{"id":74851,"date":"2025-02-08T02:13:20","date_gmt":"2025-02-08T02:13:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/anthropology\/wheres-anthropology-hashtag-mayhem-at-aaa2021baltimore\/"},"modified":"2025-02-08T02:13:20","modified_gmt":"2025-02-08T02:13:20","slug":"wheres-anthropology-hashtag-mayhem-at-aaa2021baltimore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=74851","title":{"rendered":"Where’s #Anthropology? Hashtag mayhem at #AAA2021Baltimore"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

\n

The American Anthropological Annual Meeting has come and gone after a year
\nhiatus. But, courtesy of the continued pandemic, it was not business as usual,
\nand a combination of uneven face-to-face\/online hybridity and a buggy app meant
\ncontinued confusion throughout the conference. Adding to that confusion was the
\nmultiplication of conference hashtags, a continuing source of ambiguity that I
\nhave chronicled on this blog over the years. This year, #AAA2021Baltimore was
\njoined by numerous, other hashtags: #AAA2021, #AAABaltimore, #AmAnth2021. Here\u2019s
\n a sociograph of different hashtags:<\/p>\n

\n \"\"<\/a>\n<\/div>\n

In the lower left of the graph, you can see #AAA2021Baltimore, the \u201cofficial\u201d
\nhashtag, mostly deployed by @AmericanAnththro–accounting for the \u201chub and
\nspoke\u201d pattern of that cluster.. The largest clusters, though, belong to the
\nAAA–that is, the Asian Artist Awards–and, in particular, the popular vote
\ncategory, which generated at least 80 percent of Twitter traffic around AAA2021
\n(congratulations Kim Seon Ho!) in Korean, Japanese and Thai. Other hashtags
\nreferring to the Awards likewise commanded large numbers of likes and retweets,
\n and anthropology was fairly occluded under the white-hot glare of K-Pop fans.<\/p>\n

\n Here are the top Twitter accounts by \u201cbetweenness centrality\u201d: top
\n betweenness: starnewskorea jonah_writer unitedmongjis_ anneekarika yoonbwii
\n gummy88888 tsukicooky fkfkfk_kfkfkf korb_blog weareoneexo yukaseon18 nuestnews
\n jseolhee 1exoklwkn americananthro kimsoen08051986 biancaphd Wickedwitcheso1 <\/p>\n

Note that @americananthro was the only anthropology account in the top counts. <\/p>\n

\n Here\u2019s the top anthropology tweet by re-tweet counts: \u201cInterested in reaching
\n a wider public with your research? Join us and @SAPIENS_org on Friday in
\n Baltimore at the @AmericanAnthro annual meeting for our public scholarship
\n event! Looking forward to learning and sharing ideas with you! @NapaAnthro
\n @WennerGrenOrg #aaa2021 https:\/\/t.co\/b4k210aCYs\u201d While here\u2019s the top tweet by
\n \u201clikes\u201d: \u201cSpeaking of sanctuary spaces she has found\/created within anthro,
\n Dr. Harrison says (and I paraphrase) “If I had to depend on a department of
\n anthropology for my sense of self, I wouldn’t be an anthropologist today!”
\n SAY. THAT. AGAIN. #AAA2021Baltimore\u201d\n<\/p>\n

In terms of the resulting network of meaning, this resulted in a AAA with a
\ndistinctly KPOP feel to it. Here\u2019s a semantic network that classifies tweets
\naccording to otheir overall theme:<\/p>\n

\n \"\"<\/a>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cObfuscation\u201d is a term that Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum have used to
\ndescribe the political mobilization of hashtags and other techniques to dilute
\nmessages, hide data or otherwise re-direct people for political ends.
\n\u201cObfuscation is the deliberate addition of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading
\ninformation to interfere with surveillance and data collection\u201d (2015: 1).
\nBrunton and Nissenbaum document the first instance of obfuscation in Russian
\nattempts to quell protests over the 2011 parliamentary elections. By flooding
\nthe hashtag \u201c#Triumfalnaya\u201d (a Moscow public square where protests took place)
\nwith messages extolling Russian nationalism or just nonsense words, the Russian
\ngovernment rendered the hashtag useless as a rallying point and reference to
\nprotests resisting the Putin\/Medvedev government. More recently, KPOP fans
\naround the world have used to same technique to flood white supremacist hashtags
\nwith concert clips and KPOP news. But, here, we have the American
\nAnthropological Association in essence obscuring itself through its dogged
\ninsistence on the \u201c#AAA\u201d hashtag, with AAA already a casualty of twentieth
\ncentury efforts to select names that would appear first in the alphabetical
\n yellow pages listings (AAA Bailbonds, anyone?). <\/p>\n

Why does the AAA continue with
\nthis hashtag? I think it ultimately comes down to brand identity–in other
\nwords, placing the organization over the imperatives of its members who might
\nuse hashtags to build solidarity among anthropologists. And it also has to do
\nwith a firm misunderstanding of the way Twitter works. Events are temporal. Even
\nthough Twitter breaks the strict chronology of its feed with older tweets (\u201cIn
\ncase you missed it\u201d), conference tweets are not going to persist more than a few
\ndays. And what is the goal? To communicate with anthropologists, or to increase
\nthe visibility of the American Anthropological Association? If it\u2019s about
\nanthropologists, then what about hashtags like \u201c#Anthropology2021\u201d? There\u2019s no
\nreference here to AAA at all, and the hashtag could be used by any anthropology
\nconference. Why not? Are we afraid that this will compete with other
\nanthropology conferences in late November? At a time when hybrid formats seem
\nlikely to persist, why not use hashtags to build links around the world to other
\n anthropologies?<\/p>\n

References<\/p>\n

Bunton, Finn and Helen Nissenbaum (2015).
\n Obfuscation: A User\u2019s Guide. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The American Anthropological Annual Meeting has come and gone after a year hiatus. But, courtesy of the continued pandemic, it was not business as usual, and a combination of uneven face-to-face\/online hybridity and a buggy app meant continued confusion throughout the conference. Adding to that confusion was the multiplication of conference hashtags, a continuing source […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":74852,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11767],"tags":[38544,3735,38543,26882,19364],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-74851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anthropology","tag-aaa2021baltimore","tag-anthropology","tag-hashtag","tag-mayhem","tag-wheres"],"yoast_head":"\nWhere's #Anthropology? 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