What is Theory?

Miller: started his career as a theorist
- UCL Anthro was a Marxist department (Althusserian-Marx, late Marx)
- Structuralism, Poststructuralism
- Modes of production, Capitalism, Alienation…
- Miller likes early Marx, Hegel
- “All problems in the world arise out of capitalism.“ Hegel: whatever that is created in the world goes its own way - dialectical
- Material culture
- Emphasis on production is insufficient; consumption is also effective
- Internet: an Ethnographic Approach
  - how Trinidadians appropriate Internet -> the product: both Trinidadians and the Internet (what emerges in this context)
  - The Young and the Restless
- Theory?
  - Hegel: all the things (e.g. institutions) we create tend to become the concept of reason, but they tend to develop their own interests
    - Bourdieu’s Distinction: art and class -> art comes from certain aethestics (needs to be taught in school) -> reproduction of our class system (in the education camp who understand art; artistic capital); art is another sense of education, becoming increasingly complex. Art extends the world of class through education by distinguishing who understands and who doesn’t. -> theory: education’s version of modern art -> career structures -> propensity of class differentiation
    - Academia: fads? fashion?
  - How do you distinguish useful and useless stuff?
    - Make things clearer (things can be understood more clearly)
    - Accountable, be able to be explained in ordinary language
- What are the means and ends? Can we turn the ends to the means?

Polymedia

If you want to understand new media, find a circumstance that can tease it out.
- Filipino mothers - the degree they can be mother depends on the media they can use
- Texting
Theorize the media + relationships
Kinship: any given kinship word we use:
- normative word: proper roles they play - Theory of Shopping (1995)
- discrepancy: how we think of the idealized role and what the role really is
Media studies: technology in itself vs. Anthropology: relationships
- technologists: affordances (the propensities the technology would be good for something)
  - Backwards: affordances -> what people are actually doing
  - Power relationships
    - Mothers: reconstruction of mothering/parenting
    - Children: surveillance
- relationships
- See how they come together: Polymedia: resocialization

Expectations

(Hopefully) Clarifies what’s going on in those relationships
Is it necessary? Helpful?
Every media is treated the same way
- Loss of humanity
- Post-human, cyborgs
Anthropology: nothing is unmediated
Change our idea of humanity is
- Most people use it conservatively
- Webcam: an aspect of being human
Oliver Sachs
- a surgeon
- humanistic characteristics
Clive Thompson
- memories
Theory: the ways we understand technology. It’s a means, not an end.
- not for testing; rather a re-conceptualization in order to gain insight
- balance generality (generalization of theories) and parochialism (the parochialism of ethnography)

Webcam (2014)

Latency: tautology
- frustration over something that doesn’t work well
  - Adam Drazin: shoebox
- It’s overcome
- We envisage possibilities (afterwards)
  - E.g. e-mail (temporality) for theological discussions

Ethnography vs. Theory

Anthropology: parochial approach -> understanding of the humanity
How it works in research
- science: hypothesis -> testing it out in the field
- most anthropologists don’t do that (Miller)
- because you’ll find what you were looking for
- no idea of if what one’s studying is relevant
- Ethnography
  - studying everything possible
  - insights
  - explanation
  - theory (conclusion) -> not always
- Repetitive vs. Variant
Criteria: original insight

Mediation

To be human is to be mediated. -> Culture: Human beings are intrinsically mediated.
You can’t say a new media makes people more mediated.
New media changes mediation. (added something and subtracted something)
Miller: Opposing different degrees of authenticity of Polynesia communities and people shopping on Oxford Street