I am writing this, mostly, in response to Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa’s article “#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States.” Published in the Vol. 42, Iss. 1 (February 2015) of American Ethnologist, I only just got round to reading it. Given my interests in the concurrent militarization and “prisonization” of American life, with an ongoing racialized basis, this is unfortunate. Bonilla and Rosa’s article is an important point of departure, even though I find it deeply unsatisfying.

I acknowledge that there are important insights in this article. For example in considering the possibilities and limitations of Twitter hashtags as a place to do research (a “field site” in anthropology speak), the are quick to note the importance of “distinguishing the town of Ferguson, Missouri, from ‘hashtag Ferguson’ and to recognize how each of these contributed to the formation of the larger ‘event’ of Ferguson.” (The article is behind a paywall—I will hope that the AAA will move to true open access for all of its journals in the near future.)

They point up the decontextualized character of hashtag ethnography:

“Part of the problem of engaging in hashtag ethnography, then, is that it is difficult to assess the context of social media utterances. Moreover, a simple statement of fact—for example, that there were eight million Ferguson tweets—tells us very little. How many were critical of the police? How many were critical of the protestors? How many were posted by journalists (both professional and amateur)? Beyond knowing that people tweeted, we know little about what those tweets meant to their authors and their imagined publics.”

And they emphasize the importance of not relying exclusively on online sources of information, given the particular distortions liable to emerge from such a methodology.

“Most observers of contemporary social movements would agree that what is needed is not simply “internet ethnography” but “internet related ethnography” (Postill and Pink 2012:3) that follows users across multiple online and off-line communities to better understand how digital and analog forms of engagement are mutually constitutive (Juris 2012:260).”

Yet much of this is both obvious and oddly—from my point-of-view—disconnected from the larger questions associated with the rise of citizen journalism and the simultaneous flooding of channels of distribution with a deluge of “noise” in the form of irrelevant commentaries, willful trolling, and token participation. More to the point, the authors—without ever seeming hostile to #Blacklivesmatter—focus their documentary lens on describing the limits of internet activism as a way of thinking about the limits of internet ethnography.

This is a choice of focus—and again, not without interest—it just leaves me wondering and wanting not a meta-commentary on the limits of Twitter, but an ethnographically informed analysis of citizen journalism as a mode of activism in the face of active resistance from the state to “bricks and mortar” activism (tongue firmly in cheek, except that I want to point out that “street activism” has often evoked the same kind of “this is transient” commentary that Rosa and Bonilla fall back on in describing internet activism).

Part of this may from the “restricted” perspective of what is publishable in AE—one of the half-dozen most important journals in cultural anthropology. American Ethnologist tends to publish—in my judgment—articles that are above all “safe” in terms of what they are willing to claim as knowledge. (Okay, this is another way of saying “vetted,” “sound,” and presumably “reliable”—I am not an AE fan, but don’t deny the value of what they publish.)

But another part is (probably) the incessant anthropological gaze and the way it is drawn to issues of epistemology. (I know the fashionable notion is “ontology” but these are not ontological issues—the status of knowledge claims derived in whole or in part from reading and sorting hashtags on Twitter is epistemological. Also, and this relates only to a throwaway line in the article, online personas are not ontological derivations and those who claim they are such a thing are engaging in hyperbole—until/unless consciousness is divorced from bodies, allowing the person to exist free of breathing, eating, digesting and emptying his or her bowels, a new world is not being constellated—sorry, we are stuck with the old one in which everyone is impacted by climate change (if hardly equally), and can be targeted by weaponized drones controlled from half-a-world away.) The privileging of the knowing aspect of the “#”—that is, how can we know it; what does it tell us, etc., sets aside (not willfully, not completely, but still), the embodied struggles that link, however weakly, back to the hashtag.

And when I say that embodied struggles “link” to the hashtag it is worth translating this into a language of political action, or English anyway. Whatever else it may do, the #Ferguson hashtag was/is a way to mobilize support for a real struggle for justice, linked to the killing of a particular black teenager—Michael Brown—as well as the thousands of civilians, the majority Black and Latino men—who have been killed by police in the last fifteen years.

It is striking that the order of magnitude of these killings is roughly equal to U.S. combat deaths in the war on terror; even as the number of incarcerated, 2.x million, is of the same order of magnitude of those “serving” in the military. Why is this striking apart from being a moment of numerological convergence? Because these are astonishing statistics, or should be, placed in any kind of critical perspective—and it is exactly such a perspective that #Ferguson could help to highlight.

Now, it is unfair to take the authors to task for having different interests and obsessions than me. So to an extent I will accept a judgment of unfairness. They can rightly say—“you do that study, don’t criticize us for what we didn’t do.” Yet there remains the fact Rosa and Bonilla were not writing a textbook account of hashtag methodology, but about Ferguson/#Ferguson and its implications for ethnography. This does, I think, raise the bar in terms of expectations above, say, #celebrity gossip, in terms of going beyond the reflexive questions of method.