SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This study is based on 18 months of fieldwork with Sri Lankans who use social media for resistance. On the one hand, the monograph considers the ethnographic tensions that emerge in the encounter between being a highly visible Sri Lankan activist on social media in a media sphere notorious for its restriction of media freedoms, the proliferation of disinformation, and state-sponsored violence against dissenters. On the other hand, it probes the lure and demands of widespread influencer culture on social media and how the accumulation and exchange of influence affects and contributes to how activists politically participate. The term ‘information influencer’ is introduced to bridge these tensions and make a departure from the overused and ambiguous concept of digital activist. In addition, the monograph offers a conceptual way of seeing social media influence through the prism of ‘digital capital’. By advancing Bourdieu’s notion of capital and rewiring it for the digital era, digital capital is defined as the highly visible datafication of social media users’ follower count and is shown to be the primary affordance of social media activity. The information influencers studied have amassed considerable stockpiles of digital capital which has conflicting consequences, attracting surveillance, hackers and trolls on social media, plus fame and opportunities in real life (IRL). The study is also a demonstration of the methodological challenge of doing ethnography through a pandemic and devising novel solutions to unprecedented problems. The outcome, 'augmented ethnography', is a patchwork approach combining datafied, digital and in person modalities for a deeper understanding of the complexity of a social world organised by data, presented through a screen, and experienced in the body. The 4 commonplace distinction made between the online and offline worlds is contested through the augmented approach and the six chapters that comprise the independent dimensions of the study: 1) media, 2) people, 3) data, 4) platforms, 5) place, and 6) practice. Presented under the titular The Digital IRL, the monograph emphasises the collapse of the faux binary between online practice and place, and life offline.