The online culture wars: a global perspective
Speaker: John Postill, Digital Ethnography Research Centre, RMIT University Melbourne.
In this edition of the IMCI Speaker Series, John Postill from the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University Melbourne, will draw from long-term online research to tell the story of how the anti-woke movement -- US-centered movement led by controversial culture warriors such as Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Tucker Carlson -- came into being. He will tell his causation tale through four critical media events: the early Trump presidency, the Covid-19 pandemic, the George Floyd protests, and the war in Ukraine. Each event, according to him, had unique ‘worlding’ effects on this dynamic space of content creation. Different digital practices (tweeting, podcasting, YouTubing, broadcasting, etc.), too, had different effects on the emerging antiwoke space.
In the second part of the talk, he will discuss how we might study the online culture wars beyond the Anglosphere, giving examples from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He advocates a ‘flat methodology’ or a ‘whatever works’ approach, which, he says, is an open-ended way of doing digital ethnography that does not privilege any prior method – including participant observation – or even one’s own primary research.
About the speaker
John Postill (PhD, UCL) is an anthropologist currently working at RMIT University, in Melbourne. He specialises in the study of media, communication, and socio-political change. To date he has conducted fieldwork in Malaysia, Indonesia, Spain and (online) in the Anglosphere. He is the author of numerous publications, including The Anthropology of Digital Practices (in press, Routledge) and The Rise of Nerd Politics (2018, Pluto). At present he is researching the online culture wars globally.