As with holism, there is a version of relativism anthropologists have repudiated, (at least since the Second World War) associated with a plural concept of cultures that implied pure internal homogeneity and pure external heterogeneity. These perspectives took cultural differences as essentially historical and a priori based on the independent evolution of societies. By contrast, more contemporary anthropology recognises that within our political economy one region remains linked to low income agriculture and conservatism precisely because that suits the interests of a wealthier and dominant region. That is to say, differences are often constructed rather than merely given by history.

Postill's discussion of the digital citizen reveals how while democracy is officially secured by an occasional vote, mobile digital governance is imagined as creating conditions for a much more integrated and constant relationship between governance and an active participatory or community citizenship that deals embracing much wider aspects of people's lives. Though often this is based on assuming that previously it was only the lack of appropriate technology that prevented the realisation of such political ideals, ignoring the possibility that people may not actually want to be bothered with this degree of political involvement. Political holism thereby approximates what Postill calls a normative ideal. He shows that the actual impact of the digital is an expansion of involvement but still, for most people, largely contained within familiar points of participation such as elections, or communication amongst established activists.

Curiously the much earlier writings of Turkle (1984) were amongst the most potent in refuting these presumptions of prior authenticity. The context was the emergence of the idea of the virtual and the avatar in role-playing games. As she pointed out, issues of role-play and presentation were just as much the basis of pre-digital life, something very evident from even a cursory reading of Goffman (1959, 1975). Social science had demonstrated how the real world was virtual long before we came to realise how the virtual world is real. One of the most insightful anthropological discussions of this notion of authenticity is Humphrey's (2009) study of Russian chat rooms. The avatar does not merely reproduce the offline person; it is on the internet that these Russian players feel able, perhaps for the first time, to more fully express their `soul' and passion. Online they can bring out the person they feel they `really' are, which was previously constrained in mere offline worlds. For these players, just as for the disabled discussed by Ginsburg, it is only on the internet that a person can finally become real.

In summary, an anthropological perspective on mediation is largely concerned to understand why some media are perceived as mediating and others are not. Rather than seeing pre-digital worlds less mediated, we need to study how the rise of digital technologies has created the illusion that they were.

But in all these cases it is not that media simply mediates a fixed element called religion. Religion itself is a highly committed form of mediation that remains very concerned with controlling the use and consequences of specific media.

To spell out this second principle, then, digital anthropology will be insightful to the degree it reveals the mediated and framed nature of the non-digital world. Digital anthropology fails to the degree it makes the non-digital world appear in retrospect as unmediated and unframed.

at least as much effort was expended upon trying to understand the Filipina concept of motherhood because being a mother is just as much a form of mediation as being on the internet.

Potentially one of the major contributions of a digital anthropology would be the degree to which it finally explodes the illusions we retain of a non-mediated non-cultural, pre-digital world. A good example would be Van Dijck (2007) who uses new digital memorialisation such as photography to show that memory was always a cultural rather than individual construction. Photography as a normative material mediation (Drazin and Frohlich 2007), reveals how memory is not an individual psychological mechanism, but consists largely of that which it is appropriate for us to recall.

In anthropology there is no such thing as pure human immediacy; interacting face-to-face is just as culturally inflected as digitally mediated communication but, as Goffman (1959, 1975) pointed out again and again, we fail to see the framed nature of face-to-face interaction because these frames work so effectively. The impact of a digital technologies, such as webcams, are sometimes unsettling largely because they makes us aware and newly self-conscious about those taken for granted frames around direct face to face encounters.

In the discipline of anthropology all people are equally cultural, that is the products of objectification.

The example of money shows that we can find both clear positives in new accessibility and banking for the poor, but also negatives such as body shopping or new possibilities of financial chicanery found in high finance (Lewis 1989) which contributed to the dot.com debacle (Cassidy 2002), and the more recent banking crisis. This suggests that the new political economy of the digital world is really not that different from the older political economy.

Following Hegel, European political traditions tend to see individual freedom as a contradiction in terms; ultimately freedom can only derive from law and governance. Anarchism suits wide-eyed students with little responsibility, but social-democratic egalitarianism requires systems of regulation and bureaucracy, high taxation and redistribution to actually work as human welfare.

What is clear in Karanovic and others' contributions is that, just as Simmel saw that money was not just a new medium, but also one that allowed humanity to advance in conceptualisation and philosophy towards a new imagination of itself, so open source does not simply change coding.

In effect, the digital is producing too much culture, which because we cannot manage and engage with it, renders us thereby superficial or shallow or alienated.

Money was also behind the commodification that led to a vast quantitative increase in material culture. This also created a potential source of alienation as we are deluged by the vast mass of differentiated stuff that surpasses our capacity to appropriate it as culture.

For Hart, the digital not only exacerbates the problems of money, but also can form part of the solution since new money-like schemes based on the internet may allow us to create more democratised and personalised systems of exchange outside of mainstream capitalism.

Money was always virtual to the degree that it extended the possibilities of abstraction. Exchange became more distant from face-to-face transaction, and focused on equivalence, calculation and the quantitative as opposed to human and social consequence. Hart recognised that digital technologies align with these virtual properties; indeed, they make money itself still more abstract, more deterritorialised, cheaper, more efficient and closer to the nature of information or communication.

As an abstraction, money gives rise to various forms of capital and their inherent tendency to aggrandizement. As particularity money threatens our humanity through the sheer scale and diversity of commoditized culture. We take such arguments to be sufficiently well established as to not require further elucidation here.

Dialectical thinking, as developed by Hegel, theorised this relationship between the simultaneous growth of the universal and of the particular, as dependent upon each other rather than in opposition to each other.

Just like the digital, money represented a new phase in human abstraction where, for the first time, practically anything could be reduced to the same common element. This reduction of quality to quantity was in turn the foundation for an explosion of differentiated things, especially the huge expansion of commoditisation linked to industrialisation. In both cases, the more we reduce to the same the more we can thereby create difference. This is what makes money the best precedent for understanding digital culture and leads to our first principle of the dialectic.

One advantage of defining the digital as binary is that this definition also helps us identify a possible historical precedent. If the digital is defined as our ability to reduce so much of the world to the commonality of a binary, a sort of base line 2, then we can also reflect upon humanity's ability to previously reduce much of the world to base line 10, the decimal foundation for systems of modern money.

Rather than a general distinction between the digital and the analogue we define the digital as everything that has been developed by, or can be reduced to, the binary, that is bits consisting of 0s and 1s. The development of binary code radically simplified information and communication creating new possibilities of convergence between what were previously disparate technologies or content.

We shall argue that it is this drive to the normative that that makes attempts to understand the impact of the digital in the absence of anthropology unviable.

Our final principle acknowledges the materiality of digital worlds, which are neither more nor less material than the worlds that preceded them.

The fifth principle is concerned with the essential ambiguity of digital culture with regard to its increasing openness and closure, which emerge in matters ranging from politics and privacy to the authenticity of ambivalence.

The fourth principle re-asserts the importance of cultural relativism and the global nature of our encounter with the digital, negating assumptions that the digital is necessarily homogenising and also giving voice and visibility to those who are peripheralised by modernist and similar perspectives.

The commitment to holism, the foundation of anthropological perspectives on humanity, represents a third principle.

Our second principle suggests that humanity is not one iota more mediated by the rise of the digital. Rather, we suggest that that digital anthropology will progress to the degree that the digital enables us to understand and exposes the framed nature of analogue or pre-digital life as culture and fails when we fall victim to a broader and romanticized discourse that presupposes a greater authenticity or reality to the pre digital.

The first principle is that the digital itself intensifies the dialectical nature of culture.

we need to be clear as to what we mean by words such as digital, culture and anthropology and what we believe represents practices that are new and unprecedented and what remains the same or merely slightly changed. We need to find a way to ensure that the vast generalisations required in such tasks do not obscure differences, distinctions and relativism which we view as remaining amongst the most important contributions of an anthropological perspective to understanding human life and culture.

The digital should and can be a highly effective means for reflecting upon what it means to be human, the ultimate task of Anthropology as a discipline.

Essentially, we study culture at an “on the ground" level – looking for the individual stories, rich details, particular nuances, and thick description you can only find by spending extended time with people in their daily lives. As opposed to pointing a telescope at them from afar, bringing them into labs to run hypothetical experiments, or amassing troves of personal data and analysing it for the 'big trends'.

What defines Anthropologists is that we study culture through participant observation Anthropologists use all manner of other methods too – surveys, data collection, interviews, mapping, and historical research. But active participant observation is at the heart of the discipline – the act of completely immersing yourself in another culture for a long period of time as both an active participant in it, and an observer of it. You join in the dance, and then analyse what the dance means.