[Air-l] Re: first post (An Internet Without Space)

[Slater,D]

Hello thread -

This discussion seems to be getting increasingly bizarre (am I the only
one?). It started with the issue of internet as a 'space' and then
entered into 'numbers' (=real data??!!) versus qualitative waffle, and
even Arts/Humanities versus SCIENCE - can we really be debating, in
2004, whether social science should be a positive science based on
physics (more '??!!'s)

For what its worth, you could argue that the second - science - issue
was contained in the strange way the first one was posed: someone
actually talked about whether we 'believe' in 'cyberspace', in the sense
of - 'do we believe that cyberspace exists?' Well, as a completely
inumerate, waffly ethnographer I feel it is my responsibility as a
'scientist' not to *believe* in anything whatsoever, in this sense. I
want to find out what people actually think, do and say. And I've found
it very interesting over the past few years of doing ICT ethnographies
in the Caribbean, South Asia and now Ghana to discover that people use
very diverse spatial metaphors to understand and structure their use of
new comms technologies. Sometimes it ends up looking a bit like
'cyberspace' as we normally define it; sometimes they treat internet
facilities as a space but describe it in very different ways (or not
spatially at all); sometimes both spatiality and cyberspace seem utterly
irrelevant to understand what is going on, or in the users'
udnerstandings. 

They also use incredibly different spatial metaphors and scales (eg, in
Trinidad, radio is incredibly local, relates to what people are doing at
this moment, on that street corner; whereas much internet use is
conceptualised at a global level, but then again is not always used to
be part of a global space - more often to be in the same space as one's
daughter or mother who lives away; in Ghana, most of the internet use we
are observing is split between somewhat cyberspacey online chat with
unknown others; but almost all the rest seems to be one amongst many
means of maintinaing extended family relations and operations, such as
managing flows of remittances from the North, or being an agent for a
Northern manufacturer - its simply a quicker way of doing what they
always did, within social networks that owe very little to 'cyberspace'.


All I'm saying is that I don't even want to ask the question, 'is there
a cyberspace?' although spatiality is a crucial and fascinating issue.
It's just the wrong way of approaching it. I'd also say that asking
about spatiality and geo-positiongings does lead one directly to
epistemological, ontological, historical, etc, etc questions - the big
stuff. But it's very different if you start from people's diverse
experiences or from generic and global concepts of 'cyberspace' (which
completely ignore spatiality actually in that they claim a new kind of
space as a technological property fo the medium itself - question
closed). If you start from experiences - personal and historical - then,
like any good anthropologist, you are asking about local concepts and
practices of things like space, identity, family, network, community,
body, etc and seeing how they and new technologies co-configure each
other. And you find it's different everywhere, in important ways (and
you can then, for one thing, really see if there are any convergences
which might have something to do with global media technologies). 

On the other hand, if you start from a 'belief' (or a polemical
refutation) of 'cyberspace', the degenerate offspring of 1990s
cyberbabble!, then you are starting from an abstract set of premises and
ensuing issues/agenda that derives from the millenial obsessions of a
few northern strands of avante garde theory and practice, such as
poststructuralism, postmodernism, cyberpunk literature, and afew net
activists, etc, etc, This is hardly a good way to understand what is
going on in different places, and what different things ICTs can be for
different people. And frankly it seems another kind of imperialism, a
projection of northern issues and understandings onto the technology and
via that onto everyone else. You have only to see some of the hoops that
this makes southern academics and intellectuals jump through if they
have to keep up with a completely alien northern obsession with
disembodied selves and loss of identity.


The only valid answer I can find to the question of 'cyberspace' (and it
is unabashedly empiricist) is 'go and take a bloody look'. Of course,
'taking a look' does not mean looking through the spectacles of a
quantitative survey, or tracking traffic. I do actually find numbers
quite useful, but I've never found that they make any sense at all
outside of an ethnographic context - ie, having a framework in which
both to generate numbers meaningfully and to interpret them
meaningfully. I'm in Ghana as part of a four country comparative study
(the others are Jamaica, India and South Africa). My colleagues and I
have found that in order to standardize a few lines of questioning for
meaningful comparison between countries we have to ask quite *different*
questions in each place, and we can only see this because of the
ethnographjic base we already have. Eg, relating internet use to poverty
is very different in Ghanaian formally extended kinship networks and
lineage decents than in Jamaican single parent families with multiple
baby fathers - it's only by knowing the different familial patterns of
resources and obligations that you can even begin to think how to ask
about 'monthly household income'. So what point would there be in asking
a standardized survey question aboiut 'household income'. Same goes for
Internet or mobile phone use, which is structured differently in all
four places.

Similarly, with interpretation of numbers: the stats tell me that there
are about 700,000 mobile phone accounts in Ghana, yet everyone - and I
mean everyone - uses mobiles in one way or another. I can only square
this circle by understanding patterns of shared use, the structure of
communications kiosks and so on. Similar I'm told by the World Bank that
there are about 10,000 ISP accounts in Ghana, but even the poorest areas
have numerous cafes, which are filled to overflowing, and everyone I've
met so far can tell me their email address. And don't tell me we just
need better numbers - this is an interpretative issue about what you are
looking for and at, and whether you are senstivite and open to local
uses and understandings of technology. What about the Accra parents
(similar to cases in Trinidad) who have never seen a computer in their
lives, are illiterate and impoverished, but send and receive emails
several times a week from their elder son in London, the conduit being
their second son who visits cybercafes on an almost daily basis. I don't
think that EITHER 'cyberspace' or 'number-crunching' offer anything at
all in this (vitally important) instance. I'll let you know how general
this is as we continue carrying out more interviews, long term family
ethnographies and hanging around cafes. Knowing the exact number of
these instances, even if any survey known to science could get at it, is
not very interesting to me; knowing whether email has entered into
people's communications repertoires in thjese kinds of ways is.

If you start with the northern, universalist, techno determinist so-90s
presumption of cyberspace as the basis for a research agenda, then
either you keep on waffling and asking the wrong questions, questions
that don't emerge from engagement with actual practices and experiences;
or I suppose you start demanding numbers that will prove things one way
or another. If you start with numbers and surveys you just impose
another set of universal assumptions across sites, rather than framing
or interpreting your questions in location-specific ways. 

It might get boring to people to keep banging on about ethnography, but
it seems to me the only way of subsuming both concepts and numbers
within a meaningful engagement with the concrete diversity of social
constructions of technology and people. Sorry for the rant, and for this
plague on both houses conclusion, but this thread really got to me.

Don Slater


_______________________________________________

Don Slater
Reader in Sociology, London School of Economics

Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE
Tel: +44 (020) 7849 4653
Fax: +44 (020) 7955 7405

 http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/slater

______________________________________________



-----Original Message-----
From: elijah wright [mailto:elw at stderr.org] 
Sent: 09 February 2004 13:36
To: air-l at aoir.org
Subject: Re: [Air-l] Re: first post (An Internet Without Space)



Eero,

i know you're an aussie, and that your discourse conventions are a bit
different than they are stateside, but you're coming across in this
message as pretty rude.


> study will turn more towards real number crunching, rather than
> worrying about "cyberspace" and "cyber communities".

rebellions that do not work through an understanding of what their
precursors were inevitably seem to fail.  several people appear to be
engaged in this discussion with you, currently.

and, by the way, there are plenty of people here who crunch the numbers
through one set of methods or another.

> I think the new generation of students will force change as people who
> are less tolerant of "cyberisms" graduate and influence academia. I 
> also think this new wave of Internet Studies scholars will drive the 
> area into a more commercially focussed future as they understand the 
> opportunities to be gained by excelling in the research of real data.

be aware that your 'new generation of students' is a loose agglomeration
that doesn't even share common research methods, much less opinions
about abstract concepts.

second: 'scholarship' and 'commercially focused' have traditionally been
diametrically opposed.  with reason.

and could you define real data, please - either you're making a 'slap'
at the rest of the community, or you've gotten your head stuck somewhere
unmentionable...


> However...the internet as we know it may not last more than another
> decade, it will be replaced by something else, but I imagine that 
> whatever replaces it will still be a communications tool.

this is a bluesky argument.  people have been arguing that the 'net is a
passing fad since sometime in the mid-1980s.  (!!!)


> So perhaps rather than concentrating on the "internet" part of this
> equation, all the little bits that are floating around in the academic

> world in related areas should pull themselves into one universal 
> school of communications study so that they not only allow for greater

> diversity of study but also protect their own academic industry from 
> the inevitable technological change.

AoIR is sort of a public face for the 'invisible college' of people
interested in internet-related research.


> division and I would see this evolving in a more global sense through
> an online Division rather than being an individual battle for status 
> at every single university. How this would be put together in flesh 
> and blood terms I leave to the geniuses of organisation.

... in other words, "i don't really understand how universities around
the world work, so i will put out this grand idea and let someone else
figure out how to implement it"?  jesus.


> Thus, when the internet dies and is replaced by something else there
> is still a home for those who want to study the new emerging 
> technology.

there are list-folk who're on their third and fourth 'careers' - people
always find something useful to do with themselves as their interests
change or evolve.  :)


elijah

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