Scalable sociality and "How the world changed social media" conversation with Daniel Miller
ABSTRACT Daniel Miller is Professor of Material Culture at University College London. His prolific work in consumption studies, material culture studies and, more recently, digital anthropology has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of consumption, markets and culture. Miller is currently in the midst of a five year European Research Council grant titled, Social Network Sites and Social Science, which funds the Global Social Media Impact Study. Developing concepts such as scalable sociality and understandings of "Why We Post," anthropologists in nine locations around the world have conducted ethnographies, each of 15 months, focusing on everyday social media use in relation to issues of migration, family, politics, education, and commerce, as well as, on the ways in which genres of content flow through different platforms. The project's output includes 11 scholarly books, the launch of the Why We Post website, and an online university course, all of which are open access and have creative commons license. Miller is a Fellow of the British Academy and has won the Royal Anthropological Institute's Rivers Memorial Prize, given in past years to such luminaries as Bronislaw Malinowski, E. E. Evans Pritchard, and Mary Douglas. This interview took place in London, 19 October 2015.