ABSTRACT
Popular and academic writings on digital technology tend to characterize the effects of its distinguishing properties – abstraction, binarism, and the “reduction of quality to quantity” – in one of two ways. The inductive orientation and fieldwork-based methodologies of anthropology, proceeding from observation to analysis and privileging particular cases over general frameworks, have much to contribute to understanding the effects of digital technology on everyday human experience. Scholars have also considered how individuals use social media to perform and narrate identities around illness and health practices, while others have focused on the ways in which telecare technologies redefine patient identities and roles. Ethnographers have documented the robust sense of community that can unfold in computer-accessed game worlds, resulting in affiliations that in some cases transcend or escape the strictures of offline social dynamics and, in other cases, recreate or even amplify them.
