John Postill
Biographic Data
| ID | 3618808 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Postill |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Postill |
| SIGNATURE | POSTILL J |
| AFFILIATIONS | RMIT University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 434 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The Anthropology of Digital Practices: Dispatches from the Online Culture Wars
The Anthropology of Digital Practices connects for the first time 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 explores the messy, complex, open-ended effects of new media practices in a digit…
Localizing the Internet: An Anthropological Account
Internet activism is playing a crucial role in the democratic reform happening across many parts of Southeast Asia. Focusing on Subang Jaya, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, this study offers an in-depth examination of the workings of the Internet at the local level. In fact, Subang Jaya is regarded as Malaysia’s electronic governance laboratory. The author explores its field of residential affairs, a digitally mediated social field in which residents, …
Digital Public Anthropology and the Covid‐19 Pandemic
The digital revolution had a paradoxical effect upon public anthropology. On the one hand, it gave public‐minded anthropologists a wealth of tools and platforms with which to reach diverse audiences and create new publics. On the other, it helped to further the ongoing managerialization and quantification of academic labor in the name of efficiency and “public accountability.” In 2020, the COVID‐19 pandemic entered this complex scenario. COVID‐19…
Introduction. Thinking through Sociality: The Importance of Mid-level Concepts
Introduction: Theorising Media and Practice
Media and Nation Building: How the Iban became Malaysian
With the end of the Cold War and the proliferation of civil wars and "regime changes," the question of nation building has acquired great practical and theoretical urgency. From Eastern Europe to East Timor, Afghanistan and recently Iraq, the United States and its allies have often been accused of shirking their nation-building responsibilities as their attention - and that of the media -- turned to yet another regional crisis. While much has bee…
Thinking Through Sociality: An Anthropological Interrogation of Key Concepts
As issues and circumstances investigated by anthropologists are becoming ever more diverse, the need to address social affiliation in contemporary situations of mobility, urbanity, transnational connections, individuation, media, and capital flows, has never been greater. Thinking Through Sociality combines a review of classical theories with recent theoretical innovations across a wide range of issues, locales, situations and domains. In this bo…
Theorising Media and Practice
Although practice theory has been a mainstay of social theory for nearly three decades, so far it has had very limited impact on media studies. This book draws on the work of practice theorists such as Wittgenstein, Foucault, Bourdieu, Barth and Schatzki and rethinks the study of media from the perspective of practice theory. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from places such as Zambia, India, Hong Kong, the United States, Britain, Norway and …
Digital politics
The growing use of digital media by political actors of all kinds – politicians, journalists, activists, celebrities, religious leaders, etc. – has spawned a bourgeoning literature, albeit one that is highly diverse and split along disciplinary and topical lines. The term 'digital politics' only began to acquire academic currency in the early 2010s. This signalled a rapidly growing scholarly interest in both the digitisation of the political fiel…
Digital Anthropology
Digital Anthropology, 2nd Edition explores how human and digital can be explored in relation to one another within issues as diverse as social media use, virtual worlds, hacking, quantified self, blockchain, digital environmentalism and digital representation. The book challenges the prevailing moral universal of “the digital age” by exploring emergent anxieties about the global spread of new technological forms, the cultural qualities of digital…
Digital Politics and Political Engagement
The growing use of digital media by political actors of all kinds has given rise to a thriving literature, albeit that is divided along disciplinary and technological lines. The scholarly literature on digital political campaigning has been dominated by the wide use of Internet and mobile technologies in United States presidential campaigns since 2000. Future anthropological studies of digital politics should avoid sterile debates about technolog…
Imagining Mundane Futures
When people move country, they experience new social, infrastructural, and ambient contingencies, which enables them to imagine otherwise unknowable possible futures ‘at home’. In this article, we mobilise a design anthropological approach to show how collaboration with temporary migrants can generate understandings that generate insights regarding future sustainable products in emerging economies. We draw on research with temporary Indonesian st…
Populism and social media: A global perspective
The link between the spread of social media and the recent surge of populism around the world remains elusive. A global, rather than Western, theory is required to explore this connection. Such a theory would need to pay particular attention to five questions, namely, the roots of populism, ideology and populism, the rise of theocratic populism, social media and non-populist politicians, and the embedding of social media in larger systems of comm…
Communication Activism as a School of Politics: Lessons From Spain's Indignados Movement
In this article, we draw on ethnographic research to examine some key communication activism practices of Spain’s indignados (15M) movement. The 15M radically transformed communication activism in Spain through its strong political-pedagogical orientation. Here lies the greatest 15M lesson for Communication for Social Change: Ordinary citizens in countries like Spain are rejecting traditional roles as “beneficiaries” of institutional communicatio…
Indonesian Religion as a Hybrid Media Space: Social Dramas in a Contested Realm
The popularity of social media in Indonesia, along with the rise of political Islam, is changing the ways in which people engage with religious matters in the country. In this article, we deploy post-Bourdieuan field theory to explore Indonesia’s religious domain as a ‘hybrid media space’ – a social space mediated by old and new media agents interacting to produce viralized forms of public communication. We undertake this exploration through thre…
Media-Related Changes as Finite Processes: A Response to Ece Algan
TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM çatısı altında, Türkiye'de yayımlanan akademik dergiler için elektronik ortamda barındırma ve editoryal süreç yönetimi hizmeti sunar. DergiPark dergilerin işleyişine ve yönetimine karışmaz
Student migration and domestic improvisation: Transient migration through the experience of everyday laundry
In this article, we develop a novel approach to transient student migration: by studying it through the mundane everyday. We focus on the private worlds where migrants encounter and improvise with new domestic technologies – through their laundry – by drawing on our video ethnography of Indonesian students in Australia. Such an analysis creates insights into some of the most fundamental, but usually invisible, aspects of migrant experience: their…
Digital-visual Stakeholder Ethnography
In this article, we discuss how new configurations of stakeholders are implicated and can be conceptualised in digital-visual applied and public ethnography. We set the discussion in the context of the increasing calls for researchers to have impact in the world and the ways that digital technologies are increasingly implicated in this. In doing so, we situate ethnographic practice and stakeholder relationships within a digital-material world. To…
Firebrand waves of digital activism 1994–2014: The rise and spread of hacktivism and cyberconflict
This book is an ambitious chronicle of digital activism and cyberconflict worldwide from 1994 to 2014. It argues that digital activism is gradually becoming mainstream, especially following the 201
Mobile Ensembles
Public Anthropology in Times of Media Hybridity and Global Upheaval
Like other professionals, anthropologists work in a public environment that has undergone profound technological changes over the past ten years. New forms of publicness have arisen out of three converging global trends, namely the rise of 'viral media' such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitt er, the mainstreaming of 'nerd politics' epitomized by Wikileaks and Anonymous, and the digitization of public spaces. I will now consider each of these trends …
Multitudinous identities: A qualitative and network analysis of the 15M collective identity
The emergence of network-movements since 2011 has opened the debate around the way in which social media and networked practices make possible innovative forms of collective identity. We briefly review the literature on social movements and 'collective identity', and show the tension between different positions stressing either organization or culture, the personal or the collective, aggregative or networking logics. We argue that the 15M (indign…
Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice
A Critical History of Internet Activism and Social Protest in Malaysia, 1998-2011
This article asks two related questions. First, to what extent has internet activism shaped social protest in Malaysia from the late 1990s to the present? Second, what can the history of internet activism and social protest in Malaysia tell us, if anything, about the 2011 global wave of protests? To address these questions I distinguish three key moments in Malaysia’s eventful history of internet activism and social protest, namely the 1998-1999 …
Democracy in an age of viral reality: A media epidemiography of Spain's indignados movement
The present article draws from fieldwork on the indignados (or 15M) movement in Spain to propose a new approach to the study of protest movements in the digital era: 'media epidemiography'. This composite of the terms 'epidemiology' and 'ethnography' is used as a heuristic to address the research challenge of today's swiftly evolving techno-political terrains. I argue that viral media have played a key role in Spain's indignados movement, with Tw…
Social Media Ethnography: The Digital Researcher in a Messy Web
Social media practices and technologies are often part of how ethnographic research participants navigate their wider social, material and technological worlds, and are equally part of ethnographic practice. This creates the need to consider how emergent forms of social media-driven ethnographic practice might be understood theoretically and methodologically. In this article, we respond critically to existing literatures concerning the nature of …
Democracy in an age of viral reality: A media epidemiography of Spain's indignados movement
The present article draws from fieldwork on the indignados (or 15M) movement in Spain to propose a new approach to the study of protest movements in the digital era: 'media epidemiography'. This composite of the terms 'epidemiology' and 'ethnography' is used as a heuristic to address the research challenge of today's swiftly evolving techno-political terrains. I argue that viral media have played a key role in Spain's indignados movement, with Tw…
Localizing the internet beyond communities and networks
As the numbers of internet users worldwide continue to grow, the internet is becoming `more local'. This article addresses the epistemological challenge posed by this global process of internet localization by examining some of the conceptual tools at the disposal of internet researchers. It argues that progress has been hampered by an overdependence on the problematic notions of community and network whose paradigmatic status has yet to be quest…
Clock and Calendar Time: A missing anthropological problem
The spread of clock and calendar time (CCT) from the North Atlantic region to the rest of the world is an understudied phenomenon. The second part of this article, based on anthropological fieldwork, examines the successful localization of CCT in a semi-rural area of Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo. Before that, the article critically assesses some of the main anthropological studies of time to date, highlighting their inattention to CCT and suggest…
Theorising Media and Practice
Although practice theory has been a mainstay of social theory for nearly three decades, so far it has had very limited impact on media studies. This book draws on the work of practice theorists such as Wittgenstein, Foucault, Bourdieu, Barth and Schatzki and rethinks the study of media from the perspective of practice theory. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from places such as Zambia, India, Hong Kong, the United States, Britain, Norway and …
Populism and social media: A global perspective
The link between the spread of social media and the recent surge of populism around the world remains elusive. A global, rather than Western, theory is required to explore this connection. Such a theory would need to pay particular attention to five questions, namely, the roots of populism, ideology and populism, the rise of theocratic populism, social media and non-populist politicians, and the embedding of social media in larger systems of comm…
Digital Anthropology
Digital Anthropology, 2nd Edition explores how human and digital can be explored in relation to one another within issues as diverse as social media use, virtual worlds, hacking, quantified self, blockchain, digital environmentalism and digital representation. The book challenges the prevailing moral universal of “the digital age” by exploring emergent anxieties about the global spread of new technological forms, the cultural qualities of digital…
Student migration and domestic improvisation: Transient migration through the experience of everyday laundry
In this article, we develop a novel approach to transient student migration: by studying it through the mundane everyday. We focus on the private worlds where migrants encounter and improvise with new domestic technologies – through their laundry – by drawing on our video ethnography of Indonesian students in Australia. Such an analysis creates insights into some of the most fundamental, but usually invisible, aspects of migrant experience: their…
Researching the Internet
The turn of the millennium saw the publication of four important Internet ethnographies: Hakken's Cyborgs@cyberspace?(1999), Zurawski's Virtuelle Ethnizität(2000), Hine's Virtual ethnography (2000), and Miller and Slater's (2000) The Internet: an ethnographic approach. The authors of those pioneering studies grappled with difficult questions that still occupy Internet researchers today, such as interaction and identity in cyberspace, the virtual …
Digital-visual Stakeholder Ethnography
In this article, we discuss how new configurations of stakeholders are implicated and can be conceptualised in digital-visual applied and public ethnography. We set the discussion in the context of the increasing calls for researchers to have impact in the world and the ways that digital technologies are increasingly implicated in this. In doing so, we situate ethnographic practice and stakeholder relationships within a digital-material world. To…
The anthropology of news and journalism: Global perspectives - Edited by S. Elizabeth Bird
Knowledge, literacy and media among the Iban of Sarawak. A reply to Maurice Bloch
Making the Most of the Media
Clock and Calendar Time: A missing anthropological problem
The spread of clock and calendar time (CCT) from the North Atlantic region to the rest of the world is an understudied phenomenon. The second part of this article, based on anthropological fieldwork, examines the successful localization of CCT in a semi-rural area of Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo. Before that, the article critically assesses some of the main anthropological studies of time to date, highlighting their inattention to CCT and suggest…
Knowledge, literacy and media among the Iban of Sarawak. A reply to Maurice Bloch An earlier version of this article was published in the Proceedings of the Sixth Biennial Conference of the Borneo Res…
Maurice Bloch has rejected Jack Goody's ‘autonomous’ theory of literacy for being deterministic and eurocentric. The Merina of Madagascar, says Bloch, have adapted literacy to local purposes. Rather than altering their (oral) knowledge system, bringing it closer to European models, literacy has actually extended this system. In this article I apply Bloch's insight to another Austronesian people: the Iban of Sarawak. While agreeing that his indige…
The making of literate societies edited by Olson, David R. and Nancy Torrance
Knowledge, literacy and media among the Iban of Sarawak. A reply to Maurice Bloch
New Media and the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, 2nd Ed
Book Review| December 01 2008 New Media and the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, 2nd Ed. New Media and the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, 2nd ed. Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003 213 pp., $19.95 (paper) John Postill John Postill Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2008) 28 (3): 571–573. h…
Localizing the internet beyond communities and networks
As the numbers of internet users worldwide continue to grow, the internet is becoming `more local'. This article addresses the epistemological challenge posed by this global process of internet localization by examining some of the conceptual tools at the disposal of internet researchers. It argues that progress has been hampered by an overdependence on the problematic notions of community and network whose paradigmatic status has yet to be quest…
What is the point of media anthropology: What Is the Point of Media Anthropology
After long decades of neglect, the anthropological study of media is now booming. The period between 2002 and 2005 alone saw the publication of no less than four overviews of this emerging subfield (Askew and Wilk 2002; Ginsburg et al. 2002; Peterson 2003; Rothenbuhler and Coman 2005) as well as the founding of the EASA Media Anthropology Network, which by May 2009 boasted over 700 participants. \nAnthropologists have now undertaken media researc…
Response to Mark A. Peterson: What's the Point of Media Anthropology
Researching the Internet
The turn of the millennium saw the publication of four important Internet ethnographies: Hakken's Cyborgs@cyberspace?(1999), Zurawski's Virtuelle Ethnizität(2000), Hine's Virtual ethnography (2000), and Miller and Slater's (2000) The Internet: an ethnographic approach. The authors of those pioneering studies grappled with difficult questions that still occupy Internet researchers today, such as interaction and identity in cyberspace, the virtual …
The anthropology of news and journalism: Global perspectives - Edited by S. Elizabeth Bird
Social Media Ethnography: The Digital Researcher in a Messy Web
Social media practices and technologies are often part of how ethnographic research participants navigate their wider social, material and technological worlds, and are equally part of ethnographic practice. This creates the need to consider how emergent forms of social media-driven ethnographic practice might be understood theoretically and methodologically. In this article, we respond critically to existing literatures concerning the nature of …
A Critical History of Internet Activism and Social Protest in Malaysia, 1998-2011
This article asks two related questions. First, to what extent has internet activism shaped social protest in Malaysia from the late 1990s to the present? Second, what can the history of internet activism and social protest in Malaysia tell us, if anything, about the 2011 global wave of protests? To address these questions I distinguish three key moments in Malaysia’s eventful history of internet activism and social protest, namely the 1998-1999 …
Democracy in an age of viral reality: A media epidemiography of Spain's indignados movement
The present article draws from fieldwork on the indignados (or 15M) movement in Spain to propose a new approach to the study of protest movements in the digital era: 'media epidemiography'. This composite of the terms 'epidemiology' and 'ethnography' is used as a heuristic to address the research challenge of today's swiftly evolving techno-political terrains. I argue that viral media have played a key role in Spain's indignados movement, with Tw…
Mobile Ensembles
Public Anthropology in Times of Media Hybridity and Global Upheaval
Like other professionals, anthropologists work in a public environment that has undergone profound technological changes over the past ten years. New forms of publicness have arisen out of three converging global trends, namely the rise of 'viral media' such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitt er, the mainstreaming of 'nerd politics' epitomized by Wikileaks and Anonymous, and the digitization of public spaces. I will now consider each of these trends …
Multitudinous identities: A qualitative and network analysis of the 15M collective identity
The emergence of network-movements since 2011 has opened the debate around the way in which social media and networked practices make possible innovative forms of collective identity. We briefly review the literature on social movements and 'collective identity', and show the tension between different positions stressing either organization or culture, the personal or the collective, aggregative or networking logics. We argue that the 15M (indign…
Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice
Firebrand waves of digital activism 1994–2014: The rise and spread of hacktivism and cyberconflict
This book is an ambitious chronicle of digital activism and cyberconflict worldwide from 1994 to 2014. It argues that digital activism is gradually becoming mainstream, especially following the 201
Communication Activism as a School of Politics: Lessons From Spain's Indignados Movement
In this article, we draw on ethnographic research to examine some key communication activism practices of Spain’s indignados (15M) movement. The 15M radically transformed communication activism in Spain through its strong political-pedagogical orientation. Here lies the greatest 15M lesson for Communication for Social Change: Ordinary citizens in countries like Spain are rejecting traditional roles as “beneficiaries” of institutional communicatio…
Indonesian Religion as a Hybrid Media Space: Social Dramas in a Contested Realm
The popularity of social media in Indonesia, along with the rise of political Islam, is changing the ways in which people engage with religious matters in the country. In this article, we deploy post-Bourdieuan field theory to explore Indonesia’s religious domain as a ‘hybrid media space’ – a social space mediated by old and new media agents interacting to produce viralized forms of public communication. We undertake this exploration through thre…
Media-Related Changes as Finite Processes: A Response to Ece Algan
TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM çatısı altında, Türkiye'de yayımlanan akademik dergiler için elektronik ortamda barındırma ve editoryal süreç yönetimi hizmeti sunar. DergiPark dergilerin işleyişine ve yönetimine karışmaz
Student migration and domestic improvisation: Transient migration through the experience of everyday laundry
In this article, we develop a novel approach to transient student migration: by studying it through the mundane everyday. We focus on the private worlds where migrants encounter and improvise with new domestic technologies – through their laundry – by drawing on our video ethnography of Indonesian students in Australia. Such an analysis creates insights into some of the most fundamental, but usually invisible, aspects of migrant experience: their…
Digital-visual Stakeholder Ethnography
In this article, we discuss how new configurations of stakeholders are implicated and can be conceptualised in digital-visual applied and public ethnography. We set the discussion in the context of the increasing calls for researchers to have impact in the world and the ways that digital technologies are increasingly implicated in this. In doing so, we situate ethnographic practice and stakeholder relationships within a digital-material world. To…
Populism and social media: A global perspective
The link between the spread of social media and the recent surge of populism around the world remains elusive. A global, rather than Western, theory is required to explore this connection. Such a theory would need to pay particular attention to five questions, namely, the roots of populism, ideology and populism, the rise of theocratic populism, social media and non-populist politicians, and the embedding of social media in larger systems of comm…
Sociology (28 works) · Political science (17 works) · Media studies (15 works) · Anthropology (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Social Media and Politics (9 works) · Ethnography (8 works) · Asian Studies and History (7 works)