A digital anthropology syllabus — reading the internet as culture

Digital anthropology — the study of human cultures as they're constituted through digital technology — sits in an uncomfortable position in 2026. The academic discipline is mature; the public discourse about internet culture is loud and unreflective. The books and writers below sit in the productive middle: serious about ethnographic method, accessible to readers who don't already know what 'affordances' means. This page is a syllabus for someone who wants to think about the contemporary internet with the analytical depth that anthropology brings, organized by what each source contributes: the foundational scholars who shaped the field, the books on specific platforms and communities, the writers tracking the internet's effect on identity and selfhood, the critical-theory adjacent literature that frames what's at stake, and the contemporary writers carrying the tradition forward. One deliberate omission: pure tech-critique that doesn't engage with culture as a concept ('these apps are bad because [statistics]') is excluded — the point of this syllabus is to think about the internet as people actually live in it, not to scold its designers.

A syllabus for thinking about the contemporary internet with the analytical depth that anthropology brings.