The Newbie Anthropologist:
Discourses

Protagonist vs Skeptic

"Creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between our starting point and its rich environment. But the point from which we started out still exists and can be seen, although it appears smaller and forms a tiny part of our broad view gained by the mastery of the obstacles on our adventurous way up." [Einstein, cited in Zukav 1979: 45]

Opinion on the nature of the digital realm varies greatly. Many commentators see it as an entirely new frontier; Nguyen and Alexander consider the Internet to be a "universal discursive space" without precedent; "we are equipping our world with a social nervous system similar to those in our own bodies." [Nguyen & Alexander 1996: 99] They suggest that this has profound implications; "in world history, no new medium has diffused so quickly as cyberspacetime is doing, or required such rapid readjustment." [op. cit: 102] This adjustment is one which newcomers must make in the way they think, in order to understand the world that they find online. "Jacked into the matrix, they find a lateral world of people cooperatively connecting to play roles, share ideas and experiences, and live fantasies." [op. cit: 103]

Others, however, are not as convinced that what is emerging requires such radical readjustment. "I can't help worrying about the gross disparity between the ballyhooed electronic utopia and the mundane reality of today's networked community," writes Clifford Stoll, [1995: 13] himself a long-time computer-network user. "Next time I'm in traction, I'll check into Usenet. One of the joys of computers is how they're great at wasting time that might otherwise be difficult to waste." [Stoll 1995: 49]

The arguments fall into a pattern of protagonists and skeptics; the former extolling the opportunities for creating new communities; the latter concerned with the tendency to neglect addressing people's increasing alienation from one another, in favour of the promise of technological solutions. "These are familiar dichotomies in advocacy and critique of industrial society, extending back through Marshall McLuhan to nineteenth century formulas of 'Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft'." [Anderson 1995: 13]

It would seem to be the case that "we can assume a priori neither the existence of nor the need for a new branch of anthropology." [Escobar 1994: 216] In anthropological literature and elsewhere, there already exist concepts which make adequate descriptions of the structure of digital culture, and which places it within the wider cultural movement of which it is a part. This is required since "for Anthropology, inquiry into the nature of modernity as the background for current understanding and practice of technology is of paramount importance." [Escobar 1994: 213] An understanding of modernity and an understanding of technology, however, seem to be inseparably intertwined.

 

Theoretical Formulations

Theories of social structure have often been formulated according to (or in reaction to) the prevalent technologies of the time. Durkheim's two categories of group - mechanical and organic solidarities - seem to derive partly from his perception of the transition from feudal to industrial society and partly from the evolutionary theories of Darwin. While mechanical solidarities consist of undifferentiated members - a clockwork collective, organic solidarities lead to individualism through specialisation and difference. Durkheim's model proposes that society becomes more organic over time, but that "however complex the division of labour, society does not become reduced to a chaos of short-term contractual alliances." [cited in Giddens 1971: 77] Machines, governors and gradual, linear evolution appear to be embedded as metaphors in Durkheim's conceptualisation of society.

Machines, however, are no longer favoured as dominant metaphors. Illich [1973], pointed out that machines have historically been considered servants of humanity, but that this no longer held, since it was clear that machines enslaved men. The time at which Illich was writing was one of increasing disillusionment with the perceived trajectory of technological development. "People need tools to work with rather than tools that 'work' for them." [Illich 1973: 340] He called these tools 'convivial technology' -

"I chose the term 'conviviality' to designate the opposite of industrial productivity... In any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society's members... convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision." [Illich, I.1973: 342]

Illich argued that the focus of this new technology should be on the needs of individuals, whose needs he sees as having been neglected in the modernist 'top-down' organising of society. He suggests that with convivial technology, the impetus for development should be turned towards "primary groups." [op. cit: 340] These groups consisted of associations of individuals with a common purpose, aided by tools which Illich claimed were only then becoming possible.

More recent debates frame the issues through similar devices. The argument still concerns the roles of the individual and the group, but this time represented through the computer and the television. Tresilian suggests that there are consequences to the existence of two distinct kinds of technology - the analogue and the digital. "In the shift from analogue to digital technology in media, we may be seeing a paradigm for a more general shift from the division of labour characteristic of the industrial phase of work to its re-integration in the work of the post-industrial world." [Tresilian 1995: 262] This transition has not yet been completed, and he suggests that we are currently in a "digilogue" [op. cit: 262] phase where the two technologies co-exist.

Analogue culture, as illustrated by the mass experience of television, represents the apex of modernism and its grand narratives; the primacy of society over the individual. "Its final flowering in terrestrial television brought the people of all nations into a single communications loop for world events, be it the death of a president or an Olympic final, each passing in turn through the domestic screen." [op. cit: 265]

The digilogue phase, in Tresilian's scheme, represents the postmodern age; where TV channels multiply and fracture the mass experience into little stories, such that individuals are no longer locked into the singular experience of the mass event. He thus uses changes in the means of media production and distribution as a metaphor for the changes that he perceives in society. In this transition period the two cultures coexist, though they have perspectives which are seemingly diametrically opposed. For example, "channel-hopping is, broadly speaking, a negative phenomenon with respect to analogue but positive with respect to digital technology." [Tresilian 1995: 264] Interactive programming requires audience response; it relies on the individual making choices in order for the experience of the programme to occur. This suggests that the perspective (analogue or digital) from which an analysis is made determines the value of the outcome.

The 'digital age', however, remains to be fully experienced, though perhaps its stirrings can now be faintly heard on the Internet. Hakim Bey [1991] identifies an analogous duality between the collective and the individual in the digital domain, which he characterises as 'the Net' and 'the Web'; the Net is hierarchical, such as banking and military systems, while the Web is non-hierarchical, like the telephone network and postal systems. "The Net... presents a pattern of changing/evolving relations between subjects ("users") and objects ("data")." [Bey 1991: 109] Control lies not with the individual, but with the institution. The key features of the Web, on the other hand, are its horizontality and openness. The Internet, at present, encompasses both kinds of communicative structure - one may use it to check a bank statement or to hold conferencing sessions with a friend. It seems ironic that these two contemporary themes - the structural social relations of the Net, and the multiplicity of relations of the individual on the Web - appear to echo Durkheim's mechanical and organic solidarities.

However, while the apparent function of the technology of the Web is to enable horizontality of communication between individuals, it also allows the creation of forums such as newsgroups, conferences and shared spaces. These are enduring 'nodes' in the Web, associations of individuals that lack many of the hierarchical features of institutions. "Cyberspace, at least as met on the Internet, occupies such a social space between 'hard' institutions and 'soft' culture. Its advocates register this liminal character as 'virtual community'." [Anderson 1995: 13] The structure of such communities can neither be described by appeals to the primacy of the codified relations within the institution nor by the consequences of alienation on the behaviour of individuals. Perhaps the kind of group that these social spaces favour is more akin to Illich's 'primary group' than to conventional notions of social institutions or the interaction of individuals.

 

Between the Local and the Global

There have been several attempts to address these issues within Anthropology. Boissevain, [1968] for example, proposed the term 'non-groups' to describe associations that fall between the two poles of institutions and individuals. He highlighted the ubiquity of such associations from "networks of relatives and friends and relations... to the more intimate but often temporary coalitions which are formed out of these: the cliques, interest groups and factions of which all persons are members." [Boissevain 1968:542] 'Non-groups' - or as he later called them, 'coalitions' - remain largely unanalysed; "there is no place for them in the structural-functional view of society." [op. cit: 544] That coalitions are temporary social relations makes analysis all the more difficult. "We are not studying a static model of structure at a given period in time, nor one which remains constant through time. We are studying the process of creation." [op. cit: 544] This picture of the dynamic nature of coalitions reflects the need for their emergent properties to be included in the model.

Victor Turner, in his book The Ritual Process - published at much the same time as Boissevain's articles - argues for a strikingly similar model of social relationship he calls 'communitas' which is neither hierarchic nor fixed; these "liminal entities are neither here nor there. They are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by custom, law, convention and ceremonial." [Turner 1969: 81] Liminal states were originally identified as a part of the 'rite of passage' by Van Gennep. "Most ritual occasions are concerned with movement across social boundaries from one social status to another." [Leach 1976: 77] Liminality is the middle of the three phases of the rite, during which time the participant is neither of one status nor the other. The period is characterised by a lack of structure; consequently (although on a larger scale) liminality implies that Turner's "communitas emerges where social structure is not." [Turner 1969: 113] He, like Boissevain, acknowledges the transitory nature of such social relations; "it becomes clear that social structure is intimately connected with history, because it is the way a group maintains its form over time. Structureless communitas can bind people only momentarily." [Turner 1969: 141]

Both the liminal 'communitas' and the "temporary alliance of distinct parties for a limited purpose" [Boissevain 1971: 470] that is the 'coalition' were models proposed long before the Internet became accessible to people outside certain institutions. On the one hand, they show that the kinds of groups the researcher finds in the digital domain do have conceptual precedents, but on the other hand, both theories lack the vocabulary to adequately represent the emergent properties of such systems. This is a problem which is by no means unique to Anthropology; David Leakey, ex-chief scientist at British Telecom describes a similar problem facing engineers. At first they dealt mainly with 'ideal systems' where a certain requirement led to a single solution; if a machine goes wrong, there is only one correct way to fix it. Later, as systems became more complex, the discipline entered a period when engineers had to propose 'adequate solutions' to system specifications; a system should do what it claimed to do. Contemporary engineering, however, must contend with continuously changing environments. There has consequently been an shift in emphasis away from solutions to problems towards continuing responses to that changing environment. [Leakey 1995] Engineers have had to deal with these situations in a very practical way, but the primary impetus for the development of a language of emergent properties has been from the field of Physics.

 

Complexity Theory

The science of complexity - or Chaos Theory as it is commonly known - has been evangelised by some writers like James Gleick [1992] as a third great paradigm shift in Physics. Previous paradigms had been the Newtonian model, which began the codification of the universe in 'mechanistic' manner, and the insights of Einstein, which opened the way for the quantum mechanics of 'relativistic' physics. [Capra 1975] Like models of society in the social sciences which contrast the collective and the individual, Physics focusses on the very large through Newtonian science, and the very small through quantum mechanics. However, both branches of Physics investigate phenomena by isolating them from their environment, observing them as essentially 'closed' systems. The key idea of closed systems, first proposed as the concept of 'heat death' in thermodynamics, is that there is only one optimal historical outcome for the system. "Philosophers such as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer... introduced thermodynamic concepts into social science" [De Landa 1996b: 267] through analogous ideas such as the 'fittest design' of evolutionary theory. This kind of thinking also seems to be in evidence in Durkheim's assertion that society would avoid the 'chaos of short-term contractual alliances'.

Chaos theory looks instead at 'far-from-equilibrium' systems such as dripping taps and fluttering flags. It seeks to model phenomena where there are "strong interactions between local variables" [De Landa 1996a: 182] such as crowd movements and flocking birds. "The new science deals with systems that are subject to constant flow of matter and energy from their surroundings." [De Landa 1996b: 267] They are 'open' systems, subject to continuous change - without a singular historical outcome. "When a system switches (bifurcates) from one to another form of stability, minor fluctuations can be crucial in deciding the actual form of the outcome." [De Landa 1996a: 182] This is often referred to as their "sensitive dependence on initial conditions." [Hofstadter 1985: 387] The result of change in an open system may be a static, periodic or chaotic system known as an 'attractor'. Such phenomena have resisted explanation through conventional theories, so that, as Gary Zukav wrote of the revolution which quantum mechanics brought to physicists thinking, "what we actually discover is that the way we have been looking at nature is no longer comprehensive enough to explain all that we can observe and we are forced to develop a more inclusive view." [Zukav 1979: 45] A similar situation has occurred with the recognition and examination of far-from-equilibrium systems within the social sciences.

Functionalist and Structuralist paradigms of social science have hitherto dealt mainly with stable and enduring social relations, and sought to codify these relations into 'social institutions'. Proponents of the language of complexity within social science, "instead of emphasising the stability in nature and societies... emphasise instabilities and fluctuations." [Escobar 1994: 221] For them, it is not what happens in the mainstream that is interesting, but rather what happens at the margins. Turner suggests that communitas occurs "in the intervals between incumbencies of social positions and statuses, in what used to be known as the interstices of the social structure." [Turner 1969: 125] Bey points to "a decentralised proliferation of experiments in living" [Bey 1991: 98] such as hippie communes and virtual communities, coining the term 'Temporary Autonomous Zone' (TAZ) to describe them. If the Mandelbrot Set, the resonant image of Chaos Theory, is considered as "a cartographic projection of the Net in its entirety," [Bey 1991: 112] then the TAZ can 'disappear' without ceasing to exist, embedded in 'the interstices of the social structure' as if it were a data peninsula hidden in the depths of a fractal.

In cyberspace, these interstices are analogous to Bey's notion of 'the Web'; an open, horizontal communication network - that which is more commonly called the Internet. Its data resilience, originally built in by the military, makes centralised control of the Internet impossible. Email 'disappears' from central control; it moves by 'piggy-backing' data onto the existing traffic of the institutional networks. The Internet is decentralised, non-hierarchical and 'in-between' the transactions that take place between individuals and institutions. Indeed when it comes to networks, "chaos theory predicts that any universal control-system is impossible." [Bey 1991: 110] The content of the Internet is in continuous flux, being changed and added to by participants all over the world. Like coalitions and communitas, a virtual community occurs at the periphery of structure. They rely on Boissevain's intimation of "change as a basic structural principle" [Boissevain 1968: 546] for their effectiveness and appeal. A virtual community can be seen as a node which arises as an 'open' system in cyberspace, subject to flows of participants, information and data across the network. The Internet itself can also be seen as an 'open' environment for such groupings and associations, in which the concepts and language of complexity have considerable, although not unique, descriptive power.

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