The Newbie Anthropologist:
Introduction

The Digital Domain

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation... a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data." [Gibson 1984: 86]

Since William Gibson first described it, the notion of 'cyberspace' has become a common theme in descriptions of an emergent age of digital technology. Sci-fi visionaries see a future in which computers, and the worlds they give us access to, have become ubiquitous. However, while there can be no doubt that 'Information technology' is increasingly influential, the grand imaginings of science fiction and futurology have only begun the process of understanding the impact of these technologies on social life.

Escobar's call for enquiry - Welcome to Cyberia - suggests that "anthropologists might be particularly well prepared to understand these processes if they were to open up to the idea that science and technology are crucial arenas for the creation of culture in today's world." [Escobar 1994: 211] Though notions of 'culture' and 'community' have always been problematic, they become even more so in the abstract "technoscape" [Escobar 1994: 214] of the Internet.

The perception of computers has changed enormously in their short, turbulent history. Initially thought of as the calculating machines, they soon developed beyond the field of mathematics. Douglas Adams, co-founder of The Digital Village, described the transition:

"We all thought it was an adding machine, but after a while, because we were able to manipulate these numbers with increasing speed and sophistication, we began to think what else these numbers could stand for - maybe they can stand for the letters of the alphabet... how lacking in imagination we were to think that this is just an adding machine - what it is, is a typewriter. We developed it for a while as a typewriter and then began to think what else we could use these numbers for, like the elements of a graphic display - the pixels - and we began to think of it as a television, with a typewriter stuck in front of it." [Adams 1997]

The computer had changed from being considered a tool to being thought of as information technology. The social meanings of digital technology were largely sought in their relationship to human groups, as the rise of consumption studies in anthropology demonstrate. But the changes did not stop there; it has become increasingly popular to conduct persistent human relationships through computers. This has happened with astonishing rapidity as individual computers are linked through the telephone system. "Information technology increasingly has to do with managing relationships. As in those among people, like on the Internet; or among companies, like on an electronic data interchange network; or among nations, like when banks use clearing and settlement networks. Most of what is called information technology today has already outgrown the name and is now relationship technology." [Schwartz 1996: 79] The clearest sign of the shift to this "relationship technology" is the rapid growth of Internet.

 

The Internet

The origins of the Internet lie in the military networks that the United States developed during the Cold War. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) developed the first computer network to link their vast mainframes across the country. The network was intended to make the data stored on the computers resilient to military attack, so that if one computer were destroyed, the information would reroute to avoid the damage. Academic and business institutions subsequently began to see the value of interconnecting their computers so that users could share data. Over time, further networks were established, and eventually they became linked via 'gateways'. The Internet (with a capital I) is the sum of all these networks - the network of networks.

It seems ironic that what began as a military experiment should now be subject to intense media scrutiny as a medium for the dissemination of taboo material such as pornography. This is because the data resilience of the original network is still a feature of the current Internet, so that any message will reroute if it encounters an obstacle. This allows emails to arrive intact, even though the 'packets' will have travelled separately; it means that files can be stored outside national legal jurisdictions; that groups cannot be prevented from communicating, and illustrates that "technologies constitute a site on which various social forces converge... The user may bring to bear on a technology an intention which was not foreseen by the technology's designer." [Mackay 1995: 50] From military network to uncensorable public communication medium; the Internet represents bricolage on a global scale.

 

Virtual Communities

Although "the primacy of the electronic apparatus suggests a mass-mediated culture that allegedly destroys all sense of community and belonging... the appropriation of that apparatus within this context suggests only the reverse." [Collins 1995: 45] The emergence of the Internet provided electronic forums for people to communicate with one another via their computers. Howard Rheingold proposed the term 'Virtual Community' to describe the activity of electronic forums. "Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussion long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace." [Rheingold 1995: 5]

Virtual communities are growing ever more sophisticated, from simple mailing lists to complex three-dimensional shared spaces. However, there has been little analysis of these communities beyond the entrenched views of their protagonists and their detractors. It is into this breach that Anthropology can step; "anthropological analysis can be important not only for understanding what these 'villages' and 'communities' are but, equally important, for imagining the kinds of communities that human groups can create with the help of emerging technologies." [Escobar 1994: 218]

Over the last three years, the explosive growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) - originally a means for scientists at the particle physics laboratories at CERN to exchange data - has made the Internet the focus of intense media interest as graphical hypertext medium. It is what people generally think of when they think of the Internet, but is, in fact, only one way of accessing the information on it. The virtual communities which are the subject of this study are not accessed via the WWW, but rather through other services such as email, Usenet and conferencing. They are text-based services, which, though unexciting to look at, encompass the majority of social interactions on the Internet. [see Appendix 1]

The restriction of communicative activity to such a narrow band of human experience does not rule out social activity, but merely limits it. There is, on the one hand, the diminution of the human sensorium; it is claimed that "true interactivity is what happens between human beings," [Carlsson 1995: 242] and that virtual interaction is thus stultified. Yet on the other hand, there is an encouragement of participation, since "people are more sociable under conditions in which they can better control the presentation of self in everyday life." [Nguyen & Alexander 1995: 104] There would appear to be no fixed value that can be attached to the means of transmission alone.

Dangers of Futurology

This paper examines what kind of models might appropriately describe the activity of the people involved in these electronic channels of communication and investigates how these models fare in practice through ethnographic research. Commentators on matters regarding digital technology rarely resist the temptation to predict future trends, even though "the direction and nature of technology does not follow some inevitable trajectory." [Mackay 1995: 50] Any attempts at futurology should therefore be tempered by the caveat that the future is discontinuous with the past. [Kumar 1972]

Moreover, it seems that "while sci-fi writers and technology builders are generally uncritical of these trends, it remains to be seen to what extent and in what concrete ways the transformations envisioned by them are in the process of becoming real." [Escobar 1994: 214] It would be a great feat of imagination to make accurate predictions while so much of what currently occurs languishes largely unexamined. This paper therefore seeks to illuminate some of the dynamics of existing cyberspace communities, rather than make predictions about the nature of those to come.

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