Abstract

Drawing on respective case studies from long-term ethnographic research studying smartphone practices in Ireland and Italy, in this article we explore the intersubjective, socio-technological affordances of social media and smartphones, in contributing to a rethinking of people’s self-positioning towards aspects of identity, religion, society and culture in both contexts. We argue how subjectification is always also an instance of objectification, and suggest that the ongoing task for anthropologists is to continue to mine the intersections between the individual and the collective, and subjectification and objectification, in our unfolding understandings of social media and subjectivity in contexts around the world.