Anthropology of Social Media

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

In barely a decade, social media has transformed the world around us, the way we learn, the way we communicate, and our relationships. There is an incredible amount of discussion and speculation over the consequences of social media – for example, have we lost our right to privacy? Do new forms of social media lead to greater political freedom or perhaps political repression? Have children replaced face-to-face interactions and relationships with only screen interactions? Alongside these changes there is a whole new language emerging to describe what people do on social media, including selfies, memes and shares. Yet most claims made about social media are very general. Taking an anthropological view, this course looks at a variety of forms of social media in very different social contexts. This course concentrates on content of social media rather than platforms through which social media operates. But we will also use social media as a research method for understanding people’s lives as they converge in both online and offline spaces. We will see not only how social media has changed people’s lives but also how these people have changed social media. Interestingly, this course challenges many of the claims that are made about what social media is by showing the incredible variation in social media that emerges on different continents, among people of different class and religious backgrounds, for people with different gender identities and sexual preferences, for producers, consumers, and students. As we will find, social media can tell us much about the contemporary world at large.