Abstract: The essay highlights the plurality of ethnographic choices that describe and analyze the digital and its increasingly complex ways of constituting life. In recent decades, anthropology has problematized, through different paths, the conception of the social or society as being the gathering of human individuals and their modes of representation, action, coexistence, and belonging. This includes the emergence of situational and contingent collectives, defined, for example, by the sharing of molecules, by binary and genetic codes, or by the combination of data mined by algorithms. Although projected as global, these technologies encounter resistance and mobilize diffuse interests, gaining new contours in localized practices. Personal computers and modeling software, apps and internet social networks, algorithms and DNA, artificial intelligence, and genetically modified organisms constitute a broad and complex amalgam that intersects digital and life technologies. They shape multiple worlds, modulated by mathematical combinations, technical arrangements, and biological transformations. A future that has been present for some time, although poorly distributed, whether in the emerging forms of social constitution or in the anthropologies interested in it.
Keywords:
ethnography; digital; biosociality, technosociality