Page 234 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

COMPUTERS, THE INTERNET, AND VIRTUAL CULTURES

everyday life, and they are pertinent as a conclusion, too. If cultural studies can
‘denaturalize and radically contextualize the Internet itself’ (Sterne 1999: 277),
scholars must think less about the connections users make online and more
about what it is that connects the expression of particular interpretations and
what compels repression of others. We must delve into the how and why of the
connections made, the formation and reformation of the structure of the Net
both as apparatus and as spatializing force, not in the sense of ‘creating space’
(such as cyberspace) but rather in the sense that it creates affective spaces. Only by
problematizing the relationship between the triumvirate of space, connection,
and culture will we make it possible to do so. To borrow from Geertz, how might
we ‘reduce the puzzlement to which unfamiliar acts emerging out of unknown
backgrounds naturally give rise’ (1973: 16)? The goal should not be to merely
‘connect’ the real and the virtual; it should be to embed one within the other.
The choice one must make when doing cultural studies of the Internet, there-
fore, is deciding which one, the real or the virtual, is to be embedded in the other.

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