Cyborgs@Cyberspace?

An Ethnographer Looks to the Future

David Hakken

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415915588
• eBook ISBN: 9781135964122
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Arguing that humans have always been technological as well as cultural beings, David Hakken calls for a fundamental rethinking of the traditional separation of anthropology and technical studies. Drawing on three decades of research on contemporary technological societies, this book outlines a fresh way of thinking about technology and offers an ethical and political response to the challenge of truly living as "cyborgs" in the age of cyberspace.

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Introduction

What Are We to Make of Cyberspace?

Computer theorists use the term “cyberspace” to refer to the notional social arena we “enter” when using computers to communicate. “Cyberspace” can be used more generally to refer to the potential “lifeway” or general type of culture being created via Advanced Information Technology (AIT), the congeries of artifacts, practices, and relationships coming together around computing.

What are we to make of this cyberspace emerging around AIT? Will it remain merely a “cool” curiosity, or will it become the dominant mode of human existence?

Cyborgs@cyberspace? is an attempt to answer these questions. Presenting what I have learned via studying this space through fieldwork, the book builds a discourse supportive of the ethnographic study of cyberspace.

Coming to terms with cyberspace is important. Multiple popular, policy, and academic discourses presume that new technologies cause social change. A by no means extreme statement of this conventional wisdom is that of historian Eric Hobsbawm:

[W]hat can already be assessed with great confidence is the extraordinary scale and impact of the consequent economic, social, and cultural transformation, the greatest, most rapid and most fundamental in recorded history . . . [, t]he end of the seven or eight millennia of human history that began with the invention of agriculture in the stone age. . .. The world was filled with a revolutionary and constantly advancing technology, based on triumphs of natural science. . . . Perhaps the most dramatic practical consequence of these was a revolution in transport and communication which virtually annihilated time and distance (1995:8,9, 12).

Frequently, these ideas take the more specific form of talk about a “computer revolution” (CR).¹ Lifeways based on AIT are not only real and distinctly different; they are transformative. The transformative potential of AITs lies in the new ways they manipulate information. The new, computer-based ways of processing information seem to come with a new social formation;² or, in traditional anthropological parlance, cyberspace is a distinct type of culture.³

To what extent are these views justified? What dangers follow from acting on inappropriate or doubtful understandings of cyberspace? What possibilities for politics, or other interventions into social formation reproduction, emerge when we think consistently about cyberspace?

Indeed, how can one study such a vast, inchoate problem? Cyborgs@cyberspace? is based on the premise that careful fieldwork in current manifestations of cyberspace, its already existing “outpost” practices, processes, and arenas, is a good way. The results may be our best current indicators of what future, more complete cyberspaces might be like. Mark Dery, for example, captures this prefigurative sense in his argument that “flame wars,” the periodic extravagant, often ad hominem linguistic performances in computer-mediated or “on-line” communication, merit serious study: “[T]hese subcultural practices offer a precognitive glimpse of mainstream culture a few years from now” (1994:6).

After fitful starts and some hesitation, anthropologists (Forsythe 1992; Pfaffenberger 1990; Suchman 1987) and ethnographers from other fields like sociology (Sproul and Kessler 1995; Leigh Star 1995) history (Haraway 1991; Traweek 1988) and computer science (Kling 1980; Pape and Thoresen 1983), now regularly do fieldwork in proto-cyberspace. I agreed to write Cyborgs@cyberspace? because I believe that this cyberspace ethnography is exciting and it’s getting somewhere intellectually.

Cyberspace ethnography has a potential for contributing substantially to the cultural construction of this new social arena. Before this can be realized fully, however, cyberspace ethnographers need to make more explicit the general perspectives within which they work, and even strive to construct a shared intellectual problematic.

Through retrospective description primarily of my own work, I intend Cyborgs@cyberspace? to exemplify how to do cyberspace ethnography. In eighteen years of cyberspace research, I have been regularly forced to look beyond my own work, to create venues for more general discourses, initially primarily with colleagues inside anthropology, but then through networks and organizations of other scholars and cyberspace practitioners. As a result of this organizational entrepreneuring, I have a particularly broad view of Cyberspace Studies.

EXPLORING CYBERSPACE CULTURALLY

Anthropologists are commonly thought of, and socially justified as, cultural explorers. Emissaries from one culture, we go out deliberately to experience another. The new lifeways are typically both “other” and ones about which “we” are collectively unsure. The hesitation typically stems less from ignorance of the other than from the cacophony generated by multiple powerful describers of them, many of whose motives and interests are unknown and/or suspect.

Just as the nineteenth century West that produced anthropology had multiple discourses about the so-called “primitive” peoples that the new field was set up to encounter, so contemporary society has multiple, confusing discourses regarding cyberspace. The prime task of the cyberspace ethnographer is thus not to invent discourses about these new “natives”; there are arguably already too many. Rather—like Branislaw Malinowski (1922), the most effective promoter of anthropological fieldwork—she tries through extended participation in and observation of the new lifeways to bring some intellectual order into the talk.

Conceptual Presumptions

Perhaps the lesson about social theorizing won with the greatest recent effort is that intellectual practices cannot escape being affected by the concepts with and through which thought proceeds. Consequently, describers must be reflective, trying to be as clear about the work they intend their concepts to accomplish as they are about the picture they wish to paint.

In anthropology, these lessons are embodied in two related discourses. One, ethnography, is descriptive of specific cultures, while the other, ethnology, involves comparison of cultures and theorizing about culture in general. While ethnography is much better known, its practice is inevitably laced with ethnology, for most description uses terms that cross cultural frames. Good ethnography thus inevitably involves significant, reflective meta-discourse as opposed to only implicit theorizing.

As an analytic work, Cyborgs@cyberspace? is about the ethnology of one type of social formation, cyberspace. Because its ultimate cultural importance lies unclearly in the future, doing the ethnology of cyberspace is of more than usual difficulty. The phrase “cyborgs@cyberspace?” encapsulates how as of the time of writing I believe cyberspace stories are to be told. Perhaps most important is the interrogative, intended to suggest that there is good reason to withhold judgment about how ethnologically reliable the idea of cyberspace is; that is, how well the term captures what eventually will be.

GENERAL PROPOSITIONS

Following fieldwork, one typically writes an ethnography, a text which both describes the culture encountered and compares one’s own experience ethnologically with that of other ethnographers.⁴ Stylistically, ethnography’s conclusions tend to emerge gradually through complexly woven narrative webs. While my full view of cyberspace is developed only in the detailed chapters to follow, I present here the general claims that Cyborgs@cyberspace? aims to establish:

1. That ethnography of current AIT-related practices—“proto-cyberspace” ethnography—is an effective way to study cyberspace;
2. That “cyborg” is an appropriate term for the entities who/which will carry whatever social formations are likely to come fully into existence soon (but not only these);
3. That while “cyberspace” is a useful term for at least one potential such future social formation type, its eventual dynamics remain obscure, and so at least for now we should refrain from presuming its eventual dominance or longevity, or even the stability of many of its current characteristics;
4. That the “@” symbol—the one contained in electronic mail addresses which indicates the electronic space or “domain” at which an individual can be contacted and therefore of which one is socially a part—successfully captures the likely-to-be-further-delocalized- but-still-socially-significant kinds of relationships between cyborgs characteristic of cyberspace, if and when it comes into predominance;
5. That the form of ethnography best able to generate meaningful information about cyberspace is the reflexive, anthropological variant (which has, for example, the capacity to address questions empirically while at the same time retaining a critical stance in relation to the validity of the notions in which the questions are phrased);
6. That in order to do effective ethnography in cyberspace, we are compelled to rethink classical approaches to several aspects of social thought; while
7. At the same time, ethnography in proto-cyberspace provides information both useful for such rethinking and for guiding the cultural construction of cyberspace.

HOW I CAME TO MAKE THESE CLAIMS

My first articulation of the phrase “cyborgs@cyberspace” was as a humorous variant on “pigs in space,” a standard element of early Muppet Show episodes. The phrase was intended to evoke Miss Piggy’s sense of travail as a space traveler, but its broader evocations are also appropriate.

Consider its components. Like “robot,” the term “cyborg” was deliberately invented, the former in the 1920s, the latter in a period similarly technoscience enthusiastic after World War II (Gray 1995). An imagining of science fiction, robots are purely electro-mechanical, but cyborgs are partly biological as well. A shortening of “cybernetic organism,” a “cyborg” was to be a life form enhanced by additional capabilities—for heightening the effective use of feedback through manipulating and responding to information. Initially used less frequently than “robot,” “cyborg” has recently gained more currency, perhaps because it captures contemporary concerns, such as the feeling that AIT use fuzzes the boundary between human and machine. Indeed, the meaning of the term has changed, from “enhanced life form” to “form that acts, more or less, as enhanced human, irrespective of whether it started out biologically.”⁵

THE INTELLECTUAL PROBLEM AT THE CENTER OF CYBORGS@CYBERSPACE

Generally attributed to William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984), “cyberspace” first referred to an electronic communication notional space. Essentially a collection of spatial metaphors, like the notion “desktop” employed in explanations of how to use an Apple Macintosh computer, cyberspace is now regularly used to refer collectively to computer-related social fields.

“Cyberspace” now has even more popular currency than “cyborg”; “cyberspace” was used without explanation in the 1998 Presidential “State of the Union” address, for example. It is thus natural to assume that the interrogative onus of my title Cyborgs@cyberspace? falls more on “cyborg” than “cyberspace.” This is the view of Robbie Davis-Floyd, for example, who asks us to consider whether, as we enter cyberspace, we wish to become more “cyborgic” and less “human” (1995). The notion that in cyberspace we do indeed become something so profoundly different that we cease to be persons in the normal sense is a common refrain or “trope” in cyberspace talk.

While I understand this perspective, I employ a different, more sweeping concept. Because they have always been technological and biological, and therefore cyborgic, unities, I use “cyborg” to refer to all the entities that carry human culture. (In homage to Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern [1993], I considered calling this book We Have Always Been Cyborgs.) While of course cyberspace cyborgs are different from pre-cyberspace cyborgs—in, e.g., the increased complexity of some feedback loops—these differences do not justify drawing a cyborgic ring around cyberspace, identifying its borders as the boundary between social formations carried by humans and those carried by cyborgs.

Because of the importance of artifice to every way of being human, “cyborg” is a proper general term for the entities which carry culture in all types of human social formations, not just cyberspace. (As such entities are the truly proper scientific object of anthropology, the discipline could with justice, but not style, be called “cyborgology.”) Such conclusions about humans and cyborgs are indicative of the kinds of rethinking of basic social issues driven by ethnographic examination of cyberspace.

PROBLEMS OF CYBERSPACE AGNOSTICISM

Confident that, if cyberspace comes, its chief entities will be cyborgic, the interogative of my title relates primarily to cyberspace, and the likelihood of its emergence as a full human lifeway. I am an ethnological agnostic about cyberspace, but my agnosticism has an active, inquisitive quality; it is not knownothingism. It is quite different from the animus toward the “computer society” of those preoccupied with the negative characteristics of the new AIT-based social patterns, those called “compputropians” later. Whether good or bad, I question cyberspace’s presumed inevitability. Moreover, my agnosticism is provisional; fuller, appropriate ethnographic information would lead to a different conclusion. The ultimate, long-term uniqueness of cyberspace patterns has yet to be demonstrated.

This agnosticism is a consequence of the personal ethnographic experiences in proto-cyberspace described in the following pages. I began fieldwork in 1980 on a set of questions about “our times”: How are we to understand the contemporary era? To what should the widely shared sense of substantial social change be attributed? Is the sense that “things are changing rapidly and profoundly” valid or a misrepresentation? Just how actually important are science, technology, and computing to the changes taking place? How reasonable is it to strive to influence either the changes or perceptions of them? To which trends should we pay most attention in making decisions about the future? What new concepts do we need to answer questions like these?

My asking such big questions followed doubtless from training in anthropology. Several of the subfields of this discipline regularly focus on issues of macro-change: archaeology on cultural evolution; biological anthropology on the development of forms; applied anthropology on economic and social transition. Indeed, vast upheavels in current social formations give cultural anthropologists like myself an unusual opportunity to use our field methods, unlike our colleagues, to study change directly.

However, I soon found that common rhetorics—“Computer Revolution,” “Information Society”—got in the way of the empirical study I intended. These terms were used in ways that presumed the reality of exactly those phenomena whose existence I wished to investigate.

As I read the work of others interested in cyberspace, I encountered multiple, diffuse, disconnected discourses. I hoped initially that coherence might emerge on its own, but this has not happened. Perhaps because too many cyberspace ethnographers use its rhetorics uncritically, the diffuseness of cyberspace ethnography mirrors the hype of popular cyberspace talk.

Ethnology compels us to strive after more self-consciously shared intellectual weavings. To do ethnography in cyberspace, one should first clear rhetorics like these from one’s conceptual space by defining a more precise set of research questions. Which approach to the design of a general cyberspace problematic is best?

Cyberspace ethnographers grapple with a range of fascinating intellectual puzzles: The nature of spaces less tied to places, whether cyberspace will be more democratic or more authoritarian, the practical problem of differential access to AIT of individuals and groups—classes, peoples, genders, races, and nations—whether AITs have agency in the philosophical sense, etc. In the tradition of humanistic studies, one could design an account of cyberspace in terms of such topics. The problem with this approach is that these issues arise at multiple levels of analysis, and the dynamics at one level often cut against those at another.

Key Issues in Cyberspace Ethnography

In the following section, I outline an alternative, “levels” program for coherence in cyberspace research a general intellectual context for Cyberspace Studies. My map of cyberspace highlights different levels of analysis. The key levels are arranged in a continuum that roughly parallels those of biology; that is, from the sub-individual to the macro-structural:

1. The basic characteristics of the ent...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• [ 1 ] Introduction
• [ 2 ] An Alternative to “Computer Revolution” Thought
• [ 3 ] Doing Ethnography in Cyberspace
• [ 4 ] The Entity Problem: What Carries Culture in Cyberspace?
• [ 5 ] The Ethnography of Mid-Range Social Relations in Cyberspace: Community, Region, Organization, and Civil Society
• [ 6 ] Macro-Social Relations and Structure in Cyberspace
• [ 7 ] Knowledge in Cyberspace and the Practice of Ethnography
• [ 8 ] Conclusions
• References Cited
• Notes