This article argues for a more explicit concern with sociality in anthropology, illustrated through a study of one of the oldest English platforms for sociality: the English pub. Using an approach derived from the study of social media, the pub is analysed in terms of the balance between structural (mainly commercial) forces and agency (mainly the desire for particular kinds of sociality). Following an introduction to the English pub, the article considers how pubs exert control over which population they serve. The next section, shows how groups of people colonize pubs, regardless of the pub's intentions. This is followed by a discussion of the various responses by pubs to this colonization. The final section, ‘Scalable sociality’, demonstrates how these processes combine to produce a phenomenon called scalable sociality, which is also a definition of social media: a series of platforms that can be sited along various scales and parameters of sociality. This is important because a similar tension between, on the one hand, commercial or state forces and, on the other hand, the development of new forms of sociality is increasingly common within many topics studied by anthropologists.

中文翻译：

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酒吧和平台

本文主张对人类学中的社会性进行更明确的关注，通过对最古老的英语社会性平台之一的研究来说明：英国酒吧。使用源自社交媒体研究的方法，根据结构（主要是商业）力量和代理（主要是对特定社会性的渴望）之间的平衡来分析酒吧。在介绍了英国酒吧之后，文章考虑了酒吧如何控制他们所服务的人群。下一部分将展示一群人如何殖民酒吧，而不管酒吧的意图如何。随后讨论了酒吧对这种殖民化的各种反应。最后一部分“可扩展社会性”展示了这些过程如何结合产生一种称为可扩展社会性的现象，这也是社交媒体的定义：一系列平台，可以根据不同的社交规模和参数进行定位。这很重要，因为在人类学家研究的许多主题中，一方面是商业或国家力量，另一方面是新社会形式的发展之间的类似紧张关系越来越普遍。