This article discusses the relationship between technology and Inuit identity. Using interviews, it explores how a group of students from the Arctic College located in the community of Iqaluit in the Canadian Arctic, use the social network Facebook. It was found that in addition to an expected use of the social network associated with the script promoted by the technology, Inuit youth used Facebook to access content related to their identity in various groups, discuss sociocultural issues, and remember traditions. This article argues that Inuit identity is an example of how indigenous cultures have to be understood as something dynamic, constantly changing, for which information and communication technologies are fundamental. Furthermore, this article claims that rather than understanding Facebook as a tool that is adopted by Indigenous people—as previous literature tends to hold—the use of digital media should be conceived as part and parcel of identity.
In this article I reflect on a particular Inuit use of the social networking site Facebook: the group called Inuit Hunting Stories of the Day. I focus on two main issues. First, I discuss the logic behind current technologies as conceptualized by Albert Borgmann (e.g., 1984), who states that rather than being neutral tools, modern devices foster a particular “taking-up” with the world that leads to disengagement from community and meaningful practices. Arguing against this view, I discuss how Inuit Hunting Stories of the Day is an example of how the internet and Facebook are appropriated and provide meaningful engagement. Second, I follow anthropologist Claudio Aporta’s (2013) notion of ecology of technology and argue that the relationship between technology and Inuit has to be understood within an ecological framework that encompasses the broader context of political, economic, and social change, which are intertwined with the use, appropriation, adoption, and adaptation of technology. Drawing from the ecology of technology perspective, it is my central argument that technology and computer-mediated communication bring proximity to cultural practices, activities, and the land rather than provoking distance and alienation from reality, as commonly expressed in dystopian notions.
Much research has focused on the introduction of information and communication technology (ICTs) into the lives of older people, but it has generally understood them as external factors who act as a sort of independent variable that impacts the seniors' lives. There remains a dearth of empirical research into how aging and technology are co-constructed, namely, research that focuses on older people's relationship to technology as a socio-technical network. We therefore contribute to this field by analyzing the development and establishment of a network in a geriatric hospital in Montevideo, Uruguay. Uruguay has been developing a one-tablet computer-per low-income-senior policy since 2015. In this research, we deployed a qualitative ethnographic research comprised of semi-structured interviews, jottings, and field notes where we explore the adoption of tablets within the corresponding actornetwork. Our findings suggest that objectively, not only was the establishment of the sociotechnical network rife with complexities, disruptions, and fissures, but subjectively, seniors in the hospital were heavily influenced by their selfperception of the potentialities of ICTs.
This thesis engages in a broad discussion of technology, communications, identity, and cultural change in the Canadian Arctic. Using an ethnographic methodological strategy, it looks at how a group of Inuit college students in Iqaluit use the online social network Facebook. It was found that Inuit youth are intensive users of Facebook, basically using it to communicate with their communities of origin, to maintain friends and family ties across a vast territory, to access cultural referents on Facebook groups, discuss issues, shape their identity, ask questions, access pictures of the land and recall traditions. In these Facebook groups, there is a cultural memory and remembrance of the past collectively established through the hypertext of Facebook which further shows how technology is incorporated and adapted to a culture rather than being undermined by that technology's incorporation. In this sense, Inuit youth "travel" through Facebook using it for their own purposes such as accessing cultural referents of the land in a multimedia interface. This research also argues, from an actor-network perspective, that Inuit youth are immersed in a culture of connectivity (van Dijck, 2013) through which social life and experiences are increasingly mediated by social network sites. 2 groups 1 (Scobie and Rodgers, 2013). The site is extensively used and has acquired a special presence in the media-scape, and plays an important role in defining Inuit presence on the Internet.Previous literature on how indigenous peoples have used media and communication technologies tended to looked at this relation positively
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