Devin Proctor - Böcker

Practicing Digital Ethnography offers a comprehensive introduction to the essential methods, concepts, and practices of conducting ethnographic research in digital environments.Written by 60 global contributors across 12 chapters with accompanying case studies and concept explorations, this book provides both theoretical foundations and practical guidance for digital ethnographic work. It covers research approaches for diverse digital contexts, including social media, virtual spaces, video games, and hybrid physical-technological settings, while addressing the deployment of tools like artificial intelligence, big data, mapping technologies, and multimodal methodologies. This book examines ethical challenges specific to digital research environments while maintaining a commitment to reflexive, co-present research that acknowledges how our interactions with digital technologies transcend boundaries of citizenship, race, gender identity, age and ability.Practicing Digital Ethnography is ideal for students and researchers in anthropology, media studies, science and technology studies, and communications who seek to understand contemporary hyper-mediated environments, as well as professionals outside academia who need practical, accessible guidance for conducting rigorous digital research.

Practicing Digital Ethnography offers a comprehensive introduction to the essential methods, concepts, and practices of conducting ethnographic research in digital environments.Written by 60 global contributors across 12 chapters with accompanying case studies and concept explorations, this book provides both theoretical foundations and practical guidance for digital ethnographic work. It covers research approaches for diverse digital contexts, including social media, virtual spaces, video games, and hybrid physical-technological settings, while addressing the deployment of tools like artificial intelligence, big data, mapping technologies, and multimodal methodologies. This book examines ethical challenges specific to digital research environments while maintaining a commitment to reflexive, co-present research that acknowledges how our interactions with digital technologies transcend boundaries of citizenship, race, gender identity, age and ability.Practicing Digital Ethnography is ideal for students and researchers in anthropology, media studies, science and technology studies, and communications who seek to understand contemporary hyper-mediated environments, as well as professionals outside academia who need practical, accessible guidance for conducting rigorous digital research.

Human* Being: On Otherkin Identity and Digital Community is an ethnographic exploration of the Otherkin—a technologically-mediated community of practice whose members identify as other-than-human—breaking down barriers of identity and calling into question assumptions about what it means to be a human. Based on a decade of ethnographic research, Human* Being examines Otherkin engagement with the techno-virtuality afforded by the internet—through chat forums, personal blogs, 3D virtual worlds, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Discord, TikTok, and Reddit—troubling conventional notions about our relationships with the virtual and our understandings of the Self. The Otherkin represent a larger shift in body identity, shown by increasing numbers of people identifying as trans, nonbinary, fluid, and neurodiverse; bodies open to nuance, complication, and multiplicity. Devin Proctor closely examines internal community debates about the limits of non-human identity, avatar creation practices in virtual worlds to approximate inner realities, and the policing of identity constructs toward a stable definition of the phenomenon. However anomalistic, even fantastical they may seem, the Otherkin offer a window into our own complex notions of bodies, Selves, and technologies.

Contrary to popular belief, the internet is not making us stupid or lazy or subjecting us to algorithmic domination. Devin Proctor contends that it is instead changing the way we perceive our bodies, our social worlds, and our identities along a spectrum of virtuality.Proctor conceptualizes the internet as a social space, arguing for a return to spatial understandings of the digital. The reality of this space, he posits, is co-produced through our interaction with human and non-human agents – bots, AI programs, and algorithms – that exist alongside us in a field of internet presence.From video calls to anonymous chat forums, Proctor traces progressive levels of virtual emplacement to interrogate the embodied forms we take across digital contexts and the ways in which these forms influence communication and identity. He draws on years of digital ethnographic fieldwork among the Otherkin community – a group of people who largely socialize online and internally identify as non-human – to complicate conventional notions about our relationships with the virtual, our understandings of the Self, and what it means to be human.