Digital Anthropology Report 2009: The Six Tribes of Homo Digitalis

[Keith Hart]

Antropologi.info has a good link to the above report. Lane DeNicola referred to it in the Teaching Digital Anthropology thread, but maybe it would be good to run them separately. Here is what he had to say there about the report issued by British Telecom TalkTalk.

The objective of the research underlying the report (which focused on Internet use in the UK) was ostensibly "to find out more about how digital technology has changed our behaviour...to find out what homo digitalis really looks like." A key component of the report is a use classification system that places users in one of six categories, including "digital extroverts," "timid technophobes," and so on (see the report link above for the full system).

Circulation of the announcement has so far been fairly rapid, including for example industry blogs and this story in the Telegraph headlined "People in North East 'are most timid internet users'." David Zeitlyn at the University of Kent (one of the principals involved in the study) is quoted in the story as suggesting that "Online engagement will soon replace social class as the most powerful determiner of economic success, damaging the career prospects of internet refuseniks," and that "there was a danger that people who did not embrace the web would be cut off from its financial and professional benefits."

First, a major telecommunications company is issuing something they're referring to as a "Digital Anthropology Report," replete with allusions to an anachronistic, almost caricatured anthropology—the framing of a cultural taxonomy, terms like "tribes" and "Homo Digitalis," etc. Zeitlyn himself has already responded online that despite early misgivings he largely agrees with the folks at TalkTalk that the term "tribes" has a conventional understanding—"labile shifting groupings whose membership may change with time"—that should be given precedence in the context of this report.

Another obvious observation is the dubious contours of a popularly-circulated, telecom-sponsored report effectively warning that "people who do not embrace the web will be cut off from its financial and professional benefits." It seems not too far-reaching to interrogate even the use of the term "Internet refusenik" (whoever might've initiated its discursive circulation) as having a questionable etymological basis (e.g. why not "Cautious" or "Skeptical adopters"?). I won't belabour the point, and I certainly don't want to suggest that anthropologists don't have genuine, substantive contributions to make to ICT design, but I do want to put forth that there are too many popular misconceptions about the approaches and objectives of social research (and perhaps especially anthropology) to let patent caricatures of the field end up becoming its "public face," and I do wonder if that possibility isn't a risk here. More involved scrutiny of the report itself and its place in wider "digital divide" discussions is warranted—and perhaps even a fruitful subject for discussion in a Digital Anthropology seminar!—but that's a different thread.

So here is that thread...

[Beck J]

I have started another discussion on this above I didnt realise you were already discussing it. I am studying this at the moment and i can definitely see a future for anthropologists in ITC and ITC policy design of all manner. However, this type of report is as you say almost a caricature - is that the right spelling, of anthropology. Isn't that David Zetlyn guy the one who worked in Africa - I am sure we read some of his stuff but can't remember. I know that he must be a serious researcher and I wonder how much control he had over the production of the report. The report angered me but then I am in the field and perhaps it was a company production all along thus it becomes a question of author control. Actually apart from Daniel Millers ethnography I don't think there has reallt been anything of any significance from any anthropologists over the last decade or so. It is little wonder then that this is what we get as representitive of igital anthropology. Just a thought, maybe the report is a bit a farce. Has anyone checked whether it is dink di?

[Keith Hart]

Anthropologists might take an interest in the revival of the word 'tribe' in popular discourse. There is a tendency for anthropologists to run in the opposite direction when their key terms become popular. So, when 'culture' becomes an ubiquitous explanation for behaviour that once might have been seen in moral, legal or political terms ('benefit culture', 'risk culture'), we tend to shift to other terms or claim that people have got it wrong. 'Tribe' must have dropped out of professional usage 30 or 40 years ago in recognition of its colonial associations. It is still used in places like India and Nigeria as a central focus for anthropological research, but elsewhere its rise as a popular term causes anthropologists few problems, since we have dropped it already and can just poke fun at those who use it.

Arnold Van Gennep, in his classic satire of the social sciences a century ago, The Semi-Scholars, invents an anthropologist, Desire Pepin, who goes off to the Congo clutching Sir James Frazer's handbook for field investigations. He meets a native on the jungle path and asks him question 1 from the Handbook: What is your tribe, caste or clan? The fellow is confused and asks what these terms mean. Desire realizes that all he knows is that the Romans had tribes, the Indians castes and the Scots clans. In this respect, it is worth recalling where the word 'tribe' came from. The Latins were a rabble who wanted more social order, so they divided themselves into three groups (tribus) and then sacrificed a cow which they shared about among themselves in their groups (called 'distributio') thereby achieving unity in division.

Seth Godin is a famous business blogger who wrote Tribes: we need you to lead us. Several of his blog posts deal with the topic. You should take a look at what he means by the term. He has in mind that we tend to sign up for an idea that commands some part of our attention along with many others. This idea is often associated with the person who coined it and so, for this limited purpose, that person is a leader. The issue of leaders and followers is very important in this culture which draws heavily, as does Godin, on what passes for normal in the world of business. He claims that 1,000 people following an idea can use it as a lever to change the world. Twitter also is built on a sociological foundation of followed and followers (which is the root of the Latin word for society, sekw- or follow).

So what the word appears to evoke here is decentralized voluntary associations, often of an ephemeral and very partial character and built on a temporary personalized hierarchy. Journalist/anthropologist Gillian Tett', in Fool's Gold, her brilliant account of the invention and diffusion of credit derivatives, refers to a tight-knit team at J.P. Morgan as a 'tribe'. The Report that we are considering here arrives at its 'tribes' through an act of statistical classification, labeling six approaches to internet use with categories whose members have nothing to do with each other, unlike Godin's and Tett's usage.

Why bother? Because the 'tribes' phenomenon has a social and cultural reality that is new and appears to be spreading. Anthropologists, at least a few of us, instead of guarding our own professional vocabulary, might try to find out more concerning what is going on in this folk discourse.