The Internet

An Ethnographic Approach

Daniel Miller, Don Slater

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000181036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Social Sciences

This pathbreaking book is the first to provide a rigorous and comprehensive examination of Internet culture and consumption. A rich ethnography of Internet use, the book offers a sustained account not just of being online, but of the social, political and cultural contexts which account for the contemporary Internet experience. From cybercafes to businesses, from middle class houses to squatters settlements, from the political economy of Internet provision to the development of ecommerce, the authors have gathered a wealth of material based on fieldwork in Trinidad. Looking at the full range of Internet media -- including websites, email and chat -- the book brings out unforeseen consequences and contradictions in areas as varied as personal relations, commerce, nationalism, sex and religion. This is the first book-length treatment of the impact of the Internet on a particular region. By focusing on one place, it demonstrates the potential for a comprehensive approach to new media. It points to the future direction of Internet research, proposing a detailed agenda for comparative ethnographic study of the cultural significance and effects of the Internet in modern society. Clearly written for the non-specialist reader, it offers a detailed account of the complex integration between on-line and off-line worlds. An innovative tie-in with the book's own website provides copious illustrations amounting to over 2, 000 web-pages that bring the material right to your computer.

1
Conclusions

Why should we do an ethnography of the Internet in Trinidad, or of Trinidad on the Internet? Because - contrary to the first generation of Internet literature - the Internet is not a monolithic or placeless ‘cyberspace’; rather, it is numerous new technologies, used by diverse people, in diverse real-world locations. Hence, there is everything to be gained by an ethnographic approach, by investigating how Internet technologies are being understood and assimilated somewhere in particular (though a very complex ‘somewhere’, because Trinidad stretches diasporically over much of the world). A detailed focus on what Trinidadians find in the Internet, what they make of it, how they can relate its possibilities to themselves and their futures will tell us a great deal about both the Internet and about Trinidad. Indeed, the premise of an ethnographic approach is not only that each sheds light on the other, but that one cannot understand the one without the other: our presentation should convince you that ‘being Trini’ is integral to understanding what the Internet is in this particular place; and that using the Internet is becoming integral to ‘being Trini’, with due sensitivity to the complexity and difference contained in both terms. In this sense, we are not simply asking about the ‘use’ or the ‘effects’ of a new medium: rather we are looking at how members of a specific culture attempt to make themselves a(t) home in a transforming communicative environment, how they can find themselves in this environment and at the same time try to mould it in their own image.

This ethnographic particularity - this focus on Trinidad, on the specifics of one ‘place’ - is very far from a limitation, either for us as researchers, or you as readers. It is not only necessary - the Internet as a meaningful phenomenon only exists in particular places - but it is also the only firm basis for building up the bigger generalizations and abstractions: quite simply, one can use this particularism as a solid grounding for comparative ethnography. Social thought has gained little by attempting to generalize about ‘cyberspace’, ‘the Internet’, ‘virtuality’. It can gain hugely by producing material that will allow us to understand the very different universes of social and technical possibility that have developed around the Internet in, say, Trinidad versus Indonesia, or Britain versus India. We escape the straitjacket of relativism by recognizing that each of these places is constantly being redefined through engagements with forces such as the Internet. Our presentation should therefore also convince you that there is an analytically rigorous basis for going beyond the particular case, that - paradoxically, perhaps - this is not just a study of Trinidad but that it really is an ethnographic approach to ‘the Internet’.

What We Need To Account For

Let us start with a research finding that is both outlandish and yet inescapable in terms of our ethnographic engagement: Trinidadians have a ‘natural affinity’ for the Internet. They apparently take to it ‘naturally’, fitting it effortlessly into family, friendship, work and leisure; and in some respects they seemed to experience the Internet as itself ‘naturally Trinidadian’. The scale and speed of diffusion was remarkable, and regarded as inevitable. It was a ‘hot item’, fashionable, and it fitted in with a central preoccupation with being amongst the first to know what’s happening and where. It provided a natural platform for enacting, on a global stage, core values and components of Trinidadian identity such as national pride, cosmopolitanism, freedom, entrepreneurialism. This was as evident amongst business people, who felt that the Internet simply suited their natural right and ability to compete at the highest global levels, as it was amongst teenagers, who felt they were the match for any music culture they might encounter in the Internet-accelerated global ‘culturescape’. The Internet naturally fitted their intensely diasporic personal relations: being a Trinidadian family has long meant integrating over distances through any means of communication. They also saw various Internet media in terms of conventionally Trini forms of sociality such as styles of chat and hanging around.

We found very little negativity or technophobia. The Internet has reached a level where people can focus on content and ignore the technology, and furthermore there was very little anxiety about either the content or its impact. This is not a book about resistance. Nevertheless we recognize that the effects of this natural affinity need not necessarily be positive. Throughout this book one will find raised expectations and a confidence in the future. We do not deal with the future political economy that may quash many of these expectations, leaving people still more frustrated when their information skills become yet one more unrewarded and unvalorized facet of their lives. We do not discuss this because at the time of our study the consequences of Trinidadians’ rapid involvement with the Internet - for good or for bad - are still speculative, and we cannot project our fearfulness upon those we studied. All we can say is that this was rarely the perspective we encountered.

At one level, it is of course absurd to argue that Trinidadians have a special affinity to the Internet, that they ‘naturally’ take to it, are somehow more at home there than other people, as absurd as the converse argument that media technologies have intrinsic cultural qualities. Nonetheless, if we start from our ethnographic experience of Trinidad online in Spring/Summer 1999, the picture that emerges is of an extraordinarily tight fit: Trinidadians took to the new media in ways that connected to core dimensions, and contradictions, of their history and society. In fact, this is the constant conundrum of studying material culture: that what we observe ethnographically is the ostensibly ‘natural’ fit of objects within a social order that we are intellectually committed to revealing as constructed and historical. As outsiders we were astonished by the speed with which the Internet has become part of lives. Yet the narratives we encountered in Trinidad were mainly complaints about the unbearable slowness of its development and the forces that were preventing things from changing as fast as they ‘naturally’ should.

But we are pointing to something that includes but extends beyond studying ‘naturalization’, the process by which something new becomes mundane, taken for granted, ‘second nature’. Rather, we are concerned with a series of ‘alignments’ or ‘elective affinities’ between Internet use and particular facets of what being Trinidadian was supposed to mean. These affinities are not just about the idea of the Internet as symbol of modernity, but are more concerned with the practices of Internet use on a regular, everyday basis. This implies that we need to examine not only the specificity of Trinidadian self-conceptions, but also the specificity of the technology, such as email, surfing and chat.

Indeed, ‘Trinidad’ and ‘Trini-ness’ are complex and diverse phenomena; not least there are huge differences between Trinidadians at home and those many who live ‘away’. And Trinidadians do not consciously spend all their time online as Trini’s (though this was far more prevalent than we had expected): they also participate as members of youth cultures, music scenes, career structures, shoppers for consumer goods, etc. In turn, the Internet itself involves many different technologies, practices, contexts: it is no one thing, and our study encompassed a wide range of contexts, from ways of doing business to socializing in cybercafes.

Therefore we do not propose any one general explanation for this ‘natural affinity’. We need to look at both the specific and the multiple traits of active agents in creating this overall relationship and at the technology itself as an active component in our account. In the tradition of material culture analysis we are as much concerned with how subjects are constituted within material worlds as with how they understand and employ objects (Miller 1987), a perspective analogous to the writings of Latour (e.g. 1993, 1996) on science studies and technology. Our account has therefore to be multifaceted and not reduced to one dominant or homogeneous notion of either ‘Trinidadian culture’ or ‘Internet culture’. Nonetheless, the complexity and multiplicity of these affinities are precisely what strongly impel us to take as our point of departure the way in which a communicative technology is encountered from, and rooted in, a particular place.

Let’s Not Start From There

If the Internet appears so bound up with features of Trinidadian society as to appear ‘naturally Trini’, then we are certainly not dealing with a case of cyberspace as an experience of extreme ‘disembedding’ from an offline reality. Nor can we understand or explain this situation - ‘denaturalize’ it - by treating the Internet as a kind of placeless place, a ‘cyberspace’, or by taking as our point of departure those features of it that disconnect it from particular places, such as its ‘virtuality’. In this regard, we find ourselves quite alienated from that earlier generation of Internet writing that was concerned with the Internet primarily through such notions as ‘cyberspace’ or ‘virtuality’. These terms focused on the way in which the new media seemed able to constitute spaces or places apart from the rest of social life (‘real life’ or offline life), spaces in which new forms of sociality were emerging, as well as bases for new identities, such as new relations to gender, ‘race’, or ontology.

The notion of ‘virtuality’ has played a key role here: the term suggests that media can provide both means of interaction and modes of representation that add up to ‘spaces’ or ‘places’ that participants can treat as if they were real. A virtual reality game should provide a sensory environment, as well as ways of interacting with it, that is ‘realistic’ enough to immerse participants in the experience and to elicit engaged and ‘realistic’ responses from them. Similarly, relationships in a ‘chat room’ can be treated ‘as if’ they were real. Like the term ‘simulation’, ‘virtuality’ points to a representational ‘as if’ that is separate from but can substitute for the ‘really is’. But by focusing on ‘virtuality’ as the defining feature of the many Internet media and then moving on to notions such as ‘cyberspace’, we start from an assumption that it is opposed to and disembedded from the real.

The kinds of questions that have therefore preoccupied the more high-profile literature, as well as much public discussion and common sense about the net, have therefore assumed an opposition between the virtual and the real: ‘All this stuff going on in cyberspace, is it real or not?’, ‘What kind of reality is virtuality?’, ‘Is it as real as or more real than reality, is it mistaken for reality, or is it a new reality that shows up the constructed, performed, artificial nature of our old offline reality?’, ‘Is it a good thing or a bad thing, does it spell out doom or liberation for offline life, utopia or dystopia?’ On the one hand, a range of authors, sometimes assimilating ‘virtuality’ to a dystopic reading of the postmodern notion of ‘simulation’, see the Internet in terms of increasing ‘depthlessness’ and superficiality, as a poor substitute for the socially essential features of co-presence and face-to-face interaction. On the other hand, often in relation to poststructuralist projects, virtuality provides a kind of social laboratory or even liberation in which the performative character of all social realities and identities can be brought to light, deconstructed and transcended.

In fact this focus on virtuality or separateness as the defining feature of the Internet may well have less to do with the characteristics of the Internet and more to do with the needs of these various intellectual projects. The Internet appeared at precisely the right moment to substantiate postmodern claims about the increasing abstraction and depthlessness of contemporary mediated reality (Baudrillard 1988; Jameson 1991); and poststructuralists could point to this new space in which identity could be detached from embodiment and other essentialist anchors, and indeed in which (some) people were apparently already enacting a practical, everyday deconstruction of older notions of identity (Butler 1993; Haraway 1996). That is to say, intellectuals, like Trinidadians, have discovered their own ‘natural affinity’ to the Internet, in which their core values and issues correlate quite well with possibilities glimpsed in these new media (for useful surveys of the literature see Crang Crang and May 1999; Kitchen 1998). The point is not that they are wrong in their critiques of simulation or identity, or in using concepts of ‘virtuality’ or ‘cyberspace’ in pursuing these critiques. The point is simply that, even if these approaches are valuable in certain instances (e.g. Turkle 1995; Slater 1998, in press a) they are not a good point of departure for studying Trinidadians and many other people. Indeed, in most of what follows in this volume, they simply do not apply.

That is to say, if you want to get to the Internet, don’t start from there. The present study obviously starts from the opposite assumption, that we need to treat Internet media as continuous with and embedded in other social spaces, that they happen within mundane social structures and relations that they may transform but that they cannot escape into a self-enclosed cyberian apartness. Indeed, to the extent that some people may actually treat various Internet relations as ‘a world apart’ from the rest of their lives, this is something that needs to be socially explained as a practical accomplishment rather than as the assumed point of departure for investigation. How, why and when do they set ‘cyberspace’ apart? Where and when do they not do this? In what ways do they make use of ‘virtuality’ as a feature of new media? What do they (businesspeople, Carnival bands, schoolkids or government agencies) regard as real or virtual or consequential?

Rather than starting from ‘virtuality’, then, we are concerned to start our investigation of the Internet from within the complex ethnographic experience. If we were to treat virtuality as a social accomplishment rather than as an assumed feature of the Internet, then there would be nothing odd in saying that the Internet is not a particularly virtual phenomenon when studied in relation to Trinidad, but that it might well be when studied in other contexts. By way of comparison, Slater’s earlier project on ‘sexpics traders on IRC’, which was indeed largely confined to online interviews and observation of online settings, could investigate the ways in which participants socially sustained their setting as ‘a place apart’ and gave it a virtual reality, for example through their use of certain textual practices. ‘Virtuality’ really was a central feature of this setting, but this itself had to be accounted for: to a great extent, ‘virtuality’ was useful to participants in order to accomplish their business of trading, and in order to ward off various dangers. On the other hand, participants only accorded serious value to these online realities to the extent that they could be made less virtual and more ‘embodied’.

By contrast, we encountered relatively little Internet use in Trinidad that could usefully be construed as ‘virtual’. There are few places in this volume where a differentiation between, say, e-commerce and other commerce, playground chat and ICQ chat, religious instruction face-to-face or by email is treated by participants in terms of any clear division between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’. Far more evident is the attempt to assimilate yet another medium into various practices (email complements telephone for family contact, websites supplement TV for religious evangelism). Most people were concerned with whether Internet media provided effective or appropriate means to pursue practical projects; and they were concerned to discover what was new or specific about this new set of technologies and practices, given that the Internet appeared to have a huge and inevitable place in their future. New mediations, indeed, but not a new reality.

We can go further here: virtuality - as the capacity of communicative technologies to constitute rather than mediate realities and to constitute relatively bounded spheres of interaction - is neither new nor specific to the Internet. Indeed, it is probably intrinsic to the process of mediation as such. For example, Poster (1995) usefully refers us back to Anderson’s (1986) argument that modern nations might be thought of as ‘imagined’ or virtual communities, dependent on the capacity of newspapers to reflect a singular imaginary back to a dispersed or divided people. This is particularly apt in the case of Trinidad, which has had to imagine national and cultural identity across a complex ethnic mix and a geographical dispersion across the globe. In much of our research, email communications or websites were experienced as comparatively concrete and mundane enactments of belonging, rather than as virtual.

The relative irrelevance of ‘virtually’ in this book, and the fruitlessness of defining the Internet in terms of its separation from offline life, in no way diminishes the Internet’s importance or seriousness. Quite the contrary. Trinidadians, like others, may invest heavily in relationships and practices that only exist online: it is as breathtaking here as anywhere to find that the fiancee that has featured in several conv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Conclusions
• 2 Trinidad and the Internet - An Overview
• 3 Relationships
• 4 Being Trini and Representing Trinidad
• 5 The Political Economy of the Internet
• 6 Doing Business Online
• 7 Religion
• Appendix: The House-to-House Survey
• Glossary of Terms
• Bibliography
• Index