Gabriele de Seta (born 1986) is a digital anthropologist and sociologist specialising in everyday digital culture in the Chinese speaking world, and known for his contributions to digital ethnographic methodology. He works at the

University of Bergen The University of Bergen ( no, Universitetet i Bergen, ) is a research-intensive state university located in Bergen, Norway. As of 2019, the university has over 4,000 employees and 18,000 students. It was established by an act of parliament in 194 ...

Education and career

Gabriele de Seta has a PhD in Sociology from the

Hong Kong Polytechnic University The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) is a public research university located in Hung Hom, Hong Kong near Hung Hom station. The University is one of the eight government-funded degree-granting tertiary institutions in Hong Kong. Founded ...

(2016), after which he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Ethnology,

Academia Sinica Academia Sinica (AS, la, 1=Academia Sinica, 3=Chinese Academy; ), headquartered in Nangang, Taipei, is the national academy of Taiwan. Founded in Nanking, the academy supports research activities in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from ...

in Taipei, Taiwan. He joined the

in 2020 as a postdoctoral fellow.

Research focus

De Seta is most known for his extensive research on how digital media and the internet are used creatively and in everyday life in the Chinese-speaking world. He first realised how significant digital media were to Chinese social life when studying experimental music in Shanghai. His articles "WeChat as infrastructure: The techno-nationalist shaping of Chinese digital platforms" (with Jean-Christophe Plantin) and "Through the looking glass: Twenty years of Chinese Internet research" (with David Kurt Herold) present broad analyses of the Chinese internet, while he in other articles analyses specific cultural phenomena such as ''biaoqing'' (visual forms of expression like

emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversat ...

, digital stickers etc.),

trolling In slang, a troll is a person who posts or makes inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages online (such as in social media, a newsgroup, a forum, a chat room, a online video game), or in real life, with the i ...

in social media globally and in a Chinese context, and digital

folklore Folklore is shared by a particular group of people; it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group. This includes oral traditions such as tales, legends, proverbs and jokes. They include material culture, ranging ...

more broadly, including how

Pepe the Frog Pepe the Frog () is an Internet meme consisting of a green anthropomorphic frog with a humanoid body. Pepe originated in a 2005 comic by Matt Furie called ''Boy's Club''. It became an Internet meme when its popularity steadily grew across Myspa ...

became embroiled in the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement. Throughout his work he has emphasised how technology is not universal, but is used and interpreted differently in different cultural contexts. In addition to the ethnographic approach in much of his work, de Seta has contributed to theoretical frameworks by developing Bratton's concept of the "stack" to show how the Chinese Internet relies upon a partly different societal infrastructure. De Seta's reflections on digital ethnography's methodologies have also been influential. His 2020 paper "Three Lies of Digital Ethnography", which draws upon

Gary Alan Fine Gary Alan Fine (born May 11, 1950, in New York City) is an American sociologist and author. Life and career The son of Bernard David Fine and Bernice Estelle Tanz, Fine grew up in Manhattan and went to the Horace Mann School. He studied psych ...

's "Ten Lies of Ethnography", is a self-reflexive analysis of how methodological illusions can be useful heuristics for research. The paper was translated to Spanish in 2021. Another paper, which de Seta co-authored with Crystal Abidin, analyses methodological mistakes the authors have made in order to develop a more robust understanding of digital ethnography. From 2020 he has been a researcher with

Jill Walker Rettberg Jill Walker Rettberg (born Jill Walker in 1971) is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen. She is "a leading researcher in self-representation in social media" and a European Research Council grantee (2018-2023) with the proj ...

's team at the University of Bergen, researching machine vision technologies from a cultural perspective. As part of this project he has published on

deepfake Deepfakes (a portmanteau of "deep learning" and "fake") are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness. While the act of creating fake content is not new, deepfakes leverage powerful ...

s in China, and has written a speculative scifi story about potential future versions of QR codes. In an analysis of the Chinese use of visual technologies in response to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

, de Seta coined the term "optical governance".

Awards

De Seta won the University of Bergen Prize for Young Researchers in the Humanities in 2022.

References

{{Authority control Italian anthropologists University of Bergen faculty Italian sociologists Italian sinologists 1986 births Living people