Talks by Anthony Kelly
Online social networking is a phenomenon marked for the fact of its mediated nature. It is also n... more Online social networking is a phenomenon marked for the fact of its mediated nature. It is also notable for its inevitable dependence on the articulation of a user profile, inscribed in the autobiographical voice, the form of which shifts in relation with the particular communicative constraints specific to any given network. The materialization of the subject the articulation of such an artifact represents – herein termed the “textualized self” – is inextricable from the underlying facts of asynchrony and absence so constitutive of participatory copresence in the context of online interaction. This paper shall involve a discussion of the manner in which the textual coherence of the profile is crucial to the perceiv-ed/able truth value of the inscribed biography, arguing that this coherence in part derives from the deictic transposition of the materialized subject facilitating a cross-chronotope alignment traversing – and seeking to elide – the spatio-temporal gaps introduced by the geographical non-copresence of participants, marking as co-eval the putatively binary interactional moments of sending/receiving, the one with the other, and both with the objectivities inscribed in the denotational text of the profile.
Module Outlines by Anthony Kelly
How does the political subject emerge from processes of mass mediation? In what ways does media c... more How does the political subject emerge from processes of mass mediation? In what ways does media commentary shape public perceptions of political issues? How are patterns of political affiliation, identification, and mobilisation tied to the circulation of politically charged media content? Through an ethnographic focus on political media in the US, this module seeks to explore the mediation of politics from a linguistic anthropological perspective. Students will be introduced to key works in the anthropology of language and media as well as to the anthropological analysis of established and emerging genres of political mediation. In the final part of the course, we will consider how social practices of media reflect and embody ideological orientations to ways of knowing and question what this means for how political realities get co-constructed.
Digital technologies are becoming ubiquitous, fuelling massive and rapid changes in how people re... more Digital technologies are becoming ubiquitous, fuelling massive and rapid changes in how people relate to each other, how they work and do business, and how they think about what it means to be human. To what extent do these developments challenge established notions of the self, of the field, and of the real? How can anthropology help us to understand digital technologies on a human scale? This module offers students an overview of some important theoretical and methodological developments in digital anthropology, with a focus on a range of ethnographic approaches to digital culture, from traditional ethnographies of digital technologies and media to virtual ethnographies of online environments and communities.
Globalisation is a concept that in its most basic sense implies a contemporary intensification of... more Globalisation is a concept that in its most basic sense implies a contemporary intensification of global interconnectedness. What are the technological and economic preconditions that allow for and demand the transnational flow of capital and commodities? How have they affected – and effected – the mediation of ideologies and migration of labour across national boundaries? This module offers students the opportunity to engage with and critically assess some of the key principles of globalisation, starting with the spatial metaphors “local” and “global.” In the final lectures, we will examine a selection of specific examples of global processes that will allow us to consider some of the alleged promises of globalisation as well as the many forms of resistance it engenders.
Papers by Anthony Kelly
AI & SOCIETY
This article conceptualises the role of audience agency in the performance of American conservati... more This article conceptualises the role of audience agency in the performance of American conservative identities within a hybridised outrage media ecology. Audience agency has been under-theorised in the study of outrage media through an emphasis on outrage as a rhetorical strategy of commercial media institutions. Relatively little has been said about the outrage discourse of audiences. This coincides with a tendency to consider online political talk as transparent and "earnest," thereby failing to recognise the multi-vocality, dynamism, and ambivalence—i.e., performativity—of online user-generated discourse. I argue the concept of recontextualisation offers a means of addressing these shortcomings. I demonstrate this by analysing how the users of the American right-wing partisan media website TheBlaze.com publicly negotiated support for Donald Trump in a below-the-line comment field during the 2016 US presidential election. These processes are situated with respect to the ...
Online social networking is a phenomenon marked for both the fact of its mediated nature and its ... more Online social networking is a phenomenon marked for both the fact of its mediated nature and its inevitable dependence on the articulation of a user profile, predominantly and ideally inscribed in the autobiographical voice, the form of which shifts in relation with the particular communicative constraints specific to given networks. As communications technologies increasingly facilitate the mass mediation of human social life, the significance of text as a vehicle for the self-representation of social actors becomes progressively more marked.
This prompts an appraisal of the pragmatic characteristics and potentials of text as a visuospatial communicative modality. Talk – whether achieved in vocal or textual modalities – is governed by arrays of social constraint expressed in the context(s) of foregoing texts and is, thus, itself a form of performance within which individuals assume responsibility for the negotiation and deployment of valued models of discourse.
Discourse serves as both a maker and marker of identity insofar as it both manifests and acts to produce it. Discourse as modeled in encountered texts furthermore serves as a model for its own production, but directives as to the production of discourse are also modeled in explicit and implicit metalinguistic regulatory content, impinging on the authorial practice of constituting oneself in text.
Prosthetic insofar as it permits the performance of the self beyond the bounds of the physical body, and fiction insofar as it is the product of a selective reduction, the materialized subject is interactively transposed across the spatiotemporal gaps introduced by the geographical non-copresence of online social networking participants. This effective absence – and its correlate, asynchrony – imply the active engagement of the reader in the completion of authored selves as hypertextually assembled and stereotypically interpreted indexical, biographical constructs dramatized by the reader in the absence of h-is/er interlocutor.
By applying theories of discourse to the digital and virtual artifacts produced as a phenomenological effect of individual self-representation within the bounds of a specific online social network, this thesis seeks to demonstrate the manner in which the textualized self – a textual materialization of the subject – is routinely constructed by a semiotic process that confounds the dual roles of author and reader.
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Talks by Anthony Kelly
Module Outlines by Anthony Kelly
Papers by Anthony Kelly
This prompts an appraisal of the pragmatic characteristics and potentials of text as a visuospatial communicative modality. Talk – whether achieved in vocal or textual modalities – is governed by arrays of social constraint expressed in the context(s) of foregoing texts and is, thus, itself a form of performance within which individuals assume responsibility for the negotiation and deployment of valued models of discourse.
Discourse serves as both a maker and marker of identity insofar as it both manifests and acts to produce it. Discourse as modeled in encountered texts furthermore serves as a model for its own production, but directives as to the production of discourse are also modeled in explicit and implicit metalinguistic regulatory content, impinging on the authorial practice of constituting oneself in text.
Prosthetic insofar as it permits the performance of the self beyond the bounds of the physical body, and fiction insofar as it is the product of a selective reduction, the materialized subject is interactively transposed across the spatiotemporal gaps introduced by the geographical non-copresence of online social networking participants. This effective absence – and its correlate, asynchrony – imply the active engagement of the reader in the completion of authored selves as hypertextually assembled and stereotypically interpreted indexical, biographical constructs dramatized by the reader in the absence of h-is/er interlocutor.
By applying theories of discourse to the digital and virtual artifacts produced as a phenomenological effect of individual self-representation within the bounds of a specific online social network, this thesis seeks to demonstrate the manner in which the textualized self – a textual materialization of the subject – is routinely constructed by a semiotic process that confounds the dual roles of author and reader.
This prompts an appraisal of the pragmatic characteristics and potentials of text as a visuospatial communicative modality. Talk – whether achieved in vocal or textual modalities – is governed by arrays of social constraint expressed in the context(s) of foregoing texts and is, thus, itself a form of performance within which individuals assume responsibility for the negotiation and deployment of valued models of discourse.
Discourse serves as both a maker and marker of identity insofar as it both manifests and acts to produce it. Discourse as modeled in encountered texts furthermore serves as a model for its own production, but directives as to the production of discourse are also modeled in explicit and implicit metalinguistic regulatory content, impinging on the authorial practice of constituting oneself in text.
Prosthetic insofar as it permits the performance of the self beyond the bounds of the physical body, and fiction insofar as it is the product of a selective reduction, the materialized subject is interactively transposed across the spatiotemporal gaps introduced by the geographical non-copresence of online social networking participants. This effective absence – and its correlate, asynchrony – imply the active engagement of the reader in the completion of authored selves as hypertextually assembled and stereotypically interpreted indexical, biographical constructs dramatized by the reader in the absence of h-is/er interlocutor.
By applying theories of discourse to the digital and virtual artifacts produced as a phenomenological effect of individual self-representation within the bounds of a specific online social network, this thesis seeks to demonstrate the manner in which the textualized self – a textual materialization of the subject – is routinely constructed by a semiotic process that confounds the dual roles of author and reader.