Digital Initiation Rites (Paperback)

Paperback. Digital Initiation Rites is an ethnography of Anonymous in Britain between 2014 and 2017, in the context of government austerity. Drawing on testimonies of dozens of participants, for whom digital technologies enabled and articulated a political transformation from being "asleep" to being "awake," Vita Peacock narrates the process through which these technologies have become implicated in profound subjective changes. The book joins a wider return of the comparative method in anthropology by placing these accounts in direct conversation with studies of traditional initiation rites - ritual sequences of symbolic death and rebirth - that charge the initiand with knowledge about a society to produce a moral responsibility for it. Through this juxtaposition, Peacock conceptualizes the historically novel form of digital initiation rites, in which digital communication and information technologies play a substantive role in these sequences. Digital Initiation Rites presents another angle to contemporary debates around "conspiracy theorizing" and shows how the consumption of digital media connects to the deep history of humankind. "An ethnography of Anonymous in Britain in the mid-2010s, the book maps a narrative of subjective epistemic change members call "waking up." This transformation is framed through the anthropology and sociology of cults and initiation rites, demonstrating the emergence of new digital forms of these phenomena"-- Provided by publisher. Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability.…