Hello thread - This discussion seems to be getting increasingly bizarre (am I the only one?). It started with the issue of internet as a 'space' and then entered into 'numbers' (=real data??!!) versus qualitative waffle, and even Arts/Humanities versus SCIENCE - can we really be debating, in 2004, whether social science should be a positive science based on physics (more '??!!'s) For what its worth, you could argue that the second - science - issue was contained in the strange way the first one was posed: someone actually talked about whether we 'believe' in 'cyberspace', in the sense of - 'do we believe that cyberspace exists?' Well, as a completely inumerate, waffly ethnographer I feel it is my responsibility as a 'scientist' not to *believe* in anything whatsoever, in this sense. I want to find out what people actually think, do and say. And I've found it very interesting over the past few years of doing ICT ethnographies in the Caribbean, South Asia and now Ghana to discover that people use very diverse spatial metaphors to understand and structure their use of new comms technologies. Sometimes it ends up looking a bit like 'cyberspace' as we normally define it; sometimes they treat internet facilities as a space but describe it in very different ways (or not spatially at all); sometimes both spatiality and cyberspace seem utterly irrelevant to understand what is going on, or in the users' udnerstandings. They also use incredibly different spatial metaphors and scales (eg, in Trinidad, radio is incredibly local, relates to what people are doing at this moment, on that street corner; whereas much internet use is conceptualised at a global level, but then again is not always used to be part of a global space - more often to be in the same space as one's daughter or mother who lives away; in Ghana, most of the internet use we are observing is split between somewhat cyberspacey online chat with unknown others; but almost all the rest seems to be one amongst many means of maintinaing extended family relations and operations, such as managing flows of remittances from the North, or being an agent for a Northern manufacturer - its simply a quicker way of doing what they always did, within social networks that owe very little to 'cyberspace'. All I'm saying is that I don't even want to ask the question, 'is there a cyberspace?' although spatiality is a crucial and fascinating issue. It's just the wrong way of approaching it. I'd also say that asking about spatiality and geo-positiongings does lead one directly to epistemological, ontological, historical, etc, etc questions - the big stuff. But it's very different if you start from people's diverse experiences or from generic and global concepts of 'cyberspace' (which completely ignore spatiality actually in that they claim a new kind of space as a technological property fo the medium itself - question closed). If you start from experiences - personal and historical - then, like any good anthropologist, you are asking about local concepts and practices of things like space, identity, family, network, community, body, etc and seeing how they and new technologies co-configure each other. And you find it's different everywhere, in important ways (and you can then, for one thing, really see if there are any convergences which might have something to do with global media technologies). On the other hand, if you start from a 'belief' (or a polemical refutation) of 'cyberspace', the degenerate offspring of 1990s cyberbabble!, then you are starting from an abstract set of premises and ensuing issues/agenda that derives from the millenial obsessions of a few northern strands of avante garde theory and practice, such as poststructuralism, postmodernism, cyberpunk literature, and afew net activists, etc, etc, This is hardly a good way to understand what is going on in different places, and what different things ICTs can be for different people. And frankly it seems another kind of imperialism, a projection of northern issues and understandings onto the technology and via that onto everyone else. You have only to see some of the hoops that this makes southern academics and intellectuals jump through if they have to keep up with a completely alien northern obsession with disembodied selves and loss of identity. The only valid answer I can find to the question of 'cyberspace' (and it is unabashedly empiricist) is 'go and take a bloody look'. Of course, 'taking a look' does not mean looking through the spectacles of a quantitative survey, or tracking traffic. I do actually find numbers quite useful, but I've never found that they make any sense at all outside of an ethnographic context - ie, having a framework in which both to generate numbers meaningfully and to interpret them meaningfully. I'm in Ghana as part of a four country comparative study (the others are Jamaica, India and South Africa). My colleagues and I have found that in order to standardize a few lines of questioning for meaningful comparison between countries we have to ask quite *different* questions in each place, and we can only see this because of the ethnographjic base we already have. Eg, relating internet use to poverty is very different in Ghanaian formally extended kinship networks and lineage decents than in Jamaican single parent families with multiple baby fathers - it's only by knowing the different familial patterns of resources and obligations that you can even begin to think how to ask about 'monthly household income'. So what point would there be in asking a standardized survey question aboiut 'household income'. Same goes for Internet or mobile phone use, which is structured differently in all four places. Similarly, with interpretation of numbers: the stats tell me that there are about 700,000 mobile phone accounts in Ghana, yet everyone - and I mean everyone - uses mobiles in one way or another. I can only square this circle by understanding patterns of shared use, the structure of communications kiosks and so on. Similar I'm told by the World Bank that there are about 10,000 ISP accounts in Ghana, but even the poorest areas have numerous cafes, which are filled to overflowing, and everyone I've met so far can tell me their email address. And don't tell me we just need better numbers - this is an interpretative issue about what you are looking for and at, and whether you are senstivite and open to local uses and understandings of technology. What about the Accra parents (similar to cases in Trinidad) who have never seen a computer in their lives, are illiterate and impoverished, but send and receive emails several times a week from their elder son in London, the conduit being their second son who visits cybercafes on an almost daily basis. I don't think that EITHER 'cyberspace' or 'number-crunching' offer anything at all in this (vitally important) instance. I'll let you know how general this is as we continue carrying out more interviews, long term family ethnographies and hanging around cafes. Knowing the exact number of these instances, even if any survey known to science could get at it, is not very interesting to me; knowing whether email has entered into people's communications repertoires in thjese kinds of ways is. If you start with the northern, universalist, techno determinist so-90s presumption of cyberspace as the basis for a research agenda, then either you keep on waffling and asking the wrong questions, questions that don't emerge from engagement with actual practices and experiences; or I suppose you start demanding numbers that will prove things one way or another. If you start with numbers and surveys you just impose another set of universal assumptions across sites, rather than framing or interpreting your questions in location-specific ways. It might get boring to people to keep banging on about ethnography, but it seems to me the only way of subsuming both concepts and numbers within a meaningful engagement with the concrete diversity of social constructions of technology and people. Sorry for the rant, and for this plague on both houses conclusion, but this thread really got to me. Don Slater _______________________________________________ Don Slater Reader in Sociology, London School of Economics Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE Tel: +44 (020) 7849 4653 Fax: +44 (020) 7955 7405 http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/slater ______________________________________________ -----Original Message----- From: elijah wright [mailto:elw@stderr.org] Sent: 09 February 2004 13:36 To: air-l@aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] Re: first post (An Internet Without Space) Eero, i know you're an aussie, and that your discourse conventions are a bit different than they are stateside, but you're coming across in this message as pretty rude.

study will turn more towards real number crunching, rather than worrying about "cyberspace" and "cyber communities".

rebellions that do not work through an understanding of what their precursors were inevitably seem to fail. several people appear to be engaged in this discussion with you, currently. and, by the way, there are plenty of people here who crunch the numbers through one set of methods or another.

I think the new generation of students will force change as people who are less tolerant of "cyberisms" graduate and influence academia. I also think this new wave of Internet Studies scholars will drive the area into a more commercially focussed future as they understand the opportunities to be gained by excelling in the research of real data.

be aware that your 'new generation of students' is a loose agglomeration that doesn't even share common research methods, much less opinions about abstract concepts. second: 'scholarship' and 'commercially focused' have traditionally been diametrically opposed. with reason. and could you define real data, please - either you're making a 'slap' at the rest of the community, or you've gotten your head stuck somewhere unmentionable...

However...the internet as we know it may not last more than another decade, it will be replaced by something else, but I imagine that whatever replaces it will still be a communications tool.

this is a bluesky argument. people have been arguing that the 'net is a passing fad since sometime in the mid-1980s. (!!!)

So perhaps rather than concentrating on the "internet" part of this equation, all the little bits that are floating around in the academic

world in related areas should pull themselves into one universal school of communications study so that they not only allow for greater

diversity of study but also protect their own academic industry from the inevitable technological change.

AoIR is sort of a public face for the 'invisible college' of people interested in internet-related research.

division and I would see this evolving in a more global sense through an online Division rather than being an individual battle for status at every single university. How this would be put together in flesh and blood terms I leave to the geniuses of organisation.

... in other words, "i don't really understand how universities around the world work, so i will put out this grand idea and let someone else figure out how to implement it"? jesus.

Thus, when the internet dies and is replaced by something else there is still a home for those who want to study the new emerging technology.

there are list-folk who're on their third and fourth 'careers' - people always find something useful to do with themselves as their interests change or evolve. :) elijah _______________________________________________ Air-l mailing list Air-l@aoir.org http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l