Human No More joins a growing scholarly conversation regarding digital culture. Its wide-ranging contributions will be of interest to designers and participants of online social environments, as well as to scholars in fields including but not limited to anthropology, informatics, media studies, and game studies.

Before turning to its twelve chapters, I address Whitehead and Wesch's flawed introduction, which contradicts most of the chapters (many of which are not by anthropologists or based on ethnographic methods) and misrepresents the relationship between anthropology and technology. For two reasons this might seem difficult. First, the argument is partially framed in disagreement with my own work (Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human, Princeton University Press, 2008). Second, I not only respect the broader oeuvre of these scholars, but am also saddened that Whitehead passed away five months before Human No More was published. Yet neither of these realities is insurmountable. A review provides the opportunity to extend an important debate, hopefully doing justice to the memory of Whitehead's intellectual and collegial passion.

In their introduction, Whitehead and Wesch discuss using “the challenges of ethnography in online worlds … to broaden our critique of ethnography” (p. 1). They then incorrectly conclude that I “find the prospect of the posthuman threatening, both subjectively and with regard to the preservation of the iconic founding figures of the discipline” (3). However, what I (and most contributors to Human No More) claim is not that the notion of the posthuman is threatening, but that it is empirically inaccurate. While Whitehead and Wesch characterize those talking about the human online as “conservative,” it is their view that is conservative. By assuming that adding technology creates the “posthuman,” they implicitly construct a romanticized “human” without technology—the familiar anthropological figure of the “primitive.”

I, and others, thus seek not “the preservation of the iconic founding figures of the discipline” but rather two forms of historical consciousness that should be obvious to readers of a journal like CSSH. First, ethnographic methods did not start being innovative in the twenty-first century; they have always been, by design, underdetermined and flexibly adaptable to new contexts. Second, against Whitehead and Wesch's language of “human no more,” “posthuman,” and “unhuman subjects,” an awareness of anthropological pasts reminds us that there is a colonial history to anthropologists terming some persons less human or not human. We cannot simply use a millenarian language of “the end of anthropology” as an excuse to ignore the dynamics of knowledge and power that still shape ethnographic practice.

Granting that we are not becoming posthuman and that the breathless language of endtimes, so prevalent in the hype of the technology sector, is ill-suited for the empirical analysis of digital culture, we can see how the component chapters of Human No More build on anthropological and other histories to chart new methodological and topical domains. In “The Mutual Co-Construction of Online and Onground in Cyberorganic,” Jennifer Cool examines a “group of San Francisco web geeks who combined online and face-to-face interaction in a conscious project to build community ‘on both sides of the screen’” (11). Her attention to physical and virtual interfaces can provide an important history to many analyses of mobile technologies. Zeynep Tufekci turns a philosophical eye all the way back to Plato in “We Were Always Human,” emphasizing that “the proliferation of digital technologies has made us no more posthuman than the invention of writing” (34). His attention to semiotics and identity links up to the following chapter, “Manufacturing and Encountering ‘Human’ in the Age of Digital Reproduction.” Here, Matthew Bernius examines Artificial Intelligence (AI) devices to ask after “the ways in which AI and human cultures are becoming increasingly intertwined” (65). In “The Digital Graveyard,” Jenny Ryan takes this question in a different direction by exploring how social network sites like Facebook can act as “vehicles of remembrance” after death.

Together with a group of undergraduate students, Michael Wesch's chapter “Anonymous, Anonymity, and the End(s) of Identity and Groups Online” chronicles how online communities set apart from physical-world identities can shape emerging regimes of social practice and moral value. The next chapter, “Splitting and Layering at the Interface,” presents a wide-ranging discussion by Radhika Gajjala and Sue Ellen McComas about Indian diasporas online, including brief visits to the virtual world Second Life as well as discussions of Bollywood media and social network sites. Gray Graffam also provides a comparative analysis in his chapter “Avatar,” drawing from experience in World of Warcraft and Second Life to examine embodiment and affect. Yet another form of comparative discussion appears in Stephanie Alemán's “Technology, Representation, and the ‘E-thropolgist,’” in which she describes how she and her “native Amazonian” interlocutors engage with emerging technologies.

“The Adventures of Mark and Olly” has a quite different tone than those before it. Here, James Hoesterey reflects on “experiences as anthropological advisor for several documentary programs” (157) to explore “the pleasures and horrors of anthropology on TV.” Kent Wisniewski's chapter “Invisible Caboclos and Vagabond Ethnographers” takes us even further afield, since the discussion of fieldwork in Brazil barely touches on questions of technology; Wisniewski's goal instead is to reflect broadly on how cultural transformation means that we must “foster new ways of understanding human interaction in all its novel forms” (196). Brazil is also the focus of Michael Heckenberger's “Marginal Bodies, Altered States, and Subhumans.” By focusing on “(dis)articulations between physical and virtual realities” (199), he addresses how urban planning and mass media relate to everyday experience in São Paulo. Heckenberger's chapter is followed by “Are We There Yet,” in which Neil Whitehead reflects on questions of anthropology and the posthuman. Anne Allison's afterword closes the volume on a contrasting note by emphasizing how the contributors “accord the digital subject a humanness and sociality that has long been the purview of anthropology” (231). It is precisely in such historically conscious ethnographic and theoretical engagement that the chapters making up Human No More have so much to offer emerging social studies of the digital.