Collecting the World

We are in a moment of intense critique and reflection of the history and legacy of ethnographic, and colonial, collection. By wondering if social media is the next ethnographic collection, I propose that the reckoning with difficult histories and power imbalances of ethnographic collection be channelled not just to the past but also be used as a mode of continued reflection on the future of museums and collections and that we apply the lens of contemporary critical museum anthropology, that has focused not simply on the collection and exhibition of material culture in museums, but on the structure of power, colonial histories and legacies, and social and political relations that these collections engender to our contemporary relationship with digital culture. Perhaps paradoxically, I also propose that we take seriously the analytic issues raised by digital, and especially social media – questions of scale, the everyday, normativity, class, language, as well as corporate control and surveillance – as an important heuristic to understand contemporary collecting of cultural practice and everyday life in museums. Is there any mileage left to the conception of the ethnographic collection? Or is it so tainted by the colonial project that it is no longer viable? If so, should we be satisfied with the ways in which corporate social media has supplanted the space of knowledge of the everyday both as the form and object of enquiry?