drill down into this assumption by looking at a particular thread of it: status. Understanding social status is a way of understanding power. (A similar ethnography might have looked only at gender in social media).

I wanted to look at a community that was highly wired, one on a certain end of the bell curve that would give me lots of rich information about technology use online, but also how technology is used in social spaces. I’m not interested in “online ethnography;” I wanted to do an ethnography that existed both in face-to-face environments, and through various websites and mobile technologies, as that is how many people experience their social lives today.

On the other hand, the way hyper-wired Americans (or Koreans, or Swedes) use technology is not universal. It’s a quite specific culture with a quite specific understanding of technology. I’m hypothesizing that the assumptions made about technology use by those who create it — who are often the most connected, and often very wealthy, people– are inscribing a particular cultural understanding of technology.

[…]

I’ll be in San Francisco for nine months collecting data, talking to people, observing events, reading, and analyzing. It’s a long time to be away from home, but so far it’s going very well. Throughout this time, I’ll be checking in and sharing thoughts and anecdotes from my research; please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas, especially if you’re in the Bay Area and would like to talk.

I am immediately fascinated with Marwick and her world, although it might take a while to get used to being looked at like a lab rat. Still, we should welcome Alice to the area, and watch her research posts with interests: I’m sure she will reveal things we are blissfully unaware of, as we twitter away all day long.