Part 5 Digital Archaeology’s Place in the World

Whether or not digital archaeology consitutes, in your view, a distinct subfield, we need to consider the ways it is complicit or resists the dominant digital platforms that permeate our lives. The current digital ecosystem requires that people’s behaviour online (their clicks, their likes, their follows, their browsing) by monetized (and weaponized). Archaeology - and the popular conception of archaeology promulgated by so-called ‘alternative archaeologies’ - generates a lot of content, hence clicks, and thus money for Facebook, Amazon, Google.

How do we, as digital archaeologists, deal with this? Subvert it? Capitalize on it?

Or is this none of our business, not our worry?