The Newbie Anthropologist:
Review

Threads

"What we can construct, if we keep notes and survive, are hindsight accounts of the connectedness of things that seem to have happened: pieced together happenings, after the fact." [Geertz 1997: 158]

Among the frequently voiced hyperbole of technological evangelists and the doom-laden pronouncements of their detractors lies a present that seems as complex and intense as anything so far envisioned. Indeed, "information is always socially organised, and usually in non-obvious ways so that values get built into techniques of knowledge." [Anderson 1995: 15] The predominance of text as the primary mode of communication in these groups belies the depth of engagement which may result. Electronic writing is not the same as the printed word. In having both literary and speech-like qualities, there is a resultant metamessage which suggests that "time would no longer be circular (as in orality) or linear (as with historical societies of writing) but punctual. Punctual time and the acceleration of information would entail that knowledge be not fixed, as in writing, but evolving, as in an expert system." [Escobar 1994: 219] The electronic hypertextual narratives of mailing lists and newsgroups are neither stable over time nor regularly periodic. They exhibit a punctual switching of expectation - in incidents such as the flame war on the McLuhan list - that can be seen as behaviour similar to that of De Landa's [1996a] chaotic, or 'strange' attractors.

Strange attractors are characterised by their sensitive dependence on initial conditions This dynamic also seems present in virtual communities; as Boissevain [1968] observed, the intersection of two coalitions (or mailing lists) is a person (in this case the list owner), and that their values may radically affect the outcome of that intersection. When schism occurs in virtual communities, cyberspacetime narratives 'bifurcate' in unexpected ways, so that classical narrative time gives way to what Ermarth calls 'ph(r)ase time' - postmodern, finite and problematic, and implying local definition. This term concatenates the 'phase time' of physics and Lyotard's 'phrases in dispute.' such that "to conceive of language as phrases and not as structure is... to liberate from confinement certain powers of language suppressed during several centuries of rationalist hegemony" [Ermarth 1995: 96] In a newsgroup or conference, where voices are legitimated by the content of the message rather than by the hierarchical position of the speaker, it is indeed the 'phrases' that are in dispute. Networked discussion reduces the contributions of all members to the level of content, and thus "it becomes possible to think of a cultural poetics that is an interplay of voices." [Collins 1995: 40]

Constituted as they are by discursive threads, mailing lists may be considered as the result of many email 'voices' constructing collaborative literary narratives. Ermarth claims that postmodern narratives work formally, but that it is "a formality of sustained interruption." [Ermarth 1995: 105] DIRECT-L - a vast conglomeration of fragments of discussions - exemplifies this notion; members construct linear narratives through the structural formality of the 'subject line', but at any point they may be drawn to another thread or posting which captures their attention. "Details here do not act, as they do in historical sequences, as grounds for generalisation but instead as switches capable of rerouting expectation in several directions at once." [op. cit: 102-3] One finds, embedded within the linear text of a DIRECT-L digest, multiple interwoven narratives, each of which may be read differently, and few of which may be predicted. Members of the group can be seen as readers who bring their own agenda to the text, and thus extract from it meanings which are unique to themselves. By means these now 'unsuppressed powers of language', the participants are engaging in an alternative social construction of knowledge.

Knots

"The true revolution will only happen if we end up with different communities than the ones we started with." [Schwartz 1996: 79]

For electronic communities to develop, there must be a greater understanding of these emerging communicative regimes, since "the organisation of knowledge... is crucially important to multimedia producers." [Thorn 1996: 6] Turner and Boissevain both suggest models which, while they have many similarities with the dynamics of chaos theory, also show that there are a multiplicity of ways in which to conceptualise the activity of online interaction. Turner's recognition of the phases of schism, and his identification of the liminal character of such occurrences, places his work in the context of far-from-equilibrium systems. However, for Turner, liminality was conceived of as a transition phase of a rite of passage between two stabilities, whereas complexity theory indicates that open systems undergo permanent flux. In focussing on the the marginal and the 'in-between', complexity theory often synthesises ideas from different fields of knowledge. But while it may be that the activity of virtual communities is complex, and that chaos theory is also complex, it does not necessarily follow that there must be an interconnectedness between them. Perhaps it is not that people are doing anything unrecognisably new, but that they are doing more of it, and in a more connected way.

Furthermore, the idea of 'theorising liminality' is itself problematic, suggesting a contradiction that limits discourse to the description of emergent processes. Ermarth asks whether chaos theory signals "the end to our powers to universalise or even generalise particulars as we do in formulating the laws of science and of social order?". [1995: 103] This implies that ethnographic accounts should resist the temptation to descend into systematising the results of study into fixed patterns, since

"analytical techniques, by their very nature, tend to kill emergent properties, that is properties of the whole that are more than the sum of its parts. Hence the need for a more synthetic approach, in which everything systematic about a given whole is modelled as a historically emergent result of local interactions." [De Landa 1996a: 182-3]

Whether in accordance with the suggestion of chaos theory, or whether out of the caution required in any new undertaking, it seems that judgment should stay suspended. "Every project in phrase time is limited absolutely. Its time comes to an end, and it will not be repeated. There is less of prediction and more of improvisation, less displaced control and more precision. There is no deep structure or transcending meaning to rescue us from that finitude and from that engagement." [Ermarth 1995: 108]

Ermarth's assertion of the demise of global explanation may be well founded; "some philosophers have judged technical rationality the primary mode of knowing and being, thus reversing the traditional primacy of science over technology and theory over practice." [Escobar 1994: 214] There may be no overarching reason to venture into the digital domain; it may provide no answer to the questions that are asked, yet "despite its insufficiencies we should go into cyberspace with hope. Groundless hope, like unconditional love, may be the only one that counts." [Barlow 1995: 11] Indeed it seems unlikely that technology builders will cease building technologies, and that consumers will stop using them. "IT affects anthropology more substantially than simply changing the way we acquire, record, transmit, publish and collaborate over data; it has the potential to change the way we think, and the discipline must follow." [Houtman & Zeitlyn 1996: 2] The requirement of a historically emergent view of community indicates a need for long-term ethnographic research if an 'anthropology in cyberspace' is to have a significant influence upon the scope and nature of the technologically-mediated communities that are already underway. Anthropological understanding might not change their form, but it may deepen the experience.

Christian Wach - 12th May 1997