Page 233 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

STEVE JONES AND STEPHANIE KUCKER

The economic project of localizing communities in terms of real estate is strik-
ingly similar to the project of localizing (and commercializing) communities in
virtual space. But to take a cultural approach to the study of virtual space
means, as Carey points out, to accept the notion that Americans, particularly,
‘are a people who are always creating new communities and then trying to
figure out a way to get out of town’ (Carey 1997: 23). With the Internet, at first
a particularly American technology, we have invented at once the community
and the way out of town.

Conclusion

If we are to begin to understand culture in cyberspace, we therefore need to
adapt to our analyses, as Grossberg suggests, by ‘rethink[ing] articulations of
culture and power’ (1997: 354). Adopting a strategy set forth by Deleuze and
Guattari, Grossberg exhorts ‘that cultural studies explore the concrete ways in
which different machines – or, in Foucault’s terms, apparatuses – produce the
specific spaces, configurations, and circulations of power’ (1997: 355–6). An
articulation that must be made is between the real and the virtual. As Robins
pointed out:

It is time to relocate virtual culture in the real world (the real world
that virtual culturalists, seduced by their own metaphors, pronounce
dead or dying). Through the development of new technologies, we are,
indeed, more and more open to experiences of de-realization and de-
localization. But we continue to have physical and localized existences.
We must consider our state of suspension between these conditions.
We must de-mythologize virtual culture if we are to assess the serious
implications it has for our personal and collective lives.
(Robins 1995: 153)
To do so will require our thinking to move beyond the hyperbole of ‘con-
nection’ between people, beyond analyses of social networks, groups, and
communities, that demonstrate that the Internet ‘connects’. Online we are not
solely and simply expressing cultural identities we maintain o ffline; we may be
expressing ones entirely unfamiliar to us in other realms and repressing others.
But the important issue is that culture and community, though in many ways
seemingly inseparable from communication, are nevertheless not communication.
To study the ways the Internet allows connection and then do little else is not
only an acritical approach to the study of life online but it ultimately reies
fi
technology and subsumes human, interpretive activity to the tyranny of the
Internet itself.
We would do well instead to examine the Internet’s own connections to
other realms of human endeavor. At the outset of this chapter we noted the
appropriateness of Jonathan Sterne’s remarks concerning Internetworking and

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