What impact has social media had on people from different cultures? How does it transform the way we make friends and earn support? Leading British anthropologist Daniel Miller shared research findings on social media to an inquisitive audience at NYU Shanghai on Thursday, September 22.
According to Miller, Professor of Anthropology at University College London, the worlds of Chinese factory workers, young Muslim women on the Syrian/Turkish border and IT professionals in India may vary fundamentally, but the texture of their lives are intensely woven together by one common thing--social media.
“For example, in Brazil, people often post photos of themselves in ‘high-class’ settings, such as gyms or swimming pools, but that does not translate to enhanced social standing offline,” Miller said. “In Turkey, young adults tend to post food pictures instead of selfies to hide from the gaze of their families.”
Miller launched the Global Social Media Impact Study (Why We Post Project) in 2012, based on ethnographic data collected in China, India, Turkey, Italy, United Kingdom, Trinidad and Brazil collected over 15 months.
“You have to embed yourself in the population and learn them very well,” Miller said. “To understand people’s behaviors online, you have to understand them offline first.”
Miller also explained a number of interesting discoveries acquired through observation of how social media is used in different cultures, ranging from different types of “selfies” to how “memes” have become the online moral police.
After Miller spoke, Wang Xinyuan, a researcher on this project and a PhD candidate at University College London, discussed her fieldwork in Southeast China. Wang lived with migrants who had moved from smaller Chinese towns and villages to large cities. She observed that the population was engaged in two migrations at once, from rural to urban, and from offline to online.
Echoing Miller's point about the importance of context, Wang noted that while popular perception associates social media with loss of privacy, for many migrants coming from small towns, social media brought about an increase in privacy, via the intimate world of their screen.
Clay Shirky, Associate Arts Professor of NYU Shanghai, who introduced the talk, noted that "Dr Miller's project, and detailed research like Wang's, provide an incredible expansion of what we know about the effect of social media on civic life, and vice-versa."
