Page 224 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

COMPUTERS, THE INTERNET, AND VIRTUAL CULTURES

new medium with which to contend, a medium that challenged popular
music’s industrial processes, and therefore challenged theories concerning the
relationships between performers, fans, and the music business. As has been
noted in a volume on cyberpsychology:

An overarching issue is the manner in which these technologies
implicate the objects and subjects of scholarship, along with scholars
themselves, in new webs of significance and meaning that impart new
frameworks to our experiences and encounters. In addition to
encapsulating us in any variety of Foucauldian panopticons, like some
global Hawthorne effect, network technologies affect our thinking and
behavior as much because of the attention we pay the technology (and
ourselves embedded in it) as because of anything else.
(Jones 2000)
Similarly, Internetworking has come to encompass culture in particularly
interesting ways, especially so for those who have mined the territory of cul-
tural studies. The Internet could, in some ways, be seen as a ‘carrier’ of culture,
in so far as it serves both as a medium of transmission and as a medium whose
users selectively attend to texts others have made available. But to have it seen as
such means that we will likely overlook practice, space, and emotion in favor of
text. Of course, the Internet is embedded within culture in important ways.
The Internet, it may be said, creates a ‘virtual culture’ (Jones 1997a). As Strate
noted, echoing many Internet theorists: ‘Communication adjusted to meet the
demands and biases of cyberspace is cybercommunication, and as communica-
tion and culture are intimately linked (to some they are consubstantial), culture
itself is altered’ (Strate et al. 1996: 271).
But a virtual culture cannot (at least, not yet) be entirely disassociated from
‘real’ life (Jones 1998). Wellman and Gulia (1999) noted that most Internet
research ‘Treats the Internet as an isolated social phenomenon without taking
into account how interactions on the Net fit with other aspects of people’s
lives. The Net is only one of many ways in which the same people may interact.
It is not a separate reality’ (Wellman and Gulia 1999: 334).
Our conditions of existence, to borrow from James Carey’s (1997) excellent
essay on American cultural studies, are not all consumed by cyberspace, no
matter how often or how much we may log on. How we, as scholars and
Internet users, draw the boundaries between the online and offline will
largely determine the phenomenological and ontological dimensions of our
analyses.
Most research on the Internet and culture has taken a decidedly sociological,
and to a slight degree psychological, turn. Our own work (Jones 1995, 1997a,
1998), for instance, has focused on questions like ‘Who are we when we are
online?’ Such questions are prompted by elements of Internetworking tech-
nology’s interface with our human selves, by the feelings of bodily projection

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