An Ethnography of Reddit: Some thoughts

Here are some thought on a possible ethnography of Reddit. Some of these questions do not only relate to the specific case of Reddit but could also be asked more generally for other online ethnographies.

What is reddit and how does it work?

The idea of reddit is simple: Users (Redditors) can link to stuff they find on the web and share it with other redditors or simply write something and submit it . Others can give that post 'up' or 'down' votes, depending on whether they like it or not. Users can also comment the post and reply to comments already posted. This basic concept doesn't differ a lot from social networking sites like Facebook or internet forums. But there are some distinct features that make reddit stand out. First, the infrastructure allows for an open communication with all users (you don't have be 'friends' with someone and in most cases you don't have to be a formal member of the specific group to interact with them). Second, the up and down votes create lists of posts that are especially popular in the community. A very popular post raises to the top and will be highly visible for most of the users on the home page (front page). The Front Page itself is a selection of the most popular 'subreddit', which is probably the most distinct feature on reddit. A 'subreddit' is like a subtopic in a forum and there are hundreds of thousands of them. If you chose to post on reddit you would first have to decide which of these thematic sub forums to submit your post to. The subreddits are very diverse and defined by various characteristics like hobbies (r/music r/gaming') or by the type of media submitted (like videos in r/videos) or they can be designed to support and help others (r/personalfinance). 

Some thought on how to approach fieldwork on reddit.com:

Picking one subreddit and aspect of Reddit

Generally, any active subreddit could be the subject of an ethnography. However, the bigger subreddits like AskReddit where users ask very general questions about virtually anything would be more difficult to overview due to its high popularity and trying to argue for a single shared culture to exist in this space would be rather difficult. A very interesting but also highly problematic subreddit would be 'circle jerk'. In this subreddit redditors make fun of the stereotypical viewpoints and phrases of redditors and especially the fact that a lot of discussions on reddit could be described as 'preaching to the choir' and the same views are repeated over and over again by like-minded individuals. The fact that redditors in this subreddit interact exclusively in a satirical manner makes serious ethnographic work (like interviews) in this subreddit very difficult.

The research question

Although research questions are more likely to emerge after the first weeks or months of observing and participating in the community (or more precisely: for these questions to emerge the initial phase of observation is indispensable) there are nonetheless some interesting aspects one could focus on from the beginning:

Rules. For example, one could look at the underlying rules of the subreddit. What type of posts are allowed? What behavior is encouraged by the mods? In most subreddits these rules can be found in the sidebar but there are probably more rules that are not necessarily written out but become evident after spending some time on the subreddit.

Interaction. One should also focus on the different types of interaction: Replying, gifting gold, private messaging, up voting, down voting. When do users of the selected user group reach out to private messaging? What makes them up or down vote a post or give reddit gold?

Shared knowledge. An integral part of being a redditor is knowing the memes that are being used. It's important to look out for words, phrases or shared memories and the way they are being used and activated in discussions and the way they contribute to the forming of the community.

A potential problem: The Internet & Place.

The relationship between the on - and offline world.

In what way should Redditors offline lives be included in such an ethnography? Should participant observation extend to these offline worlds or stay in the limits of the online community? To what extend can we ignore offline 'worlds' and still have a representative image of these Redditors?

Some good examples: In his ethnography 'The Internet: an ethnographic approach' about Trinidadians and their use of the internet, Daniel Miller and Don Slater integrate the on-line and the off-line worlds. In fact, this entire ethnography is based on previous ethnographic work in Trinidad that focused solely on the off-line world. What's more, Miller and Slater argue against the notion of a placeless 'cyberspace' and suggest that to understand what the internet is as a whole in this specific ethnography you have to consider what 'being Trini' means  (Miller & Slater 2000: 1). On the contrary, in 'Coming of Age in Second Life' Boellstorff (2008) studies 'virtual worlds only 'in their own term'' because 'the vast majority [of participants] interact only in the virtual world'. Nevertheless, Boellstorff understands that these virtual lives have a great impact on the social life in the offline world.

More thoughts to follow.

Recapitulating

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It’s been three months since I’ve first started to write on this blog. Today, I want to summarize the most important things of the 'Anthropology: Art or Science?' debate. I want to start with briefly outlining all the texts that the blog posts are based on. Then, I will summarize my blog post and finally I will conclude the work by depicting the results that I gathered from this debate.

Process & Progress

In general, the texts and discussions on this blog so far evolved around three main concerns: First, locating the boundaries between art and anthropology, which includes all discussions on the definition and differentiation of these two fields. Second, the ways in which anthropology studies art and art studies anthropology (this part is mainly concerned with the content of such study). And third, the intersection of anthropology and art, where the boundaries between art and anthropology are more or less dissolved and the concerns are more methodological.

People and Baileys textbook introduction and Carrither’s text ‘Is anthropology art or science?’ deal with our first concern. While both try to maintain a clear distinction between art and science, People and Baileys text does this in a very classical scheme of science and art opposition, while Carrithers rejects the criterion of ‘absolute certainty’. People and Bailey’s text also deals with the second concern: The study of art in anthropology and vice versa. Once again, People and Baileys text represent the classical Art-Anthropology with the assumption that artists communicate encoded ‘meanings and messages in symbolic forms’. Victoria Walter’s text deals with the opposite. Here she depicts artists employing ethnographic methods which enable them to study how ethnographers work. All these texts indirectly imply the question ‘What is art and what is anthropology’ but the question is either never explicitly asked or inherently answered. Therefore, they bring little insight to the ultimate question of where to draw the line between anthropology and art.

Moving to the third concern (the intersection between art and anthropology) we expand into the heart of the debate. Schneider’s ‘Three modes of experimentation with art and ethnography’ suggests using visual experimentation in ethnography as a way of improving general research in anthropology. The three examples that Schneider discusses have obvious traits of an artwork, two are even works by artists. So, to put it in simple terms, Schneider suggests using artistic practices to change the way anthropologists do research. The boundaries between art and anthropology are clearly dissolved with one reaching to the other and the other way round.

Ingold’s and Latour’s texts don’t really deal with the question in the way Schneider does but rather uncover the general flaws of the patterns we think and classify in. In a way, one could say that their concern is the intersection between everything in life.

My focus of attention

The sources of impulse for writing the blog posts came from a variety of input. That input material was not only diverse in form (texts, films and digital projects) but also quite versatile regarding its content. So naturally, during the process of coming up with something to write on the blog I had to focus on aspects and subjects that spoke to me the most. I want to take a brief look at what my subjects of interest were and the aspects that had the biggest impact on my learning process.

The main question I had on my mind during the course and while writing the blog was ‘Where do we draw the line between art and anthropology?’. There is still no definitive answer but the material I considered points to one answer in particular. From the dichotomy between art and science to all the assumptions we make about the things in the world, it seems that we might have to rethink everything. And at this point art could be a helpful pathfinder.

I would say that the core of what I learned is reflected in the blog post ‘Ethnography is about experience’. Schneider’s text as well as the works of the Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab (especially Castaing-Taylor’s and Paravel’s ‘Leviathan’) demonstrate that visually creative attempts to capture the lives and environments of people are of high anthropological value and offer forms of immersion in a way that textual approaches are not able to.

What can be concluded?

In conclusion, looking into this debate offered an insight into the ways in which anthropology uses art and the ways in which art practices can be useful for anthropology. Dealing with the question ‘Art or anthropology?’ as an isolated issue seems to be an impossible endeavor since it is always linked to more general, ontological concerns about the nature of research and the way we come to know.

Generally, there are a lot of scholars in contemporary anthropology identifying new perspectives and ways in which anthropology can be thought of. However, this is still happening within the framework of classical research practices, which, for now, makes it difficult to see how the proposed changes can be put into practice. To me, the practical examples of anthropologists at the SEL indicate how future anthropology could look like.

Studying humans / Or the question of agency

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If one aspect of anthropology remained largely undisputed – and quite frankly there are not so many aspects left – then it’s the shared understanding that anthropology is concerned with the human. It’s even in the name: anthrōpos, meaning ‘human being’. There it is: a small but significant consensus in anthropology. At least this was my impression before entering the world of Ingold and Latour. Suddenly, I’m not so sure what to make of this idea. At least, the traditional idea of a subject (human) acting upon a lifeless and subordinated object (say a stone) seems to be an inaccurate portrait of reality. I’ll expand on this.

On the one hand we have Ingold. Ingold’s great idea aims at making things alive again, seeing things as embedded in the fluidity of materials in the world. He appeals to the vitality of materials and criticizes every attempt to divide the world into subjects and objects. Rather (by illustrating his point with the example of a catflap) he explains it so:

"[…] would it not make more sense to attribute the operation of the flap to the action into which it was recruited, of the cat’s making its way in or out of doors? Surely, neither the cat nor the flap possess agency; they are rather possessed by the action. Like everything else, as I shall now show, they are swept up in the generative currents of the world."

The point here is that there can’t be a clear-cut distinction between the subject (the cat with its intentions) and the object (the flap) and neither can there be something like an agency because things are always in the making, entangled in the flow of materials and not some finished entities with intentions or agencies.

On the other hand we have Bruno Latour and his Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Just like Ingold, the ANT moves beyond the subject/object dichotomy to seek a better understanding of the relationship between the ‘material’ and the ‘nonmaterial’ world. But it does so in a very different way than Ingold's idea of vitality. The ANT gives importance to the agency and attributes that agency to every actor in the network– this can be a weapon or a person. And their respective actions effect other actors.

Of course this is simplifying a complex theory but my point is that in moving beyond the subject/object scheme – whether we end up with Ingold’s, Latour’s or someone else’s version of it – we have to start dealing with the question if anthropology’s research focus on humans can be maintained in its isolated form. Or whether it needs to be expanded to a broader scope including things that are understood as non-human.

Bruno Latour: anthropologist of science

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Where do we draw the line between art and science? I’ve posed this question several times now and still have very different answers. If I were to ask this question to Bruno Latour, sociologist and philosopher, maybe he would say: all these distinctions were produced by what we call modernism.

With modernism we started to separate the human from the non-human world and distinguish between the fields of law, science, politics and so on.

In his work of science study Latour tries to trace back scientific findings to the social mechanisms of knowledge production. One early account in the field of science study was his book ‘Laboratory Life’ from 1979 where he did field work in a laboratory and observed the daily activities of the scientists. In short, his work suggested that scientific facts were socially constructed. While he was once clearly associated with this form of constructivism Latour is now trying to distance himself from such claims: He saw the dangerous influence that his critical ideas had on conspiracy theorists, such as ‘skeptics’ in the climate change ‘debate’. Ever since, Latour is defending himself against the constructivist claims.

Rather than saying that science is just another language, thus constructing what appears to be a reality, Latour suggests that there is in fact an objective reality out there and science is able to uncover that reality. It is able to do so because knowledge is produced in meticulous translation work and with help from technologies that – as the advancement of these technologies shows – are neither fully human nor fully non-human. Thus, Latour cannot be a constructivist but he is neither a realist.

What is he? This a very difficult question to answer. His work seems contradictory and maybe this comes from belonging to the type of thinkers that breaks with established thinking schemes. Just like Tim Ingold. The only thing that I could sum up with certainty is that Latour tries to bring together what has been separated in an attempt to be modern. And while his and Ingolds approaches are both radically different from ‘mainstream’ science they also seem incompatible with one another.

On the difficulty of moving boundaries

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For quite a while now, many scholars in anthropology have argued for a new way of practicing and looking at anthropology while pointing out the important intersection between their field and contemporary art. Most of them also argue that such an approach is largely being ignored in anthropology. This might have been true a few years back but as far as I can see, today, there are many different ways in which anthropology as a discipline is trying to engage in new practices and trying to ‘learn from artists’.

There is the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab that I’ve already mentioned in a previous blog post, there are also many anthropologists writing on the subject like Schneider & Wright or Anna Grimshaw and there are projects like the exhibitions of ‘Ethnographic Terminalia’ that have been part of the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association since 2011.  So while I wouldn’t necessarily argue that there hasn’t been thought, said or written much about ‘pushing the boundaries of anthropological scholarship’, there has indeed been done close to nothing to actually move them.

Why do anthropologists like Tim Ingold write meticulously on how anthropology or even science as a whole is wrong about almost anything they assume while presenting those ideas in the most conventional textual form? This practice seems to be symptomatic for anthropologist wandering on the unsettled grounds where art and science intersect.

The approaches have very well found their way into anthropology as a topic of discussion but they haven’t found a way of causing an actual shift in anthropological practice and methods.

This might only be a matter of time. But either way, this problem seems to go back to the question of how to draw the line between art and science.