Virtual Culture

Identity and Communication in Cybersociety

Steve Jones, Steve Jones

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781446230626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Virtual Culture marks a significant intervention in the current debate about access and control in cybersociety exposing the ways in which the Internet and other computer-mediated communication technologies are being used by disadvantaged and marginal groups - such as gay men, women, fan communities and the homeless - for social and political change.

The contributors to this book apply a range of theoretical perspecitves derived from communication studies, sociology and anthropology to demonstrate the theoretical and practical possibilities for cybersociety as an identity-structured space.

1

The Internet and its Social Landscape

Steven G. Jones

Whether it be film, television, radio, the Internet, virtually any medium of communication that relies on technology will at one time or another find itself deemed to be causing a “revolution.” And just as quickly one will find some segments of society in opposition to that revolution.

Such is now the case with the evolution of technologies for computer-mediated communication (CMC), particularly the development of the Internet. Backlash toward these technologies has begun already and some decry the loss of personality that often accompanies the mediation of communication via computer; others lament the amount of time taken away from face-to-face interaction by technologies that require expertise, undivided attention, or even appear addictive. Clifford Stoll (1995) summarized the backlash best when he wrote, “bit by bit, my days dribble away, trickling out my modem” (p. 2).

Stoll’s sense of life “dribbling away” is not surprising, for, to use James Carey’s (1989) distinction between the “transmission” and “ritual” views of communication, transmission and transportation form the frame of reference for our thinking about communication. Most often we simply desire to know how much we can communicate, or “get across,” most efficiently, economically, and rapidly. From that perspective Stoll’s problem is that his life is but dribbling away and not speeding along his modem’s connection. But from the point of view of “ritual,” a perspective that claims communication “is the sacred ceremony that draws persons together in fellowship and commonality” (p. 18), Stoll’s problem is that his days go by virtually without him, time passes through his modem without him noticing it.

In many, many ways, the transmission view dominates not only how the Western world thinks about communication but how it thinks about other aspects of life, and this may be most evident in the modern embrace of “progress,” or what Carey characterized as “the mythos of the electronic revolution,” the hope and belief that social ills will be overcome by advances in science and technology.

In CyberSociety (Jones, 1995) I sought to bring Carey’s words to bear on our understanding of the historical roots and motivations for what had come to be known as the “information superhighway,” the ongoing project of constructing the transportation infrastructure to maintain “progress” in industry. In this regard it is important that we do understand the transmission view of communication. It not only permeates history, in terms of the development of Western society, it continues to exert influence on the socio-economic structure of our communication media. As John Brinckerhoff Jackson wrote (1972) about the development of the Illinois Central Railroad in America:

railroad-designed towns . . . represented an important development in our whole landscape. They and the new farms surrounding them were not, even in theory, part of a pattern of independent social spaces: they were integrated from the beginning into a well-designed economic process, into a linear system vividly symbolized by the lines of track and their accompanying telegraph wires. (p. 68)

The spread of railroads had sweeping consequences for social life even in areas that were not bisected by tracks. And now the Internet’s development is similarly linear, though not symbolized by tracks and telegraph lines but by the personal computer, keyboard, and mouse. The Internet does not create independent social spaces per se, as it relies on an existing communication infrastructure and is integrated into current economic processes in the telecommunications industries. Is it any surprise that most people use the telephone system to access the Internet via modem, or that the promise of high-speed Internet connections comes via existing cable television installations? Like the telegraph wires that accompanied the railroad tracks, and the roads that followed the railroad tracks, ad infinitum, the Internet is a “piggy-backed” medium, one that follows paths we already know.

For the present analysis, it is most important to note that there was not only an industrial (and military) motivation for the creation of a communication infrastructure that has, in turn, led to the Internet’s creation and growth, but a social one as well. Many of the technologies that are developed for business purposes are useful for social purposes (and vice versa), much to the chagrin of employers who find that the technology that was to have increased their workers’ productivity has had the opposite effect and lowered it, while concomitantly increasing their socializing at work (Rice & Love, 1987; Schmitz & Fulk, 1991).

That the adoption of technology can have an effect opposite to the one intended should not be surprising, for we have become accustomed (perhaps from the very first time we must deal with the consequences of a thunderstorm that has cut power to our area and left us without refrigeration, lights, air conditioning, television, etc.) to the “trade-offs” that occur as we develop and implement technology. We may not realize the magnitude of those trade-offs until we lose access to the technologies to which we have become habituated. I raise these points not to argue that those trade-offs should necessarily prevent us from adopting technology, but rather to point out that, so long as technology works, we take the tradeoffs for granted.

But when we are unable to avail ourselves of communication technology we are struck by the sudden intensity of the local, the immediate apprehension that we are in the here, and now, and unable to attend to matters beyond our physical reach. Space is at that moment something we inhabit rather than something through which we move. To put it colloquially, we feel it “close in” around us. And what startles is that very physical presence of space, that feeling of something, or some absence, pressing against you when the lights go out.

Ordinarily, however, we “feel” space as a fish likely “feels” water. It is our own physical medium, a part of us to such an extent we do not even notice it, though we move through it and exist within its presence. It is part and parcel of our capacity for movement, so much so that the conjoining of space and motion, the very dependence of our sense of space on motion, has caused Richard Sennett (1978) to note that mobility is a sine qua non of modern life:

Today, we experience an ease of motion unknown to any prior urban civilization, and yet motion has become the most anxiety-laden of daily activities. The anxiety comes from the fact that we take unrestricted motion of the individual to be an absolute right. (p. 14)

One might well imagine, of course, that the term “auto-mobile” is derived from that sense that we believe we are granted the right of auto-mobility, irrespective of whether the medium is a highway or information superhighway . . . or social environment. For Carey’s connection of the mythos of the electronic revolution to the Industrial Revolution connects not only the material aspects of those (essentially modern) stories, it connects their social and moral dimensions as well.

The Internet and Community

My own initial concerns about CMC, as I explained them in CyberSociety (Jones, 1995), were focused on issues of community. The concerns I had were centered on the question “Who are we when we are online?” and were oriented toward the communal, the social relationships we were seeking to foster via the Internet and CMC. In particular I wanted to examine emerging social formations online and determine whether they provide some of the things we desire offline, things like friendship, community, interaction, and public life, to determine whether the moral ideals we seek among one another, in community, are realized online.

Part of what motivated my interest and concern was that much was being made about the dual potentialities of the Internet. First, it could recreate community as we had once known it, rebuild for us the “great good place” (Oldenberg, 1991; Rheingold, 1993) we once knew but abandoned for “bowling alone” (Putnam, 1995). Second, it would not merely “get us all together,” it would do so without our having to do expend much effort, since it would overcome space and time for us, and it would also enable us to communicate with one another. As J. MacGregor Wise points out in a forthcoming work, we have developed the belief that political, moral, and social problems are the result of a lack of communication, and that if we improve communication we will also solve the various problems that plague modern life. The Internet would thus make community better. It was to result in a community free of the constraints of space and time, and so free us to engage with fellow humans irrespective of geographic proximity and the clock, and it would construct that community from communication, rather than inhabitance and being, which do not guarantee communication. As Douglas Schuler (1996) put it:

The old concept of community is obsolete in many ways and needs to be updated to meet today’s challenges. The old or “traditional’’ community was often exclusive, inflexible, isolated, unchanging, monolithic, and homogeneous. A new community—one that is fundamentally devoted to democratic problem-solving—needs to be fashioned from the remnants of the old. (p. 9)

Schuler goes on to describe these new communities as having “a high degree of awareness . . . and principles and purpose” (p. 9), and focused around action, around “doing.” In this conception, one growing in popularity, communities are not places to be, to engage in conversation (from the mundane to the momentous), they are groups of people seeking to achieve particular goals. This description is part of an older thread in conversations about computing. As Licklider and Taylor wrote in a 1968 essay that presaged much of computing’s future:

life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity . . . communication will be more effective and productive, and therefore more enjoyable. (p. 31)

Licklider and Taylor, and for that matter Schuler also, do not address whether communication that is not goal-oriented can be enjoyable too. And what happens to those “selected” groups once their goals are achieved is open to question. In general, Schuler’s call for new communities seems more like a call to form committees, or at best teams, and democracy itself is defined as problem-solving and not as a way of life. It is conceived of as a means to a material end rather than a set of moral values.

A similar call is made by Howard Rheingold (1991, p. 377), who envisions virtual reality providing the “learning by doing” that, he claims, John Dewey espoused. But that characterization is a perversion of Dewey’s expectations for education, expectations grounded in hopes for social being and not simply the learning of trade and skill. As Jensen (1990) summarized, “For Dewey, education should reflect the life of the larger society, cultivating students as full social citizens, lively and responsive” (p. 146). Furthering his twist on Dewey, Rheingold organized Electric Minds, Inc., a media company formed to create the Social Web. Its goal, according to Rheingold, “is to be the global brand for community” (cited in McCoy, 1996).

Such rhetoric puts a different spin on the modern nostalgia for community. Instead of merely criticizing the deterioration of communities in modern life, it evokes a sense of lost opportunities that need to be again made available, if only we would work harder (or have more money with which to buy Rheingold’s “brand” of community). It is therefore particularly responsive to the fragmentation of modern life along the lines of space and time, as it seeks to rally and reunite us in action and activity. But we should not overlook that it is we who, in our rush to overcome space and time, instead fragment them, and thus cause the ruptures we want healed. As Carey (1993) trenchantly points out in the title of an essay, “everything that rises must diverge.” Both space and time are fragmented and divergent in the face of new technologies, made discontinuous by the very elements of control that we seek to utilize to make them less so, to make them, in fact, convergent. What Carey had observed was that:

Divergence is not some random and unfortunate occurrence, a snake in our idyll of convergence, but a necessary consequence of the technological change we so eagerly support. We are living, engineering and hardware notwithstanding, in a period of enormous disarray in all our institutions and in much of our personal life as well. We exist in a “verge” in the sense Daniel Boorstin gave that word: a moment between two different forms of social life in which technology has dislodged all human relations and nothing stable has as yet replaced them. Media may be converging. . . . Social convergence does not follow the technical convergence, however. (p. 173)

And so it is that our hopes for convergence are dominating our common sense. The creation of the convergence, and hence stability, we seek requires that we cease to attempt to “save” or “overcome” space and time through use of technology. They are not to be “overcome,” we are, rather, to live in them.

It also requires that we move beyond simply observing whether things look as if they are converging to understanding the outcomes of our observations, or, to put it another way, understanding whether the perception of difference and similarity makes a difference. For example, though it may seem as if convergence is occurring and societies around the world share symbols, ideas, language, etc., a pervasive sense of divergence remains. Zelinsky (1992) noted that a research study conducted in 1967 “failed to disclose any convergence, and indeed suggested the opposite trend”:

cultural distances seem to be shrinking; but modern man, torn loose from conventional bounds of place or social and biological descent, may well be feeling his way into a number of newly discovered dimensions. The opportunities for personal choice, more complete individuation, and the formation of new social and cultural entities may have been greatly enhanced. Thus although most places may have begun to look alike, in important ways not usually susceptible to casual visual observation they may have started down fundamentally different routes. In sharp contrast the communities of the premodern past may have displayed the greatest imaginable superficial differences, but the most striking isomorphisms are revealed to the persistent analyst. (pp. 87–88)

I would liken this to the present situation with the Internet, which, I believe, we have a tendency to understand mainly in spatial terms, observing it as if visually, through the use of visual metaphors, as if it were indeed a highway being constructed through our backyard. (It thankfully lacks the mess, trouble, and some of the disruption of road...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Internet and its Social Landscape
• 2 The Individual within the Collective: Virtual Ideology and the Realization of Collective Principles
• 3 Virtual Commonality: Looking for India on the Internet
• 4 Structural Relations, Electronic Media, and Social Change: The Public Electronic Network and the Homeless
• 5 Why We Argue About Virtual Community: A Case Study of the Phish.Net Fan Community
• 6 Gay Men and Computer Communication: A Discourse of Sex and Identity in Cyberspace
• 7 Virtual Community in a Telepresence Environment
• 8 (Re)-fashioning the Techno-Erotic Woman: Gender and Textuality in the Cybercultural Matrix
• 9 Approaching the Radical Other: The Discursive Culture of Cyberhate
• 10 Punishing the Persona: Correctional Strategies for the Virtual Offender
• 11 Civil Society, Political Economy, and the Internet
• Index