ABSTRACT
This entry engages with anthropological contributions to the study of citizen media based on long-term, ethnographic fieldwork and immersive engagement. Media anthropology has developed as a cohesive subfield of anthropology mainly within the last two decades, but anthropologists have paid attention to media for much longer. Methodologically, anthropology engenders a decentring of media as but one part of the social worlds under interrogation, thus facilitating the analysis of subtle ambiguities and tensions in citizens’ engagement with media. With their wide geographical scopes, anthropological studies further serves to decentre the West, which has historically been favoured in media studies. Citizen media are often intricately related to institutional media, as illustrated by Anonymous attacks on film and music industry websites and activists campaigns against mainstream media. Grappling with the sociocultural complexities of citizen media entails interrogating the complex entanglements of the personal and the political as well as the deliberate and the inadvertent. This entry covers overt citizen media activism as well as the gradual, implicit and everyday practices of citizen media entailing quiet ruptures, which become significant or enable opportunities for distinct action over time.
