Information, Medium & Society: Nineteenth International Conference on Publishing Studies

Abstract

Ethnographic research has traditionally focused on human experiences and human culture. New materialist theory has called for the decentralization of the human in ethnography and other research methods, arguing that other species, digital technologies, and the material world are largely unexplored sites of knowledge production, but ones that significantly impact the ways in which humans experience everyday life. In the current moment, the nearly universal and mundane use of digital technologies influences how people interact with each other and with their environments. One example of this human-digital interaction is the use of ‘bots’, or autonomous Internet-based computer programs that are designed to interact with humans in a variety of ways. Existing work on bots has focused on the humans involved, namely the creators and end users. In this paper I am choosing not to examine the bot programmers themselves (their rationales, preoccupations, and occupational demands) nor the programmer-bot ‘intra-actions’ (Barad, 2007), not because it is unimportant in understanding the “ontological multiplicities of bots” (Geiger, 2013), but because the epistemological work of a new materialist approach demands the decentering of humans. By centering the non-human, specifically the bot, we can begin to address a number of interesting new ethnographic research questions, including non-human categories of identity (i.e., can bots have genders or sexualities?) and non-human digital culture (i.e., can human-created entities have a distinct culture?)