[Air-l] Internet definition & ANT

[Julian Hopkins]

Hello All,

As usual I come late in the day into this - I think it's the time zone
difference and the fact I get this in 'digest form'.

Anyway...

Definition of the internet, I once tried this and came up with four elements
rather than a definition as such:

1) The physical network of cables, servers and hardware 
2) Email, chatrooms, and other types of person-to-person text based computer
mediated communications (CMC).
3) The World Wide Web (WWW): the collection of online electronic documents
and databases held in Internet servers – mostly in the form of websites.
4) Software: the browsers, programmes and protocols that enable the
transmission and retrieval of electronic data in formats that permit the
accessing and operation of elements 2 and 3, above.

* This seems similar to Robert Cannon. Also: the idea of it being an
agreement is very interesting. And I would very much agree with Christian
Fuchs who said " Without meaningful human knowledge and social activity the
internet is a dead block, useless."  

'Internetting'? I would suggest 'internet practices'. Overall an Internet
practice may be identified as any activity related to the Internet –
however, analytically, it is important to isolate particular aspects that
are differ in kind from other similar types of activities, which I shall try
to do now - what I mean by that is - for example - an email is essentially
the same as a letter, but the consequesnce of the speed, one-to-many
possibilitiess, etc. are the differences that makes it relevant to call it
an 'internet practice'.


ANT: 
Miller & Slater affirm the Internet as an ‘actant’, allowing for ways in
which the Internet has agency. However, one criticism that might be made of
the authors is that they have failed to properly explore the possibility
that a 'meta-culture' [this is from an old piece, I was imagining some kind
of culture/social realm defined by internet-specific practices] and the
local culture proper to the person’s lived offline life articulate and
dynamically construct each other. We can see another aspect of this in the
way in which companies have to integrate the ‘front office’ with the
‘back-end’ of the company, or in cybercafés: people present at such
‘intersections’ should be the focus of detailed investigation.
Miller and Slater. “The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach.” Oxford: Berg,
2000

Regards,

Julian

++++++++++
Julian Hopkins
Senior Lecturer
HELP University College - ADP
Kuala Lumpur
tel: +60 3 2095 8791 x2913
email: julianh at help.edu.my 
web: http://www.help.edu.my