[Air-L] NEW BOOK. The Anthropology of Digital Practices: Dispatches from the Online Culture Wars by John Postill

[John Postill]

Dear all

I am very pleased to announce that my new book *The Anthropology of Digital
Practices: Dispatches from the Online Culture Wars* (Routledge, 2024) is
now out.

The book connects three distinct research areas – digital ethnography,
causal ethnography, and media practice theory – to explore how we might
track the effects of new media practices in a digital world. It invites
media and communication students and scholars to overcome the field’s old
aversion to ‘media effects’ and explore the messy, complex, open-ended
effects of new media practices in a digital age.

Based on long-term ethnographic research and drawing from recent advances
in the study of causality and ethnography, this book tells the ‘formation
story’ of the anti-woke movement through a series of critical media events,
namely Trump, Covid-19, George Floyd and Ukraine, with a Postscript on the
Israel-Hamas war.

The study argues that digital media practices (e.g. podcasting, YouTubing,
tweeting, commenting, broadcasting) will have ‘formative’ effects on an
emerging social world at different points in time. One important task of
the digital ethnographer is precisely to distinguish between the formative
and non-formative effects of specific media practices.

The key dramatis personae include Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris,
Tucker Carlson, Bret Weinstein, and Heather Heying.

I hope it will be useful in both undergrad and postgrad teaching, incl. in
media/digital anthropology, media and communication studies, digital
politics, social movements research, and qualitative methodology. Happy to
do guest talks on it.

More info here:
https://www.routledge.com/The-Anthropology-of-Digital-Practices-Dispatches-from-the-Online-Culture-Wars/Postill/p/book/9781032370828

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Best wishes

John Postill
RMIT University, Melbourne