Social Media in Northern Chile

Front matter

| SOCIAL MEDIA x

PUBLISHED AND FORTHCOMING TITLES:

Social Media in Southeast Turkey Elisabetta Costa

Introduction to the series Why We Post

This book is one of a series of 11 titles. There are nine monographs devoted to specific field sites (including this one) in Brazil, Chile, China, England, India, Italy, Trinidad and Turkey — they will be published in 2016-17. The series also includes a comparative book about all of our findings, published to accompany this title, and a final book which contrasts the visuals that people post on Facebook in the English field site with those on our Trinidadian field site.

When we tell people that we have written nine monographs about social media around the world, and that they all have the same chapter headings (apart from Chapter 5), they are concerned about potential repetition. However, if you decide to read several of these books (and we very much hope you do), you will see that this device has been helpful in showing the precise opposite. Each book is as individual and distinct as if it were on an entirely different topic.

This is perhaps our single most important finding. Most studies of the internet and social media are based on research methods that assume we can generalise across different groups. We look at tweets in one place and write about ‘Twitter’. We conduct tests about social media and friendship in one population, and then write on this topic as if friendship means the same thing for all populations. By presenting nine books with the same chapter headings, you can judge for yourselves what kinds of generalisations are, or are not, possible.

Our intention is not to evaluate social media, either positively or negatively. Instead the purpose is educational, providing detailed evidence of what social media has become in each place, and the local consequences, including local evaluations.

Each book is based on 15 months of research during which time most of the anthropologists lived, worked and interacted with people in the local language. Yet they differ from the dominant tradition of writing social science books. Firstly they do not engage with the academic literatures on social media. It would be highly repetitive to have the vi same discussions in all nine books. Instead discussions of these literatures are to be found in our comparative book, How the World Changed Social Media. Secondly these monographs are not comparative, which again is the primary function of this other volume. Thirdly, given the immense interest in social media from the general public, we have tried to write in an accessible and open style. This means we have adopted a mode more common in historical writing of keeping all citations and the discussion of all wider academic issues to endnotes. If you prefer to read above the line, each text offers a simple narrative about our findings. If you want to read a more conventional academic book that relates the material to its academic context, this can be done through engaging with the endnotes.

We hope you enjoy the results, and we hope you will also read our comparative book — and perhaps some of the other monographs — in addition to this one.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES WHY WE POST

Acknowledgements

This book is a product of my postdoctoral research as part of the Global Social Media Impact Study. Of course, no book is entirely an individual project, but this book in particular has been nurtured through collaboration and assistance from many individuals. The Global Social Media Impact Study team, who welcomed me, shared with me and taught me so many important lessons has been invaluable to this work. Elisabetta Costa, Tom McDonald, Razvan Nicolescu, Jolynna Sinanan, Juliano Spyer, Shriram Venkatraman and Xinyuan Yang have been the greatest colleagues, collaborators and friends anyone could hope for. Daniel Miller, our fearless leader, has been especially important to the development of this book. But my postdoctoral research fellowship was housed at the Interdisciplinary Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, funded by the Chilean CONICYT - FONDAP15110006, to which I am grateful for financial and academic support. I am also grateful to have benefitted from the project’s primary funding from European Research Council grant ERC-2011-AdG-295486 Socnet. At the Universidad Catolica I have been fortunate to work with Jaime Coquelet, Helene Risør, Marjorie Murray, Piergiorgio di Giminiani and longtime friends and collaborators Paula Seravia, and Jorge Montesinos.

This research would not have been possible without the help and support of the people of Alto Hospicio, Chile. In particular Jorge Castro Garete’s help as my research assistant in July and August 2014 was invaluable. I also will be forever indebted to individuals who gave their time and knowledge, and often offered their homes, food, vehicles and any number of other resources to me. First I must thank Jair Andres Correa Garamufio, who provided all of these as well as great emotional support during some of the hardest times of field work. Guillermo Lopez and Cristian Schlick also provided instrumental emotional support and an occasional necessary respite from field work. I would also like to thank the Correa Garamuño family, the Cornejo Ferrest family and vii

Michelle Cornejo in particular, as well as José Vilches, Eduardo Callo, Marcela Rojas, David Urrea and Alex Vilches.

I would also like to thank a number of colleagues who read drafts of various chapters and provided helpful feedback. I am grateful for the support of Matthew Thomann, Elijah Edelman, Joowon Park, William Leap, Bryan McNeil, Adrienne Pine, Dylan Kerrigan, Harjant Gill, Luis Landa, Rebecca Stone Gordon, Gregory Mitchell and Mark Cartwright. Former mentors Helen B. Schwartzman, E. Patrick Johnson, and the late Dwight Conquergood deserve thanks too. I cannot fail to mention those friends I have met in South America, who in different ways have been present and supportive, including Mauricio Salazar Jemio, Gustavo Palacios, Carlos Mendoza Martinez, Kicho Jimenez Ross, Rodrigo Jimenez Ross, Raquel Canales Molina, Roger Duran, Lysanne Merkenstein, Michael Poteet, Alex White, Juan Carrizo Ibarra, Orlando Compton, Lorenzo Dolcetti and Andrés Sanchez. But most importantly, I must thank my parents, Mary and Thomas Haynes, and my sister, Ida Haynes, who have always encouraged me to explore new places and try new things. They have also been a lifeline during the hardest times of field work and most stressful times of writing and editing. Without their support this book would not have been possible.