Webcam E-Book

Daniel Miller

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 403

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The use of webcam, especially through Skype, has recently become established as one more standard media technology, but so far there has been no attempt to assess its fundamental nature and consequences. Yet webcam has profound implications for many facets of human life, from self-consciousness and intimacy to the sustaining of long-distance relationships and the place of the visual within social communications.

Based on research in London and Trinidad, this book shows how 'always-on' webcam is becoming an entirely different phenomenon from the initial use of webcam as a videophone. Webcam is examined within the framework of 'polymedia' - that is, the new environments created by the simultaneous presence of a multiplicity of communication technologies - and used to exemplify a theory of attainment that accepts media technologies as aspects of, rather than detracting from, our basic humanity.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

1: Conclusion: A Theory of Attainment

Skype and webcam

A theory of attainment

Webcam and attainment

A note on method and context

2: Self-Consciousness

Self-consciousness and embarrassment

Is this the real you?

Conclusion

3: Intimacy

Always-on

Other forms of intimacy

Sex

Conclusion

4: The Sense of Place

Living inside the web

Attention

De-stabilizing the home

Establishing location

A balancing act

Conclusion

5: Maintaining Relationships

Parents

Grandparents and toddlers

Siblings

Friends

Conclusion

6: Polymedia

Introduction: polymedia as theory

Cost

Remediation

The BlackBerry connection

Emotions and power

Polymedia within Skype

7: Visibility

Webcam as truth and trust

Webcam as functionality and efficiency

Webcam as community and sociality

Conclusions to this chapter

A theory of attainment in the light of our ethnography

References

Index

Copyright © Daniel Miller and Jolynna Sinanan 2014

The right of Daniel Miller and Jolynna Sinanan to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2014 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7146-8

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7147-5 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7952-5 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7951-8 (mobi)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Acknowledgements

Daniel Miller would like to thank Stefana Broadbent, who first suggested this topic, Natalie Wright, who worked as an intern for him on this project, and the various students and friends who provided him with pilot interviews. Support at the Department of Anthropology UCL, especially from Susanne Küchler, the Head of Department, is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks also for support from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), where he has been appointed Adjunct Professor, School of Media and Communication.

Jolynna Sinanan would like to thank Tania Lewis and the School of Media and Communication at RMIT and UCL for funding her fieldwork in Trinidad. Thank you also to Heather Horst, and to Miley and Toffee, Zaid, Guruh and Tamara for their boundless generosity and hospitality.

We are both immensely grateful to the people of El Mirador who gave so much thought and time to assist us in our work. We apologize for the fact that, given our promise of anonymity, we cannot thank them individually. We would also like to thank those who made comments on the manuscript, Sheba Mohammid, Razvan Nicolescu, Anna Pertierra, Marisa Wilson, assistance from Mary Gray and the two anonymous reviewers for Polity.

1

Conclusion: A Theory of Attainment

Skype and webcam

The grounds for choosing the topic of webcam in personal communications were really quite simple. It was evident from research on other new communication technologies that webcam was coming to play a significant role. Yet, we knew of no anthropological studies dedicated to ascertaining its consequences. By 2011, Skype was reaching a critical point. Not ubiquitous, at least compared to mobile phones, but because of large-scale initiatives such as ‘One laptop per child’ with their integrated webcams, access was spreading to include lower income populations (Rosenberg, 2012). In Trinidad today, most people have transnational friends or family, which seemed to be the most common initial incentive for using Skype. Our research suggested that for some relationships, webcam had become a critical intervention. We also felt confident that webcam was now sufficiently embedded as an accepted part of people's everyday lives here to become the subject of ethnography as a study of the mundane.

Although we undertook the study from a hunch that the impact of webcam might now be profound, we didn't start with any particular ideas or hypotheses. We are not that kind of natural scientist. We began, instead, from what we hope is the modesty of anthropology that says the expertise lies not with the academic, but with the peoples they study. It is their creativity and inventiveness, their interpretations and accommodations, their insights and frustrations that we must share; and from them build a picture, a generalized image of what seems to be happening in their world. Only then do we ask why this matters for anthropologists and indeed for everyone.

The title of this book, Webcam, is problematic for various reasons, but we would argue it is simply better than the alternatives. Many of our informants, especially in the UK, avoid the term altogether, because a critical moment in the spread of webcam came with its usage for pornography as by ‘camgirls’ (Senft, 2008). Another influential initial usage was setting up a webcam to observe a site such as a street or events such as a rare bird nesting. Apart from within the last chapter, we do not cover such uses of webcam. You should assume a silent sub-title Webcam – but in most chapters only as used within personal communications. These communications may be dyadic or between groups as, for example, when two families greet each other at Christmas. So our interest is closer to that of Baym (2010) and Broadbent (2012) but very different from Senft (2008). To avoid these earlier connotations of the term, many people prefer to refer instead to proprietary platforms such as Skype and FaceTime, and terms such as Skyping or ‘do you want to Skype?’ are universally used and recognized. But there are various such platforms, so that we could not use any one of these for our title. By now, many other informants are comfortable with the term webcam and will themselves extend this to create the verbs ‘webcamming’ or ‘to webcam’, for example, often interchangeably with Skyping (which is in any case confusing since half of Skype calls are made without webcam). Given the rise of FaceTime and webcam within smartphones, the term webcam may grow at the expense of Skype. So we concluded that was the imperfect, but best available title for this volume. In the final chapter, we will move beyond personal communication to issues of surveillance and the use of webcams in commerce more generally.