Summary
Contents
Subject index
The Internet is a medium with great consequences for social and economic life. This book is written to help people discern in what ways it has commanded the public imagination, and the methodological issues that arise when one tries to study and understand the social processes occurring within it. The contributors offer original responses in the search for, and critique of, methods with which to study the Internet and the social, political, economic, artistic, and communicative phenomena occurring within and around it.
Studying the Net: Intricacies and Issues
Studying the Net: Intricacies and Issues
Even after all the research, and the most skillful storytelling, reality remains obdurate.
We look for evidence of culture at those minute points of contact between new things and old habits, and … we include in our sense of history the power of things themselves to impress and shape and evoke a response within consciousness.
There is always risk in probing into mysteries.
For all the newness and hoopla associated with the Internet, much of the narrative surrounding it is quite predictable. As I have noted in other essays (Jones, 1995, 1997b), the hype about the Internet, whether accurate or not, is tellingly like that which accompanied the introduction of earlier media technologies. It is possible to go so far as to say that technology itself (and the uses to which it is put) is less predictable than the hopes and promises for it that we harbor.
The Internet is not only a technology but an engine of social change, one that has modified work habits, education, social relations generally, and, maybe most important, our hopes and dreams. It is in some ways the technological embodiment of a particularly American social project (Jones, 1995, 1997b), and importantly, it is a social project rooted in what James Carey (1997b) aptly describes as “the union of science and state” (p. 3). In this regard, our metaphors have led us astray: The Internet is not an information highway; it is in reality only peripherally about information. It is, instead, the first evidence we have of what we have believed that we are for quite some time—an information society. It is not that the Internet illustrates that the public has made a leap to becoming an information society. It is that for the first time we can point to something outside of society as we know it and say, “There—that is a society made up of information,” in a somewhat literal sense. The Internet is a social space, a milieu, made up of, and made possible by, communication (the cornerstone of community and society). Of course, this is facile: Information is hardly the only thing necessary for society, and information is hardly communication (Ong, 1996). However, both the notion of an “information society” and modern conceptualizations of the Internet as a self-regulating “entity” (however one may envision its shape)—that arena in which our “digital being” lives—at least evade, if not altogether avoid, the centrality of values to the processes of communication that the Internet, as a form and medium of communication and meaning, sustains.
The Internet and the Market
Our historical work is only just begun when it comes to the Internet, and the sooner we get on with it, the better. Our histories must go beyond the origins of ARPANET (the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network precursor to the Internet), a starting point often misinterpreted as to mean that the Internet was created solely as a command-and-control mechanism to ready the United States for nuclear war. The work of Vannevar Bush, J. C. R. Licklider, Vint Cerf, and researchers at Xerox PARC—that ran along with, and parallel to, ARPANET—was itself from the start co-opted, and not only by academics. Our histories must go into greater depth, and recent and forthcoming research efforts such as Ronda and Michael Hauben's (1997) Netizens and a forthcoming book by Janet Abbate represent the first scholarly efforts that systematically delve into Internet history. It is important to note that Internetworking was co-opted by various cultures; as Steven Levy (1984) shows, by 1960s MIT hackers; as Katie Hafner (1991) shows, by computer hobbyists and academics; as Bruce Sterling (1992) shows by the 1980s, hackers and bulletin board system operators and users; as Gary Chapman, columnist and director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas—Austin has said, by professional organizations such as Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and the Electronic Frontier Foundation; and even perhaps by the media itself, which gives us images of cyberspace pioneers such as John Perry Barlow, wily hackers such as Knight Lightning, and the Chaos Computer Club and the Legion of Doom—images of teachers and students somehow transforming educational processes and images of danger and delight.
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