Digital anthropology
Digital anthropology studies how digital technologies shape social life and how people create, use, and understand them.
Social construction of technology: An approach explaining how social groups shape the design and meaning of technologies. It frames digital tools as products of social choices, not merely technical forces.
Digital ethnography: Ethnographic research that studies social practices involving digital technologies and online environments. It is a direct method for examining the social worlds digital anthropology investigates.
Cyberanthropology: Anthropological inquiry into cybernetic systems, digital technologies, and networked social life. It names an early strand of inquiry that helped form digital anthropology.
Digital identity: The ways people are represented and recognized through digital records, profiles, and interactions. Online identities show how self-presentation and recognition take shape through technical systems.
Media anthropology: The anthropological study of media technologies, institutions, practices, and cultural meanings. It is the broader tradition within which digital media research is often situated.
Mediatization: The process through which media become embedded in institutions and transform social practices. It captures how digital media reorganize routines and institutions over time.
Participant observation: A research method in which investigators take part in everyday activities while observing them. It grounds accounts of technology in the practices and relationships of its users.
Christine Hine: A sociologist known for developing influential approaches to internet and virtual ethnography. Her work helped establish ethnographic study of the internet as a social setting.
Surveillance capitalism: An economic system that treats personal data as material for prediction and profit. It connects everyday platform use to commercial extraction and asymmetries of power.
Internet studies: An interdisciplinary field examining the internet, its technologies, uses, and social effects. It overlaps with digital anthropology but draws on disciplines beyond ethnographic inquiry.