ABSTRACT
Defining a fieldsite is one of the most challenging aspects of media anthropology work in the context of global, digital platforms. This chapter argues that ethnographies of the Internet should not be limited to platforms’ pro-users – its dominant actors, its most popular or active groups. Instead we need ethnographies of the digitally dispossessed: those who are not represented online, who are routinely ignored, omitted, denigrated and denounced. The chapter is focused within the context of an Internet that is increasingly subject to the logic of automation and AI, and where voice is enabled through one’s mastering of data centric representational forms. Using the case of English Wikipedia and an article that faced significant challenges in its first year of development, the chapter uses three strategies for exploring digital knowledge platforms from the perspective of the digital subaltern including: entering via flagged erasures, following sources and their characterisation, and analysing the networks that traverse articles. The chapter applies these strategies in the fieldwork context of northern India, demonstrating the ways in which digital and datafied knowledge representations increasingly gain purchase or are stopped in their tracks via digital knowledge infrastructures.
