Page 230 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

COMPUTERS, THE INTERNET, AND VIRTUAL CULTURES

Similarly, one can discern three phases in Internet studies – the early CMC
research rooted in organizational studies emerged first, followed by research on
the insertion of computers in everyday life. We are at the brink of a third phase,
namely research on the decentralization of Internetworking and its di ffusion
across and through cultural processes and practices.
Culture has clearly played a role in much of the literature in Internet studies
during the mid-1990s and onward. Culture was conceived and deployed in
two limited ways. First, it was understood by some as largely non-Western, that
is, as something in opposition to online culture as monolithic (usually invoked
in terms of language, particularly English, or commercialism). Particular cul-
tures thus could be considered under threat from the ubiquity of capitalist,
Western culture online (Brook and Boal 1995), or they could be thought to be
undergoing profound revitalization as they fight being subsumed by ‘main-
stream’ online culture, finding new outlets for their spread (Nardi and O’Day
1999). Such discourses can be found also in the rhetoric surrounding rural
communities going online (Smith and Kollock 1999). Second, it was under-
stood as an artifact of online interaction, as ‘virtual culture’. In this case one can
find fascinating work, such as that by Donna Haraway, Sandy Stone, Anne
Balsamo and others, on the racial, political and sexual dimensions of online
experience and online culture. However, in these cases it is typically assumed
that there is either a boundary between the online and the o ffline that, though
transgressed, is necessary for the analysis of virtual culture. Alternately, one
finds work based on the premise that online culture is the digital manifestation
of offline culture. As Gackenbach, Guthrie, and Karpen put it, ‘The Internet is
the collection of information and interactions which flow over it; the users and
their usage which generate the information, and their experiences of it’ (1998:
323).
But culture is neither information nor interaction as they describe it. Neither
is it usage, or experience, at least as regards online interaction alone. Cli fford
Geertz reminds us that the ‘proper object’ of cultural analysis is ‘the informal
logic of actual life’, rather than the ‘arrang(ement of) abstracted entities into
unified patterns’ (Geertz 1973: 17).
What is lacking from Gackenbach et al. and others’ conceptions of online
culture is a connection between space and culture, a connection formed, as
Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein note, by the promenade, a place where
people ‘gather together to rub shoulders and confirm their community’ (1977:
169). At present one senses that, online, rubbing shoulders, as a metaphor,
consists of a continuum between lurking and going elsewhere. But that is
precisely why the non-textual online phenomena are of such great import-
ance. What goes unsaid by the myriad Internet users, what is not revealed
between the lines, is of critical importance, because there is nothing but lines.
The in-between spaces are, for all practical purposes, impossible to mine from
online interaction alone, just as, offline, it is impossible during a card game to
determine the intentions of a poker-faced player. Sherry Turkle summed it up

219