“Instead of treating theory as a servant we rather become its servants”: Daniel Miller on smartphones and age

Abstract

Anthropologist Daniel Miller and his colleagues from different countries have conducted several major researches on how people interact with social media and mobile platforms. Polina Kolozaridi and her colleagues from the Club for Internet and Society Enthusiasts worked on translating an online course based on the survey “Why We Post”, which took place in the 2010s. After that, Miller and his team began studying applications for health and elderly users. In this conversation, the participants draw on materials from an ongoing research project. However, these materials already raise questions about the extent to which theories and phones consist of metaphors, and whether ethnography should be trusted.