I am in their groupchat, but am I in their group? Moving from outside to inside digital spaces and why it is different (and the same) to analog spaces

Drawing from personal ethnographic experiences among the digital and non-digital social practices of LGBT+ student organizations in Milan, Italy, I try to understand the phenomenon of “being added” to the digital spaces of people populating our fieldwork as ethnographers. In approaching my current research among queer people of northern Italy, in fact, I reached multiple activism groups from the city of Milan. While my relationship to these groups and to single individuals among them varied wildly due to my past as a fellow queer activist, a clear step was always taken in my attempts to enter these organizations as a researcher: they added me to a WhatsApp group chat. The instantaneous passage from “out” to “in” a WhatsApp group comprised of a neatly defined array of members rarely represents traditional ethnographic settings, where levels of access to individuals is gradual and social groups have vague boundaries. Student activist associations in big cities, moreover, represent a kind of social entity characterized by extremely varied degrees of involvement from singular members, a high turnover of participants and a generally “in flux” social cohesion, as students tend to have quickly shifting schedules and their day is rarely spent only in their campus among the same people. Conversely, a group chat is a social space where every member is clearly defined as such by software, while the affordances of WhatsApp as a technology provide each of them with the exact same level of access to the shared communicative space. This field configuration appears to be rarely found in ethnographic efforts which do not include digital spaces:“offline” ties to our fields, especially in urban environments, are often murky, context dependent and always in flux due to the gradual nature of our relationship to individuals and the absence of strict boundaries among social groups. In this intervention, I propose to analyze what seem to be the peculiarities of digital spaces, borrowing the concepts of non-graduality and non-continuity from the fields of Science and Technology Studies and Semiotics (Dewdney, Ride 2014; Fischer, 2011; Manovich, 2002; Miller, 2020; Pias, 2016). “Digital” means “numerical” and these scholars see digital architectures, since they are numerical, as being constructed by noncontinuous, non-gradual intervals of values (Robinson, 2008): the binary code is a clear example, in fact, as there is no sliding scale between 0 and 1. As coded software, a Whatsapp group chats might always be inherently beyond the possibility of reflecting the graduality and the nuances often embedded in human sociality. In a digital environment, in fact, social realities might inherently have to deal with structures and representational tools which neatly define boundaries, clearly divide and unambiguously provide (or not) access. What, however, one must be careful about when dealing with these considerations about digital media, is to not overextend them to the whole social context they are dealing with. While it is true that, in my field, WhatsApp group chats could be described in their non-continuity with other clearly separated spaces and in the non-graduality of “being added” to them, it is also true that my relationship with these queer activist groups were otherwise just as ambiguous, multifaceted and nuanced as most other fieldwork configuration in ethnographic canon. While the group chat had a list of members and sometimes even a clearly stated objective, the social groups they referred to were populated by a variable number of individuals (student organizations have a high turnover rate), all of whom I had different degrees of familiarity with. Where, therefore, do we position non-continuity and non-graduality, “digitality”, in ethnographic practice? Since anthropology is devoted to the study of culture as a whole (Harkin, 2010), how does an anthropologist interpret digital spaces with regards to cultural analysis? In answering these questions, I expand on what “digital” is, departing from computer-based communication and finding examples of what, in traditional settings, can be described as non-gradual, non-continuous and “digital”. “Digitality” can easily be found outside of computer software (Fischer, 2011); similarly, traditional anthropological canon already includes multiple examples of clearly defined boundaries between social groups and non-gradual shifts in social standing: national borders, secret societies, rites of passage and initiation rituals (Allovio, 2014) are only some instances where one could clearly see similarities with my accounts of digital spaces. By selecting the qualities of digital media and highlighting them outside of computer-based spaces, I argue that ethnography becomes able to accurately position digital media in continuity with all other instances of non-graduality and non-continuity on the field, which could be as significant and culturally enshrined as a rite of passage or as irrelevant as mundane as crossing the entrance of a building. This conceptual and methodological shift, I argue, will allow ethnographers to refrain from inherently understanding digital media in isolation from “real life”, and more readily enquire whether, in their field, being added to a group chat is to be understood as a well respected “passage” from “out” to “in” a social group, or a much more mundane opening a door. References Allovio, Stefano. 2014. Riti di iniziazione: antropologi, stoici e finti immortali. Prima edizione. Milano: Raffaello Cortina editore. Dewdney, Andrew, and Peter Ride. 2014. The Digital Media Handbook. 2. ed. London: Routledge. Fischer, Thomas. 2011. ‘When Is Analog? When Is Digital?’ edited by R. Glanville. Kybernetes 40(7/8):1004–14. doi: 10.1108/03684921111160232. Harkin, Michael. 2010. ‘Uncommon Ground: Holism and the Future of Anthropology’. Reviews in Anthropology 39(1):25–45. doi: 10.1080/00938150903548600. Manovich, Lev. 2002. The Language of New Media. 1st MIT Press pbk. ed. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Miller, Vincent. 2020. Understanding Digital Culture. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications. Pias, Claus. 2016. Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences 1946-1953. The Complete Transactions. Zurich: Diaphanes. Robinson, Derek. 2008. ‘Analog’. Pp. 21–28 in Software Studies, edited by M. Fuller. The MIT Press.