FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE

ANTROPOLOGICHESKIJ FORUM
RUS | ENG

Antropologicheskij forum, 2017, no. 32

 

FORUM: ACADEMIC STUDIES OF CULTURE AND THE INTERNET AS A NEW PUBLIC SPHERE

Abstract: As technology develops, digital communication becomes more and more important in the academic world. Thanks to social media, the researcher and his or her personal and professional networks are now on full view to the general public, including present and potential informants. Increasingly, social media has become the place for professional discussion and the creation of networks, and drafts of articles are often posted before they are published. This practice comes into conflict with the copyright politics of some peer-reviewed journals. Participants of the “Forum” (written round-table) answer questions on academic life and research ethics in this radically new public space. They discuss such problems as scholarly publishing and evaluation, dividing their personal and professional lives online or using various types of confessional material from online sources in their work.

The discussion focuses on the issue of vulnerability of traditional, closed, and corporate, forms of scholarship, as well as the vulnerability a researcher experiences him or herself in the face of digital openness. Due to the multiplicity of audiences and publication forms available, a scholarly text is not a stable completed product anymore; it is being dissolved. Ethnography online changes the nature of the researcher’s presence in the field while the specific life of words online makes one review the criteria of quality and ethics of field-data representation.

Keywords: the Internet, digital public sphere, ethics, online publication, social networks, digital media, social media, digital ethnography.

To cite: 'Forum: Akademicheskoe soobshchestvo v usloviyakh novoy publichnosti interneta' [Forum: Academic Studies of Culture and the Internet as a New Public Sphere], Antropologicheskij forum, 2017, no. 32, pp. 10–64.

URL: http://anthropologie.kunstkamera.ru/files/pdf/032/forum.pdf