ABSTRACT
Humans have developed a vast array of mediational spaces, artifacts and practices that use technology to fix, extend and elaborate on human communication. Each new technology for symbolic communication led to new social institutions and new ways of sharing cultural models of the social and cosmological orders. Media are, therefore, a fundamental aspect of human life and a necessary subject for anthropological inquiry. The anthropology of media emerged in a particular historical moment, and developed theories and methods to study a range of physical and electronic media technologies such as the printing press, phonographs and broadcast communications. As a result, early work in the anthropology of media focused on the creation, circulation and consumption of fixed texts. The emergence of social media, web-based media and gaming has created a variety of challenges for media anthropologists as texts give way to new semiotic practices and processes involving collective narrative construction, collective diffusion and decentered agency that requires new ways of conceiving media. At the same time, ethnographic methods, comparative approaches and holistic perspectives continue to offer promising ways for anthropology to contribute to the study of media.
