Tagging Culture: Building a Public Anthropology through Social Media

Multimedia challenges our understanding of what a public anthropology should do or can be. For our students and for communities with whom we work, the world exists to be recorded, shared, and distributed: social media is testament to this documentary Zeitgeist. How do we take a community's interest in these tools and forge a partnership that is both socially beneficial and rigorous? While the tools and the desire to undertake multimedia anthropology have never been so readily available, both the guidelines for multimedia research and the structure for the more fluid relationships between communities, participants, researchers, and universities are lacking. This paper will look to Anthropology by the Wire for a new model of public anthropology premised on social activism and collaborative research. In this "networked anthropology," the onus is on anthropologists to create their own "recursive" publics. This in turn is a form of reflexivity that, in an age of social media, comprises a vital stage in the collaborative ethnographic process.