User:Jrradney/DS4OER Project/Materials

Materials

There will be a list of materials assigned during the course. The following annotated bibliography should give readers some idea of the range of materials to be covered in the course.

The focus of this course is to investigate online experience and practice as it relates to the formation, operations, and termination of communities (tribes). Of interest also is the relationship of such groups to individual experience and social behaviour in the ‘real’ (offline) world. A different course could investigate the nature of personal and social identity in online contexts (relative to offline identity), and a third course could examine the peculiar relationship between ‘virtual’ reality, reality, and imagination.

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Crow, Barbara, Michael Longford, and Kim Sawchuk. 2010. The wireless spectrum: the politics, practices, and poetics of mobile media. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Pr.

Doueihi, Milad. 2011. Digital cultures. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Pr.

‘In this book, by focusing on some of today’s more widespread technologies, I attempt to present a view of digital culture that explicitly privileges the cultural, in the broadest sense of the term, over the technical (while not, however, neglecting the technical). I undertake to discern, through the constraints as well as the opportunities opened up by the technology, the redeployment of rather classical models within the new environment. . . . the digital environment that envelops us promises to be a thrilling adventure . . . that, despite all of its newness, recalls and extends well-known models of intelligibility and sociability’ (10-1).

Comment: Doueihi affirms the value of priority to human action above the constraints of a mechanical system. He also states an approach using previous understandings of social interaction from before the digital age where possible.

‘Digital culture consists of a set of intertwined technologies that have produced and continue to produce social practices that, for the time being at least, either challenge or question the viability or even the legitimacy of some well-established social and cultural norms and their associated legal frameworks. Essentially, for our purposes in this chapter, I will say that digital culture is made up of communication and information exchange modes that displace, redefine, and reshape knowledge into new forms, formats, and the methods for acquiring and transmitting such knowledge’ (12). Comment: Digital practices call former social systems into questions, particularly regarding the production and communication of information.

‘Digital literacy, in its current state by touching on all the defining abstractions we have discussed, is not only in conflict with print literacy; it is also at the origin of a broader and more significant conflict, one that opposes models of legitimacy and paradigms of credibility, as they are invested with their own norms and practices. . . . But it would be a mistake to limit this conflict of legitimacy and credibility to a description or discussion of who can say what and with what authority. It is also essentially about forms of authority—cultural, social, and political—and the material or, in our case, digital support that makes them possible’ (52-3).

Comment: Although the operations of digital communities call notions of authorship and authority into question, they go further, calling the creation itself (as an individual act) into question.

‘If blogs represent the first large-scale step toward easy digital authorship, they are but a transition toward more complex and more sophisticated digital frameworks that are in essence social. The digital environment is fundamentally a digital city with its own rules, its own governance, its own politics and, unfortunately, its own forms of violence. Digital polis is neither a utopia nor a promised land: it is a territory that is being invented and shaped by citizens’ (77).

Comment: The comment tool in blogs invite readers to become co-authors in a discussion moderated by the blog’s ‘author’. Such an invitation opens up the notion of blog-ownership in interesting ways. As blogs develop into wikis, forums, collaborative documents (Google Docs), and other shared interactions, ownership is critically seen as a socially-derived notion, rather than as a primarily individual one.

‘Our initial ventures into digital literacy were based on the changes introduced by technology and the nature of the digital object itself, and the manner in which they lead to new models of reading and authoring. In that context, the Wiki stood out as paradigmatic, because it, by design, collapses the differences between readers and authors and provides a continuous archive of all edits and modifications’ (77) Comment: Because the wiki produces not only a finally-collaborative document, but also a record (an archeology, to borrow Foucault’s understanding) of the history of the document, there is conjoining of the function of author and reader (at least potentially) at any moment in the document’s existence.

‘the concerns surrounding credibility within Wiki space are not merely a reflection of a struggle between two competing models [, that is, openness and authority]. They go instead to the core of the long-term viability of authorship as represented by Wikipedia and may shape future participatory knowledge-creation initiatives’ (84).

Comment: How much a person may contribute to a given wiki page can be seen to be inversely related to the ability of people to attribute reliability to the information on the page. Not only that, but the credit of the page to an individual author or authors is itself critically challenged by the very potential for change resulting from the open nature of the document online.

‘The digital city, more universal than any other and more cosmopolitan than its “real life” equivalents, has developed its own geography with its own maps and its own guidance system that go well beyond the mere mirroring of conventional geography, since they call upon (besides the more traditional expectations) the languages and the tools that make the digital environment itself run. In other words, in the digital city, it is increasingly difficult to separate and distinguish the spaces inhabited from the discursive practices that render them possible’ (87)

Comment: Whereas in the non-digital world, the notion ‘here’ has a real-world correlate from the point of view of the person composing the document (and a different ‘here’ relative to readers), no such correlate is implied by virtual social interactions. In fact, the very durability of the document in the online world, makes the notion of ‘here’ problematic. In this sense, Doueihi regards the spaces and the discursive practices to have begun to converge.

‘We began our survey of Free and Open Access with a religious guiding metaphor, one that opposes heresy and orthodoxy, With the advancement of digital technologies and the rise of digital practices, the heretical model, on of Free and Open Access to the digital objects in their diversity and density and one that is cognizant of their susceptibility to conversions, is emerging as the dominant framework for digital practices. Heresy as dissidence, dissidence against the weight of restrictive notions of freedom, dissidence against the continued imposition of inappropriate conventions governing the public domain, and dissidence against unfair interpretations of normal and customary digital practices’ (115-6).

Comment: Within this sort of context, the notion of individual is less an object (a locus), and more a vector (an intentional, directed process). However, it is important to note that Doueihi’s ‘dissidence’ and ‘heresy’ are not directed against a status quo, rather such operations have become the status quo of the digital community. At the same time, it is important to realise that the dissidence is not necessarily directed against the ‘real-world’, merely against the uncritical imposition of real-world practice upon the virtual enterprise.

‘we face the ephemeral nature of digital formats and the incompatibility of systems and the general problem of interoperability. . . . it is the technology or the digitality itself that appears to be the source of the problem, even in cases where film was digitally captured’ (120).

Comment: In contrast with the feelings of security inspired by the conversion of analog technology to digital, Doueihi points out how impermanent digital records actually are. The change of technology, along with lack of backward compatibility, makes digital storage less, not more, reliable than its analog counterparts.

‘Changing applications and formats . . . are all but an indication of the current muddied state of digital archiving. . . . In fact, we can safely say that one of the most often neglected or forgotten aspects of digital culture is, ultimately, the impermanence or fragility of information and its material support. . . . digital history is literally littered with the remains of old and forgotten formats and media and with the ruins of inaccessible machines and systems’ (121).

Comment: Digital citizens are often unaware of how impermanent their archives actually are.

‘even beyond the economic weight of print, authorship has been a core value of an ethics of intellectual property, shaping historical narratives and cherished assumptions concerning individuality, freedom, innovation, and ultimately a “human” dimension that associates our world with our ideas and their various forms of expression Digital literacy, as I have suggested, radically questions and displaces this model. It first stands for the model’s exhaustion and for the rise of the voices of those who are, like Leibniz’s, humans, aware that when they repeat what has already been said they are nevertheless thinking and doing differently. Digital literacy, in this sense, is the heir to Pierre Ménard, the secret and invisible author of the Don Quixote. The words are the same, but the environment is other. The sentences are similar, but the context is different’ (149-50).

Comment: The understanding of authorship has changed over time, as the digital interactions have collapsed the functions of authors and readers in social media. Earlier notions of author-ownership have given way to group ownership and co-ownership of collaborators, as well as the potential for continuously expanding ownership over time. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that this situation was prefigured by the rise of literary-critical theory of the last century, due to its increased occupation with reader response in the meaning enterprise. It would come as no surprise to Foucault, Derrida, and many others, that copyright is an increasingly unintelligible and untenable concept (from a moral, if not a legal, standpoint).

‘Our confrontation with the digital, although in its early phases, has already opened up the way toward a careful and enlightened evaluation of challenges to established conceptual “comfort zones” ranging from property to authorship and identity. While the digital is by no means a utopia, it is nevertheless our new reality, with its own freedoms and blind spots’ (150). Comment: As encouraging as Doueihi’s observations are, they mask an essential commitment to culture that is unaware of the essential hegemony of culture over cultures. There can be nothing like a ‘new reality’ in a digital (or any other) world. The operations of communities, if directed toward constituting a reality (singular), will force the creation of multiple communities, with the intolerance of a majority making the operation of successive minorities a necessity.

This volume has a working glossary of key terms relevant to digital culture (153-6).

Hands, Joss. 2011. @ is for activism: dissent, resistance and rebellion in a digital culture. New York: Pluto Pr.

‘The summary of my argument is that there lies at the heart of rebellion a kind of thinking that entails the mutual recognition of others, and of solidarity and openness’ (17). ‘It is my contention that the digital, networked age is one that can be, and is, amenable to just this kind of horizontal communicative action, and lends itself to a horizon of dissent, resistance and rebellion’ (18).

‘So it is that Castells believes subjects of the information society are split between those captured by, furstly the “abstract, universal instrumentalism” of the net, who primarily exist in the space of flows. . . . And then, secondly, there are the “historically rooted, particularistic identities” (p.3) of the space of places – including the spaces of those who are largely dislocated from the space of flows. . . . For those with access to the space of flows, their priority is to organise themselves in that environment; to form common bonds; to learn technical, social and discursive skills; to develop and use the technology for their own ends’ (43).

‘technocapitalism is now organised in network formations, being integrated with information technology and new media, amid flows of information and the personal relationships forged in that environment. . . . I suggest we would be better served understanding the situation Castells describes as one of digital networked technological hegemony, within a horizon of technocapitalism. . . . By putting technology into the hands of the people – or, to use a term I will explore more fully in Chapter 7, the “multitude” – technocapitalism is unwittingly opening itself up to a new cycle of democratisation and social, economic and political flux’ (46-7).

‘If the examples discussed above illustrate the extend to which the logic of capital is still embedded in broadcast technology, then a model of participation that aims truly to move beyond the representational is the tradition known as “remix culture,” which takes advantage of the nature of the Internet (which will be explored more fully in Chapter 3) not only to circulate but to reconfigure audiovisual material’ (73) ‘Remix culture can be considered oppositional in several senses of the term – in production, distribution and consumption. It blurs utterly the lines between consumption and production, in that the consumers of media, out of the very media they are consuming produce it; and it is distributed independently, for free, outside the standard channels of commercial media’ (74). ‘Networks are neither intrinsically open nor closed, neither common resources nor private property, but are defined by the protocols that run them. If networks are the arenas of activist challenges in the network society, the the arena of struggle for networks is largely a protocological one’ (81).

‘If I undertake a discussion in a social network site, and the host or moderator disagrees with a claim and disconnects me without recourse, this is no different from a speaker in conversation silencing their interlocutor with the simple use of force. The platform of the social network has clearly developed protocols to enable one node to control the connection; it is a relation of asymmetric power. No longer need the force of the better argument to prevail. While this may in fact be how things do generally work, it does not mean that this how they should work’ (91). The human-network interface produces a kind of hybrid structure through which recognition flows. . . . So this is also a position that creates a moral imperative for networks to move beyond purely instrumental uses to become networks of recognition. it is also a direct challenge to the “power-over” of an informational capitalism that absorbs its workforce as an aggregate of alienated informational processors. . . . This analysis underlines the moral significance of the way in whih networks and protocols are built and ordered – the significance, for example, of open-source protocols and non-proprietary software’ (96) ‘The imperative referred to in the title of this chapter is therefore to mazimise communicative action and democracy in protocol design, and to ensure the greatest possible network distribution, openness, access and recognition’ (98).

‘In order to theorise and define the possibility of such new radical, democratic forms it is necessary to engage with emerging practices and actions. One of the most notable were [sic] the events of 15 February 2003, . . . which, rather than being seen as products of a public sphere, can be interpreted as the first instance of a massive new form of networked activism’ (105). ‘I have previously argued that dissent, resistance and rebellion are fundamentally dialogical and collective activities that are underpinned by communicative reason, mutual recognition and solidarity. I have also made the case that distributed, networked communications, in particular the Internet, have certain characteristics that can support these features, in that we can conceive of networks in certain circumstances as being “moral machines.” Given this set of characteristics, I believe it will be fruitful to develop an understanding of these features that extends this logic of recognition and distribution into the everyday realms of communication and action that they enable. I therefore propose to bring these elements together with the concept of the quasi-autonomous recognition network (QARN)’ (106). ‘I would argue that such QARNs are directed towards anti-power, and in their processes of coming together, interlinking and expanding towards mutual understanding is the preactice of what can be called anti power-law. This must be considered a practice rather than a law as such. It is not a mathematical concept, but a proposed response to the dangers a mathematical law can produce. To act in the mose of the anti power-law means to do the kinds of things I argued at the end of Chapter 3 were network imperatives – that is, to work consciously to mazimise distribution, openness, access and recognition’ (122). ‘The ability to move at will and to avoid hazards, to intersect and interrupt, is a vital aspect of power-to [as distinct from power-over]. The introduction of mobile communications, from the simple mobile phone to the Internet-enabled smart phone, as well as a myriad of other networked mobile computing devices, has massively enhanced the capacity to coordinate, organise and disrupt at speed and in numbers, enabling what can be described as “mobil(e)isation”’ (124).

‘the idea presented in these cases that smart mobs are anti-totalitarian and supportive of freedom as a result of their emergent qualities is not very convincing. . . . They are likely . . . to end up with profiled and controlled serial groups, without a mechanism to temper the un-reflected aggregation of preferences – that is, the critical thought and conscience that contributes to maintaining effective anti-power-law moblilisation’ (140-1).

‘The alter-globilisation, or global justice, movement . . . is the first great movement of the Internet age. It is ithe first to have a significant impact on a global scale – an impact defined by its networked characteristics and its use of digital network communications. . . . this very general picture [of globilisation] is the one against which the alter-globalisation movement is focused . . . a hostility not to international communication, relations and cultures, but to a specific form of globalisation in the neoliberal and neoconservative modes. . . transnationalisation of power into vast conglomerations of capital, undemocratic supra-national bodies, and privatised and encrypted realms of the “space of flows,” beyond the reach of citizens [which] has led to huge resentment and anger against a system perceived to be profoundly unjust and exploitative’ (142-3).

‘In the previous chapters I have focused on the quasi-autonomous recognition network, civil society and the political. But of vital importance to any activism is of course the aim of challenging the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism at its core: the capacity to exploit labour and expropriate the wealth it creates. This final chapter will accordingly address the role of labour, production and alternative models of social reproduction – and here the notion of the common is pivotal’ (162).

‘To conceive the multitude and its production of the common as something other than a swarming aggregation of atoms, as as a political entity, requires the application of a theory of mediated rational communication’ (172).

‘It is the combination of technology with social, political and economic activism that is the ideal, and its fulfilment must, I believe, be pursued if we are to escape what Herbert Marcuse referred to as our “comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom” [1964:1]. . . . I have argued throughout this book that dissent, resistance and rebellion are reformulating, and being reformulated by, our digital culture, and that there is a powerful capacity for technology . . . to be integral in the struggle against power-over. I have also argued that such activism needs to be understood in tandem with a commitment to mutual recognition, dignity, openness and the common’ (189).

Mossberger, Karen, Caroline J. Tolbert, and Ramona S McNeal. 2008. Digital citizenship: the Internet, society, and participation. Cambridge: MIT Pr. Shirky, Clay. 2009. Here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations. New York: Penguin.

‘When we change the way we communicate, we change society. The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. . . . Individual bees can’t be understood separately from the colony or from their shared, co-created environment. So it is with human networks; bees make hives, we make mobile phones’ (17). ‘The current change, in one sentence, is this: most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done’ (22).

‘Now that it is possible to achieve large-scale coordination at low cost, a third category [besides formal institutions doing serious, complex tasks and informal groups doing simple, short-term ones] has emerged” serious, complex work, taken on without institutional direction. Loosely coordinated groups can now achieve things that were previously out of reach for any other organizational structure’ (47). ‘It’s tempting to regard the bloggers writing about Trent Lott or the people taking pictures of the Indian Ocean tsunami as a new crop of journalists. . . . The problem, however, is that mass professionalization is an oxymoron, since a professional class implies a specialized function, minimum tests for competence, and a minority of members. . . . The individual weblogs are not merely alternate sites of publishing; the are alternatives to publishing itself, in the sense of publishers as a minority and professional class. . . . Mass amateurization is a result of the radical spread of expressive capabilities’ (66).

‘The spread of literacy after the invention of movable type ensured not the success of the scribal profession but its end. Instead of mass professionalization, the spread of literacy was a process of mass amateurization. The term “scribe” didn’t get extended to everyone who could read and write. Instead, it simply disappeared’ (79). ‘Now that our communications technology is changing, the distinction among those patterns of communication are evaporating; what was once a sharp break between to styles of communicating is becoming a smooth transition. . . . The distinction between broadcast and communications, which is to say between one-to-many and one-to-one tools, used to be so clear that we could distinguish between a personal and impersonal message just by the type of medium used’ (87)

‘We have lost the clean distinctions between communications media and broadcast media. As social media . . . now scale effortlessly between a community of a few and an audience of a few million, the old habit of treating communications tools like the phone differently from broadcast tools like television no longer makes sense. The two patterns shade into each other, and now small group communications and large broadcast outlets all exist as part of a single interconnected ecosystem’ (99). ‘[As we consider graphs of social media use, t]here are two big surprises here. The first is that the imbalance is the same shape across a huge number of different kinds of behaviours [Flikr, Blogs, Wikipedia]. . . . The general form of a power law distribution appears in social settings when some set of items—users, pictures, tags—is ranked by frequency of occurrence. . . . The second surprise is that the imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them. Fewer than two percent of Wikipedia users ever contribut, yet that is enough to create profound value for millions of users’ (124-5). ‘Like everything describe in this book, a wiki is a hybrid of tool and community. Wikipedia, and all wikis, grow if enough people care about them, and they die if they don’t. This last function is part of any working wiki, but it isn’t part of the wiki software, it’s part of the community that uses the software’ (136).

‘Technology didn’t cause the abuse scandal that began in 2002 [where lay people reacted to physical abuse incidents initiated by church clergy]. The scandal was caused by the actions of the church, and many factors affected the severity of reaction in 2002, including the exposure of more of the church’s internal documents and the effectiveness of the Globe’s coverage. . . . What technology did do was alter the spread, force, and especially duration of that reaction, bu removing two old obstacles—locality of information, and barriers to group reaction’ (153). ‘The communications tools broadly adopted in the last decade are the first to fit human networks well, and because they are easily modifiable, they can be made to fit better over time. Rather than limiting our communications to one-to-one and one-to-many tools, which have always been a bad fit to social life, we now have many-to-many tools that support and accelerate cooperation and action’ (158). ‘social tools don’t create collective action—they merely remove the obstacles to it. Those obstacles have been so significant and pervasive, however, that as they are being removed, the world is becoming a different place. . . . Revolution doesn’t happen when society adipts new technologies—it happens when society adopts new behaviors’ (159-60).

‘Collective action is different from individual action, both harder to get going and, once going, harder to stop. . . . Groups are capable of exerting a different kind of force that are individuals, and when that force is turned against an existing institution, groups create a different kind of threat’ (161).

‘As in everything that involves coordinated action, social tools have changed the balance of power in this game [of cat-and-mouse between the ruling powers and the ordinary citizens]’ (164). ‘Using the state’s reaction against itself is a kind of jujitsu. The protestors in Belarus believe that the government will be less willing to use force if it knows it is being observed by the outside world, particularly by Western Europe and the United States. As a result, the opposition wants to create widely observable protests, while the government wants to prevent such events from taking place or, failing that, to prevent documentation of those protests from being distributed widely’ (169).

‘Social tools create what economists would call a positive supply-side shock to the amount of freedom in the world. The old dictum that freedom of the press exists only for those who own a press points to the significance of the change. To speak online is to publish, and to publish online is to connect with others’ (171). ‘Having a handful of highly motivated people and a mass of barely motivated ones used to be a recipe for frustration. The people who were on fire wondered why the general population didn’t care more, and the general population wondered why those obsessed people didn’t just shut up. Now the highly motivated people can create a context more easily in which the barely motivated people can be effective without having to become activists themselves’ (181-2).

‘The power to coordinate otherwise dispersed groups will continue to improve; new social tools are still being invented, and however minor they may seem, any tool that improves shared awareness or group coordination can be pressed into service for political means, because the freedom to act in a group is inherently political. . . . we adopt those tools that amplify our capabilities, and we modify our tools to improve that amplification’ (186-7).

‘Individuals in groups with more social captial (which is to say, more habits of cooperation) are better off on a large number of metrics . . . than those in groups with less social capital. Societies characterized by a high store of social capital overall do better than societies with low social capital on a similarly wide range of measurements, from crime rate to the costs of doing business to economic growth’ (192).

‘In the developed world, the experience of the average twenty-five-year-old is one of substantial overlap between online and offline friends and colleagues. . . . The internet augments real-world social life rather than providing an alternative to it’ (196).

‘It used to be hard to get people to assemble and easy for existing groups to fall apart. Now assembling latent groups is simple, and the groups, once assembled, can be quite robust in the face of indifference or even direct opposition from the larger society’ (210).

‘When you are trying to find a link with someone else, you are unlikely to know any given contact of theirs, as we would expect in a sparsely connected environment. But you are very likely to know one of the most connected people they know. It is the presence of these highly connected people that forms the backbone of the social networks’ (214).

‘Small world networks have two characteristics that, when balanced properly, let messages move through the network effectively. The first is that small groups are densely connected. In a small group the best pattern of communication is that everyone connects with everyone. . . . The second characteristic of Small World networks is that large groups are sparsely connected’ (215).

‘Small Worlds networks mean that people don’t simply connect at random. The connect in clusters, ensuring that they interact with the same people frequently, even in large networks’ (222).

‘Perhaps the most significant effect of our new tools, though, lies in the increased leverage they give the most connected people. The tightness of a large social network comes less from increasing the number of connections that the average member of the network can support than from increasing the number of connections that the most connected people can support’ (225).

‘The essence of Burt’s thesis [“The social origins of good ideas, Univ. of Chicago] comes down to a linked pair of observations. First, most good ideas came from people who were bridging “structural holes,” which is to say people whose immediate social network included employees outside their department. Second, bridging these structural holes was valuable even when other variables, such as rank and age (both of which correlated for higher degrees of social connection), were controlled for’ (230).

‘The most basic service that Meetup provides is to let its users propose groups and to let other users vote with their feet, like the apocryphal university that lets the students wear useful paths through the grass before it lays any walkways’ (235).

‘Meetup shows that with low enough barriers to participation, people are not just willing but eager to join together to try things, even if most of those things end up not working’ (237). ‘The number of people who are willing to start something is smaller, much smaller, than the number of people who are willing to contribute once someone else starts something’ (239). ‘The bulk of open source projects fail, and most of the remaining successes are quite modest. But does that mean the threat from open systems generally is overrated and the commercial software industry chang breathe easy? Here the answer is no. Open source is a profound threat, not because the open source ecosystem is outsucceeding commercial efforts but because it is outfailing them. . . . The most important reasons are that open systems lower the cost of failure, they do not create biases in favor of predictable but substandard outcomes, and they make it simpler to integrate the contributions of people who contribute only a single idea’ (245).

‘The fact that shared interest can now create that longevity [of involvement] is what makes the current change historic. . . . Because anyone can try anything, the projects that fail, fail quickly, but the people working on those projects can migrate just as quickly to the things that are visibly working. . . . What the open source movement teaches us is that the communal can be at least as durable as the commercial’ (258-9).

‘Every story in this book relies on a successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users. The promise is the basic “why” for anyone to join or contribute to a group. The tool helps with the “how” . . . . And the bargain sets the rules of the road’ (260).

‘The fate of the various White Bicycle programs illustrates, unintentionally but dramatically, a basic truth of social systems: no effort at creating group value can be successful without some form of governance’ (283).

‘This is not to say that all groups become purely social—there is always a tension between the pleasure of community and the rationale for the group’s existence (between satisfaction and effectiveness, in other words) and that tension works itself out in different ways’ (285).

What Rose [owner of Digg] recognized, and to his credit acted on, what that his business was build not on the software that ran Digg but on the implicit bargain that his users assumed they had with Digg and, by extension, with him. The bargain had nothing to do with the official rules of the site or indeed the legal requirements—the users were intentionally violating both. The bargain was implicit but deeply felt; had Digg’s management reneged, the damage to the site’ popularity could have been considerable’ (291-2).

‘The speed with which the world became aware of the quake [in Sichuan China, May, 2008] was a function not just of global technological networks, but of its social ones. . . . As always, social tools don’t create new motivations so much as amplify existing ones. This social cable connects people living in the two countries; when this bundle of connections is supported by social media, the spread of news like this quake is effectively instant, even without mediation by government or official media’ (294).

‘One fitting name for the way more is different is “the network effect,” the name given to networks that become more valuable as people adopt them. Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet networking protocol, gave his name to a law that describes this increase in value. Metcalfe’s Law is usually stated this way: “The value of the network grows with the square of its users.” When you double the size of the network, you quadruple the number of potential connections. . . . David Reed, one of the early designers of the internet, has also formulated an eponymous law, which says that the value of group-forming networks actually grows exponentially with the number of users. . . . Metcalfe’s and Reed’s Laws conceive of value to individuals and to groups from all these new options, but what is likely to happen to society as a whole with the spread of ridiculously easy group-forming? The most obvious change is that we are going to get more groups, many more groups, than have ever existed before’ (301-3).

‘Once you know what to look for, evidence of group creativity is everywhere’ (311).

‘There are several interesting examples todya of just this sort of experimentation [to lower current barriers to the formation of virtual corporations]. The governor of the state of Vermont recently signed a law that allows for the creation of virtual companies, which allow groups who coordinate mainly or entirely through social media to apply for legal status in Vermont’ (316).

‘young people are taking better advantage of social tools, extending their capabilities in ways that violate old models, not because they know more useful things than we do, but because they know fewer useless things than we do. I’m old enough to know a lot of things, just from life experience. I know that newspapers are where you get your political news and how you look for a job. I know that musti comes from stores. . . . I’ve had to unlearn every one of those things and a million others, because those things have stopped being true’ (320-1).

Sohn, Dongyoung. 2008. Social network structures: collective dynamics in virtual communities. Amherst, NY: Cambria Pr.

Turkle, Sherry. 2011. Alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. New York: Basic Books.

‘The work reported on here, as all of my work, includes field research and clinical studies. . . . I call these studies clinical, but of course my role in them is as a researcher, not a therapist. My interest in the “inner history” of technology means that I try to bring together the sensibility of ethnographer and clinician in all my work. A sensitive ethnographer is always open to the slip, to a tear, to an unexpected association. I think of the product as an intimate ethnography’ (xiii).

‘I tell two stories in Alone Together: today’s story of the network, with its promise to give us more control over human relationships, and tomorrow’s story of sociable robots, which promise relationships where we will be in control, even if that means not being in relationships at all’ (17).

‘The first thing mising if you take a robot as a companion is alterity, the ability to see the world through the eyes of another. Without alterity, there can be no empathy. Writing before robot companions were on the cultural radar, the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut described barriers to alterity, writing about fragile people—he calls them narcissistic personalities—who are characterized not by love of selfbut by a damaged sense of self. They try to shore themselves up by turning other people into what Kohut calls selfobjects’ (55).

‘I return to the question of harm. Dependence on a robot presents itself as risk free. But when one becomes accustomed to “companionship” without demands, life with people may seem overwhelming. Dependence on a person is risky—it makes us subject to rejection—but it also opens us to deeply knowing another. Robotic companionship may seem a sweet deal, but it consigns us to a closed world—the loveable as safe and made to measure’ (66).

The two robot prototypes, ‘Cog and Kismet generate feelings of kinship [with people who interact with them]. We’ve already seen that when this happens, two ideas become more comfortable. The first is that people are not so different from robots; that is people are built from information. The second is that robots are not so different from people; that is, robots are more than the sum of their machine parts’ (85). My Real Baby was marketed as a robot that could teach your child “socialization.” I am skeptical. I believe that sociable technology will always disappoint because it promises what it cannot deliver. It promises friendship but can only deliver performances’ (101).

‘if our experience with relational artifacts [such as a robot-companion/pet]is based on a fundamentally deceitful exchange (they perform in a way that persuades us to settle for the “acting out” of caring), can they be good for us? Or, as I have asked, might they be good for us only in the “feel good” sense? The answers to such questions do not depend on what computers can do today or are likely to be able to do tomorrow. They depend on what we will be like, the kind of people we are becoming as we launch ourselves and those we love into increasingly intimate relationships with machines’ (107-8). ‘An AI expert [Timothy Hornyak, as reported by Amy Harmon, 2010] claims that humans “as a species” have to learn to deal with “synthetic emotions,” a way to describe the performances of emotion that come from objects we have made. For him, the production of synthetics emotion is take as a given. And given that we are going to produce it, we need to adapt to it. The circle is complete. The only way to break the circle is to reframe the matter. One might say that people can pretend to care; a robot cannot care, so a robot cannot pretend because it can only pretend’ (123-4).

‘a group of designers suggested that in the future people will not interact with stand-alone robots at all—that will become an old fantasy. What we now want from robots, they say, we will begin to embed in our rooms. These intellectually and emotionally “alive” rooms will collaborate with us. They will understand speech and gesture. They will have a sense of humor. They will sense our needs and offer comfort. Our rooms will be our friends and companions’ (143).

‘From the cyborgs [people who have affixed technology to enhance their information and perspective]. . . I heard another story. They felt like new selves. One, in his mid-twenties, said he had “become” his device. Shy, with a memory that seemed limited by anxiety, he felt better able to function when he could literally be “looking up” previous encounters with someone as he began a new conversation. . . . The cyborgs were a new kind of nomad, wandering in and out of the physical real. For the physical real was only one of the many things in their field of vision. . . . The multiplicity of worlds before them set them apart: they could be with you, but they were always somewhere else as well’ (152).

‘When part of your life is lived in virtual places—it can be Second Life, a computer game, a social networking site—a vexed relationship develops between what is true and what is “true here,” true in simulation. In games where we expect to play an avatar, we end up being ourselves in the most revealing ways; on social-networking sites such as Facebook, we think we will be presenting ourselves, but our profile ends up as somebody else—often the fantasy of who we want to be. Distinctions blur. Virtual places offer connection with uncertain claims to commitment’ (153). ‘Our attraction to even the prospect of sociable robots affords a new view of our networked life. . . . I have said that tethered to the network through our mobile devices, we approach a new state of the self, itself. For a start, it presumes certain entitlements: It can absent itself from its physical surround—including the people in it. It can experience the physical and virtual in new simultaneity. And it is able to make more time by multitasking, our twenty-first century alchemy’ (155).

‘Today, our machine dream is to be never alone but always in control. This can’t happen when one is face-to-face with a person. But it can be accomplished with a robot or, as we shall see, by slipping through the portals of a digital life’ (157).

‘Second Life is a virtual “place” rather than a game. Here there is no winning, only living. You begin by naming and building an avatar. You work from a menu with a vast array of choices for its looks and clothes. If these are not sufficient, you can design a customized avatar from scratch. Now pleased with your looks, you have the potential, as Second Life puts it, to live a life that will enable you to “love your life.” You can, among other things, get an education, launch a business, buy land, build and furnish a home, and, of course, have a social life that may include love, sex, and marriage. You can even earn money—Second Life currency is convertible into dollars’ (158).

‘Pete says that his online marriage is an essential part of his “life mix.” I ask him about this expression. I have never heard it before. Pete explains that the life mix is the mash-up of what you have on- and off-line. Now, we ask not of our satisfactions in life but in our life mix. We have moved from multitasking to multi-lifing’ (160).

‘One year, I raised the topic [of technology-use in the classroom] and suggested using notebooks (the paper kind) for note taking. Some of my students claimed to be relieved. “Now I won’t be tempted by Facebook messages,” said one sophomore. Others were annoyed, almost surly. They were not in a position to defend their right to shop and download music in class, so they insisted that they lied taking notes on their computers. I was forcing them to take notes by hand and then type them into computer documents later. While they were complaining about this two-step process, I was secretly thinking what a good learning strategy this might be. I maintained my resolve, but the following year, I bowed to common practice and allowed students to do what they wished. But I notice, along with several of my colleagues that the students whose laptops are open in class do not do as well as the others’ (163).

‘When I speak of a new state of the self, itself, I use the word “itself” with purpose. It captures, although with some hyperbole, my concern that the connected life encourages us to treat those we met online in something of the same way we treat objects—with dispatch. It happens naturally: when you are besieged by thousands of e-mails, texts, and messages—more than you can respond to—demands become depersonalized’ (168).

‘I watch cell phones passed around high school cafeterias. Photos and messages are being shared and compared. I cannot help but identify with the people who sent the messages to these wandering phones. Do they all assume that their words and photographs are on public display? Perhaps. Traditionally, the development of intimacy required privacy. Intimacy without privacy reinvents what intimacy means. Separation, too, is being reinvented. Tethered children know they have a parent on tap—a text or a call away’ (172).

‘Without a firm sense of purpose, people looked to their neighbors for validation. Today, cell phone in hand, other-directedness is raised to a higher power. At the moment of beinning to have a thought or feeling, we can have it validated, almost prevalidated. Exchanges may be brief, but more is not necessarily desired. The necessity is to have someone be there. . . . Ricki, fifteen, . . describes that necessity. . . . The young woman’s contact or buddy list has become something like a list of “spare parts” for her fragile adolescent self. Ricki counts on her friends to finish her thoughts. Technology does not cause but encourages a sensibility in which the validation of a feeling becomes part of establishing it, even part of the feeling itself’ (176-7).

‘Mona worries that she does not have enough of a social life [on Facebook] to make herself sound interesting: “What kind of personal life should I say I have?” Similar questions plague other young women in her class. . . . Facebook at fourteen can be a tearful place. For many, it remains tearful well through college and graduate school’ (180-1).

‘Early in this project, I was at a conference dinner, sitting next to an author whose publisher insisted that she use Facebook as a way to promote her new book. The idea was to use the site to tell people where she would be speaking and to share the themes of her book with an ever-expanding potential readership. . . . She had expected the Facebook project to feel like business, but instead she describe complicated anxieties about not having enough friends, and about envy of her husband, also a writer, who had more friends than she. It also felt wrong to use the word “friends” for all of those she had “friended,” since so many of the friended were there for professional reasons alone. She left me with this thought: “This thing took me right back to high school.”’ (181-2).

‘Early in my study, a college senior warned me not to be fooled by “anyone you interview who tells you that his Facebook page is ‘the real me.’ It’s like being in a play. You make a character.” Eric, a college-bound senior at Hadley, a boys’ preparatory school in rural New Jersey, describes himself as savvy about how you can “mold a Facebook page.” Yet, even he is shocked when he finds evidence of girls using “shrinking” software to appear thinner on their profile photographs. . . . By eighteen, he has become an identity detective. The Facebook profile is a particular source of stress because it is so important to high school social life. Some students feel so in its thrall that they drop out of Facebook, if only for a while, to collect themselves’ (183).

‘Ending a call is hard for Audrey because she experiences separation as rejection; she projects onto others the pang of abandonment she feels when someone ends a conversation with her. Feeling unthreatened when someone wants to end a conversation may seem a small thing, but it is not. It calls upon a sense of self-worth; one needs to be at a place where Audrey has not arrived. It is easier to avoid the phone; its beginnings and endings are too rough on her’ (191).

‘Every day Audrey expresses herself through a group of virtual personae. There are Facebook and Italian MySpace profiles; there are avatars in virtual worlds, some chat rooms, and a handful of online games. Identity involves negotiating all of these and the physical Audrey. When identity is multiple in this way, people feel “whole” not because they are one but because the relationships among aspects of self are fluid and undefensive. We feel “ourselves” if we can move easily among our many aspects of self’ (194).

‘Not far into this conversation, the emphasis on nonchalance runs into the complication that Audrey signaled: the composition of any message (even the most seemingly casual) is often studied. And never more so than when dealing with members of the opposite sex. John, sixteen, is an insecure young man with a crush who turns to a Cyrano, digital style When he wants to get in touch with a girl he really likes, John hands his phone over to a friend he knows to be skilled at flirting by text. In fact, he has several stand-ins. When one of these friends does his texting, John is confident that he sounds good to his Roxanne. In matters of the heart, the quality of one’s texts is as crucial as the choice of communications medium’ (199).

‘These young women prefer to deal with strong feelings from the safe haven of the Net. It gives them an alternative to processing emotions in real time. Under stress, they seek composure above all. But they do not find equanimity. When they meet and lose composure, they find a new way to flee: often they take their phones out to text eah other and friends not in the room. . . . They keep themselves at a distance from their feelings. They keep themselves from people who could help’ (206).

‘The beginning of an answer [why we deprive ourselves of the human voice to express the range of emotion] has become clear: in text, messaging, and e-mail, you hide as much as you show. You can present yourself as you wish to be “seen.” And you can process people as quickly as you want to. Listening can only slow you down. A voice recording can be sped up a bit, but it has to unfold in real time. Better to have it transcribed or avoid it altogether’ (207).

‘The Net provides many new kinds of space. On one end of the spectrum, I interview couples who tell me that they text or e-mail each other while in bed. Some say they want to leave a record of a request or a feeling “on the system.” . . . At the other end of the spectrum, there are places where one constructs an avatar—from games to virtual communities—where people go to find themselves, or to lose themselves, or to explore aspects of themselves’ (208-9).

‘In online worlds and massively multiplayer online role-playing games, you have virtuosity and fantasy—and something more: your performances put you at the center of a new community with virtual best friends and a sense of belonging. It is not unusual for people to feel more comfortable in an unreal place than a real one because they feel that in simulation they show their better and perhaps truer self’ (212).

‘In thinking about online life, it helps to distinguish between what psychologiests call acting out and working through. In acting out, you take the conflicts you have in the physical real and express them again and again in the virtual. There is much repetition and little growth. In working through, you use the materials of online life to confront the conflicts of the real and search for new resolutions’ (214).

‘since their entire relationship takes place in Second Life, the question of Noelle’s authenticity is unclear. Recently, however, it is very much on Joel’s mind. Who is she really? Is he talking with a depressed woman who has taken on the avatar noelle, also depressed? Or is the person behind Noelle someone very different who is simply “playing” a depressed person online? Joel says that he would be “okay” if Noelle turns out not to be French. That would not seem a betrayal. But to have spent hours offering counsel to a woman who says she is contemplating suicide, only to find out it was “just a game”—that would feel wrong. Although delivered from Rashi to Noelle, the advice he gives, as Joel sees it, is from him as a human being to the purportedly depressed woman who is Noelle’s puppeteer’ (216).

‘Nora is bored with her life but not with her Second Life. She says of her online connections, “They are always about something, always about a real interest.” But connections all about shared “interests” mean that Nora discards people when her “interests” change. She admits that there is a very rapid turnover in her Second Life friendships’ (218).

‘We are tempted, summoned by robots and bots, objects that address us as if they were people. And just as we imagine things as people, we invent ways of being with people that turn them into something close to things’ (224).

‘Nothing is wrong with [computer games]. But looking to games for amusement is one thing. Looking to them for a life is another. As I have said with robots, we are alone and imagine ourselves together. On networks, including game worlds, we are together but so lessen our expectations of other people that we can feel utterly alone’ (226).

‘once we feel humane because we are good friends to bots, perhaps it is not so surprising that we confide in online strangers, even about the most personal matters. On confessional sites our expectations of each other are reduced, but people are warmed by their electronic hearth. Just as simulation makes it possible to do things you can’t accomplish in the real . . . online confession gives you permission not to do things you should do in the real, like apologize and make amends’ (228).

‘Relationships we complain about nevertheless keep us connected to life. Advertising exerts a deadly tyranny. People reach out to strangers in kindness. Loneliness is so great that marriage to someone we have only met on a website can seem our best hope. On the electronic frontier, we forge connections that bring us back to earlier times and earlier technologies. We fall in love with twenty-first century pen pals. Often their appeal is that we don’t know who they “really” are. So they might be perfect’ (230).

‘The distinction between confession and apology comes us regularly in conversations about online communication and social-networking sites. There is a lot of apologizing on Facebook, for example, but I am often told that these apologies don’t count. They are more like confessions because a real apology has to deal more directly with the person you have wronged. . . . The elements of an apology are meant to lay the psychological groundwork for healing—and this means healing both for the person who has been offended and for the person who has offended’ (233-4).

‘if you share something intimate with a stranger, you invest in that person’s opinion. Anonymity does not protect us from emotional investment. In talking about online confessions, people sayd they are satisfied if they get their feelings out, but they still imagine an ideal narrative: they are telling their stories to people who care. Some online confessions reach sympathetic ears, but the ideal narrative is just that, an ideal’ (235).

‘this kind of thing [where a person projects anger at someone doing what they themselves have done to someone else] happens between friends. It happens in families. But it is endemic on the Internet. There is not barrier to displacement, no barrier to rage. Online confessionals, with their ethic of “getting the private out,” as Brandi put it, reassure users with the promise that they do not need to talk to someone in person—expression alone is helpful. And, of course, it sometimes may be. . . . But confessional sites are often taken as therapy and they are not. For beyond self-expression, therapy seeks new ways to approach old conflicts’ (237).

‘One can only be glad that Molly has found sustenance [in what she calls her online community (confessional site)]. But her view of “community” is skewed by what technology affords. Although she claims that on confessional sites she has met “good people,” when she gets feedback she doesn’t like, Molly leaves the site so that she does not have to look at the criticism again. Communities are places where one feels safe enough to take the good and the bad. In communities, others come through for us in hard times, so we are willing to hear what they have to say, even if we don’t like it. What Molly experiences is not community’ (238).

‘Anxiety is part of the new connectivity. Yet, it is often the missing term wehn we talk about the revolution in mobile communications. our habitual narratives about technology begin with respectful disparagement of what came before and move on to idealize the new. So, for example, online reading, with its links and hypertext possibilities, often receives a heroic, triumphaist narrative, while the book is disparaged as “disconnected.” That narrative goes something like this: the old reading was linear and exclusionary; the new reading is democratic as every text opens out to linked pages—chains of new ideas. But this, of course, is only one story, the one technology wants to tell. There is another story. The book is connected to daydreams and personal associations as readers look within themselves. Online reading—at least for the high school students I have studied—always invites you elsewhere. And it is only sometimes interrupted by linking to reference works and associated commentaries. More often, it is broken up by messaging, shopping, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. This “other story” is complex and human. But it is not part of the triumphalist narrative in which every new technological affordance meets and opportunity, never a vulnerability, never an anxiety’ (242).

‘Julia describes the kinds of emergencies that compel her to respond to any signal from her phone. . . . Having a feeling without being able to share it is considered so difficult that it constitutes and “emergency.”’ (245).

‘Despite the fact that they have only communicated via typed-out messages, Hannah says, “Ian is the person who knows me best.” Hannah doesn’t want to add an audio or video channel to their encounters. As things are, Hannah is able to imagine Ian as she wishes him to be. And he can imagine her as he wishes her to be. The idea that we can be exactly what the other desires is a powerful fantasy. Among other things, it seems to promise that the other will never, ever have reason to leave. Feeling secure as an object of desire (because the other is able to imagine you as the perfect embodiment of his or her desire) is one of the deep pleasures of Internet life’ (249).

‘Like as sleek, gym-toned body, an appealing online self requires work to achieve. . . . A senior boy painstakingly explains how to keep “your Facebook in shape.” First you have to conserve your energy. “It is a waste of time,” he says, “to use Facebook messaging” because those messages are like e-mail, private between the correspondents. “They will do nothing for your image.” The essential is “to spend some time every day writing things on other people’s walls so that they will respond to your wall.” If you do thi religiously, you will look popular’ (251).

‘stalking is a transgression that does not transgress. A seventeen-year-old junior at the Fillmore High School describes it as “the worst. Normal, but still creepy.” Normal because “its not against the rules to look at people’s wall-to-wall conversations [on Facebook].” Creepy because “it’s like listening to a conversation that you are not it, and after stalking I feel like I need to take a shower.” Just starting college, Dawn, eighteen, says she is “obsessed” with the “interesting people” who are her new classmates: “I spend all night reading people’s walls. I track their parties. I check out their girlfriends.” She, too, says, “My time on Facebook makes me feel dirty.” So stalking may not be breaking any rules, but it has given young people a way to invade each other’s privacy that can me them feel like spies’ (252).

‘When Brad talks about “visual proof . . . saved written proof” of damaging exchanges, he soujnds like someone hunted. I ask him about people saving his letters, He says that this does not bother him. In a letter, he explains, he thinks before he writes, and sometimes he writes a letter over several times. But to him, even though he “knew better,” Internet conversations feel tentative; you get into the habit of thinking as you write. Although everything is “composed,” he somehow gets into “ an experience of being in a free zone.” Audrey, sixteen, described a similar disconnect. She feels that online life is a space for experimentation. But she knows that electronic messages are forever and that colleges and potential employers have ways of getting onto her Facebook page. What she feels and what she knows do not sync’ (258).

‘Some say this issue [of online privacy] is a nonissue; they point out that privacy is a historically new idea. This is true. But although historically new, privacy has well served our modern notions of intimacy and democracy. Without privacy, the borders of intimacy blur. And, of course, when all infomraiton is collected, everyone can be turned into an informer’ (261).

[People will often say that privacy should not be a concern; just be good; don’t do the wrong thing, and you won’t need to worry that others can see what you’ve done.] ‘But sometimes a citizenry should not simply “be good.” You have to leave space for dissent, real dissent. There needs to be technical space (a sacrosanct mailbox) and mental space. The two are intertwined. We make our technologies, and they, in turn, make and shape us’ (263).

‘In democracy, perhaps we all need to begin with the assumption that everyone has something to hide, a zone of private action and reflection, one that must be protected no matter what our techno-enthusiasms. I am haunted by the sixteen-year-old boy who told me that when he needs to make a private call, he uses a pay phone that takes coins and complains how hard it is to find one in Boston. . . . I learned to be a citizen at the Brooklyn mailboxes. To me, opening up a conversation about technology, privacy, and civil society is not romantically nostalgic, not Luddite in the least. It seems like part of democracy defining its sacred spaces’ (264).

‘Children have always competed for their parents’ attention, but this generation has experience something new. Previously, children had to deal with parents being off with work, friends, or each other. Today, children contend with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere’ (267).

‘When I first encountered texting, I though it too telegraphic to be much more than a way to check in. You could use it to confirm an appointment, settle on a restaurant, or say you were home safely. I was wrong. Texting has evolved into a space for confessions, breakups, and declarations of love. There is something to celebrate here: a new exuberant space for frienship. . . . But there is a price. All matters—some delicate, some not—are crammed into a medium that quickly communicates a state but is not well suited for opening a dialogue about complexity of feeling. Texting . . . can compromise the intimacy it promises’ (268).

‘After she tells her story, essentially about a personal loss, Robin adds a postscript that she describes as “not personal. I’m trying to make a general point.” She says that when Joanne wrote her letters, they were “from a real person to another real person.” They were written to her, in all her particularity. Behind each letter was the history of their long friendship. The new letters on Facebook are generic. For a moment, Robin, the professional writer, allows herself a moment of judgment: “The journal is written to everyone and thus to no one. it isn’t as good.” Robin misses receiving something that was just for her’ (270).

‘Brad says that digital life cheats people out of learning how to read a person’s face and “their nuances of feeling.” And it cheats people out of what he calls “passively being yourself.” It is a curious locution. I come to understand that he means it as shorthand for authenticity. If refers to who you are when you are not “trying,” not performing. It refers to who you are when you are in a simple conversation, unplanned’ (271).

‘Brad says, only half jokingly, that he worries about getting “confused” between what he “composes” for his online life and who he “really” is. Not yet confirmed in his identity, it makes him anxious to post things about himself that he doesn’t really know are true. It burdens him that the things he says onine affect how people treat him in the real’ (273).

‘Online, social networks instruct us to share whenever there’s “something on our mind,” no matter how ignorant or ill considered, and then help us broadcast it to the widest possible audience. Every day each of us is bombarded by other people’s random thoughts.We start to see such effusions as natural. So, although identity construction on the Net begins in a considered way, with the construction of a profile or an avatar, people can end up feeling that the only deliberate act is the decision to hand oneself over to the Net. After that, one is swept along’ (276).

‘The phrase “sacred spaces” became important to me in the 1980s when I studied a cohort of scientists, engineers, and designers newly immersed in simulation. Members of each group held certain aspects of their professional life to be inviolate. These were places they wanted to hold apart from simulation because, in that space, they felt most fully themselves in their discipline. For architects, it was hand drawings. This was where design implicated the body of the architect. . . . The most enthusiastic proponents of computer-assisted design defended hand drawing. When their students began to lose the skill, these professors sent them off to drawing class. It was not about rejecting the computer but about making sure that designers came to it with their own values. A sacred space is not a place to hide out. It is a place where we recognize ourselves and our commitments’ (277).

‘Simulation is often justified as practice for real-life skills—to become a better pilot, sailor, or race-car driver. But when it comes to human relations, simulation gets us into trouble. Online, in virtual places, simulation turns us into its creatures. But when we step out of our online lives, we may feel suddenly as though in too-bright light’ (287-8). ‘In his history of solitude, Anthony Storr writes about the importance of being able to feel at peace in one’s own company. But many find that, trained by the Net, they cannot find solitude even at a lake or beach or on a hike. Stillness makes them anxious’ (289).

‘Speaking of photography, Susan Sontag writes that under its influence, “travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.” In digital culture, does life become a strategy for establishing and archive? Young people shape their lives to produce an impressive Facebook profile. When we know that everything is our lives is captured, will we begin to live the life that we hope to have archived?’ (300). ‘archiving might get in the way of living. To live most fully, perhaps we need at least the fiction that we are not archiving. For surely, in the archived life, we begin to live for the record, for how we shall be seen’ (305).

Wessels, Bridgette. 2010. Understanding the Internet: a socio-cultural perspective. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

‘The book explores the Internet within various dimensions of society and situates it within sets of social relations and various cultural contexts. The Internet is conceptualized in its different contexts of production and use as social and cultural forms. The argument is that the Internet is embedded in contemporary socio-cultural forms and by understanding the relations of production, the narratives and participation in these forms one can analyse the Internet’s characteristics, meaning and significance to contemporary society. This approach produces an analysis of the Internet that is neither technologically nor socially determined’ (1).

‘In this book, the development of cultural forms in which communication is embedded is understood through the following framework. The cultural form has three interdependent dimensions which interact to produce the distinctive phenomenon, such as the Internet as a communicative medium in society. One dimension is the “relations of production,” which involves the social organization of production and distribution of the form, including the specific features of the technology. Another dimension is the characteristics mode of narration, which embraces the themes and styles of the form. The third dimension is the type of interaction between producer, narrators and participants that characterizes participation in the form’ (3-4).

‘technologies including the Internet are socially shaped and culturally informed. The three main approaches are technological determinism, social shaping and social constructivism’ (5). ‘Cyber cultures have a material dimension in that they consist of computing artefacts and websites; they also are symbolic in that they exist in fiction, film and in people’s imaginations; and they are lived through the cyber experiences of people participating in cyber culture. Nonetheless, the notion of the “virtual” is important in understanding cyber cultures, so it is considered in relation to the ways in which, and to what degree, social actors play with virtual identities, virtual communities and subcultures, as well as virtual sexualities. The early rhetoric surrounding cyber culture emphasized the possibilities of liberation from traditional forms of identity, community and sexuality’ (7).

‘The social contexts and cultural ethos of each phase of the development of the Internet have combined to form an open and networked communication system. The flexibility of the form within the dynamics of social change is generating scope for the formation of new socio-cultural forms. The flexibility of its design and its openness of use means that the Internet has the potential to be part of a wide range of socio-cultural forms’ (29).

‘the chapter outlines a conceptual framework for understanding how technology gains it material form and meaning through innovation processes shaped by social values, cultural sensibilities and political agendas. The framework is premised on the meaningfulness of social action in the production and consumption of (digital) technology’ (30). ‘The argument in this book is that the innovation of the Internet and ICT as socio-cultural forms involves complex links between human culture and technological forms. The link between values and technology is traced, showing that this link is constituted through narratives, production and participation’ (46).

‘The social landscape in which the Internet is materializing is one that is flexible, adaptable and communicative. The dis-embedding of time and space and the rise of mediated and remote communications in a more mobile society means that individuals find new ways to participate and express community as well as constructing and reconstructing forms and expressions of identity. Networked individualism is a social form of late modernity that bridges many established and emerging social and cultural forms – hence the dualism of the virtual and the real, the online and the off-line are mitigated through social agency’ (64) ‘use of the Internet in developing networks has the potential to underpin some of the changes in public services and, if political culture becomes more vibrant, it could support a more informed and participative public that could push to ensure high quality and inclusive services. These dimensions are important because equality and inclusion is not a given and communication and participation are vital in the struggles for inclusion and equality’ (102).

‘A key aspect for fostering inclusion is building capacities in individuals, communities, regions and nations to utilize ICT and “knowledge” for economic and social purposes. The aspects of access and knowledge, as they interact in existing situations of inequality, are played out at the global level whereby developing countries are locked into existing patterns of inequality in relation to advanced economies. Therefore, trnasnational, informational capitalism and its current institutional arrangements are inducing uneven development across the globe and within nations that puts people at risk of poverty and exclusion’ (123).

‘The exploration of the Internet, culture and everyday life needs to be undertaken in relation to the characteristics of the Internets’ relations of production and its narratives; however, the emphasis is now on user-participation (as consumers and as producers) in various everyday contexts of use. . . . this chapter and the following chapters will focus on understanding the ways in which the Internet is taken-up, adapted and appropriated in everyday life’ (124-5).

‘This chapter has shown that it is through everyday life and communication that the shape of social experience is formed, performed and expressed. The culture of everyday life is interacting with changing social forms, such as the emergence of networks and networked individualism. Although the Internet can underpin and facilitate social networks, the institutions of everyday life give such networks and networked communication meaning’ (141).

‘Although “the virtual” is a distinctive feature of cyber culture, this culture is crafted out of the materiality of machines and wires, it is engaged symbolically throught popular culture, fiction, film and people’s imaginations, and it is lived in the experiences of its participants. Nonetheless, the notion of the “virtual” is central in understanding cyber cultures and must be considered in relation to the ways in which, and to what degree, social actors play with virtual identities, virtual communities and subcultures and virtual sexualities. It is, however, the ways that the virtual is given meaning through culture that gives cyber culture its resonance and shape – the way it is experienced and materialized in cultural forms. These forms, which vary in content, give the Internet its salience in the ongoing performances of ways of life’ (143).

‘This chapter first covers key themes in the shaping of a communications environment, which is followed by a discussion of the key aspects regarding understanding new media. To contextualize and explore these aspects the chapter discusses the new communication environment. This considers the spaces, identities and characteristics of its social relations, which define the integration of new media into the global, national and local spheres. The chapter then discusses the culture and ethics of the interactions in this environment and in the mediapolis in the twenty-first century’ (163).

‘The development of new media spans both the public and private apsects of social and everyday life and is part of a broader communications environment. This environmnet is a complex arena of established media organizations, technologies and forms of audience participation, and new media is being shaped in – and is shaping – that environment. New media have the potential to undermine established practice and open up the possibility of a more pluralistic media and public sphere through their interactive capacities’ (179-80).

‘This book explores the dynamics of the Internet and contemporary society. To achieve this, an analytical and conceptual framework was developed to account for the way in which the Internet and its related technologies are socially shaped and culturally informed’ (181).

‘In conclusion, the book shows how there have been some changes in late capitalist society towards an informational and intermediated society, but there is also continuity in our social practices and cultural sensibilities which are shaping the Internet and militating against a narrow technocratic society. Ultimately, the focus is on communication, with the evolvement of a highly communicative society in which the ability to connect is of paramount importance. Communication is cultural and the forms it takes both create and challenge institutions. The current communicative turn is both social and cultural and shapes the technologies which humans create’ (188).

Weinberger, David. 2002. Small pieces loosely joined: a unified theory of the web. Cambridge: Perseus.

Willson, Michele A. 2006. Technically together : re-thinking community within techno-society. New York: Lang.

‘This book attempts a number of things. Its central premise is that the increasingly dominant practices of technological mediation and extension of social relations mean that we need to rethink our understandings and practices of community. Using communications technologies extends the capacity to connect with people through space and time, therefore enabling the continuation and extension of relations of community. Interpersonal interconnectivity is consequently heightened for both the individual and the community. Yet changing experiences of time, space, and the body, as a result of technological possibilities, impact on our ways of being-together altering individual subjectivity and intersubjective relations. These changing social relations require conceptualizing and discussing according to their positioning within and across various forms of community’ (3)

‘Subjectivity, in the way in which I will use the term, refers to the ontological and phenomenal consequences of being an active social being within a particular body, a being who interacts and is interacted with, and who is positioned temporally and spatially. Therefore, a person’s subjectivity is shaped by the historical, structural, and cultural/social settings into which s/he is born and lives: her/his embodied particularity; the identity that is attributed by these settings . . . ; and her/his intersubjective relations. This understanding emphasizes the agency, the sociality, the historicity and the particularity of the subject. It also highlights the socially embedded/constituted nature of the subject and her/his resultant subjectivity. This means that when considering the subjects of a community it is not possible to examine these subjects in isolation from the social environment in which they are positioned’ (7).

‘The first part of this book brings together concepts and understandings that are frequently treated as theoretically disparate areas of analysis: community, technology, and intersubjectivity. Each of these concepts and understandings bring with it a rich and complex theoretical history’ (19).

‘It is helpful at this point to turn to those common elements mentioned previously – bonding, commonality, reciprocity, and identity – as analytical tools for grappling with community while also recognizing that these elements are not distinct, unrelated, or uncontested. Bonding is the most crucial of these elements, since it is the connection experienced among members that is integral to most understandings of community’ (24).

‘This chapter concentrates on the ramifications of information and communications technologies for subjectivity and social relations, and thus, implicitly, for forms of community. By information and communications technologies I am referring to technologies that are used to mediate or communicate information to and among people. . . . These technologies all abstract from the body inasmuch as the information of communication practices are not embedded within a face-to-face setting’ (47).

‘The remainder of this chapter explores . . . what the implications are for community and intersubjective relations when ontological categories are transformed. Throughout, my working hypothesis is that technology is used to extend relationships and integrative practices across time and space, compressing these categories in the process. In this process, it abstracts the user and her/his practices from embodied interaction, and it has the potential to instrumentalize relationships and integrative practices’ (66-7).

‘This chapter explores the implications of changes in the structuring of ontological categories for intersubjective relations and thus for community. Technology is centrally involved with these structural changes; through the material process of abstraction, extension, and rationalization, technology enables the stretching of community across time and space, changes the experience of embodiment, and alters our understandings of being-in-the-world, including our understandings of being-together. As relations are mediated or become more abstracted from concrete embodied interactive forms, I argue, that they become thinner and potentially more instrumental, thus undermining the possibilities and spaces for mutuality’ (86).

‘It is part of the argument in this book that as community relations in general become more abstracted and mediated across time and space away from direct and embodied interaction and integration through the employment of technological mediums, that subjectivity and intersubjective relations are affected’ (88).

‘In preceding chapters, it was pointed out that the subject is socially embedded and socially constituted. Indeed, it was noted that it is not possible to examine the individual person without recognition of her/his social environment. There are individual influences – experiences or particularities specific to that individual – that affect that person’s subjectivity, yet these are relevant primarily because of the social relevance attributed to them. Subjectivity is therefore not something that is arrived at independently – influence must also be attributed to those with whom that individual interacts’ (99).

‘I would argue that as these relationships [between people interacting] are more detached from presence and mediated across time and space, the more specific and typifying a construct becomes. Therefore, as the community relationship becomes more one-dimensional or specialized, the amount of exposure to the self and others diminishes or is relegated to that particular sphere of reference. . . . This leads to intersubjective relations that are more objectifying and/or less extensive’ (107).

‘This chapter examines the first strand of community theory – that of the social communitarians – and asks if and how this strand considers questions of community and technology. The communitarians are commonly labeled as such because of their shared underlying premise that the individual is socially constituted and socially embedded. Communitarianism is therefore usually counterposed against liberalism, which instead understands the individual as self-constituted or given, and autonomous’ (119).

‘This book argues that in fact the use of technology for enacting communication and integrative practices holds implications for the ways in which we experience certain ontological categories, and thus also for the ways in which we understand and experience our relationships with others. As such, it is not the technology per se – it is not the instrument – that is being examined; it is the possibilities, potentialities, and outcomes of the use of technology that are deemed to be worthy of further investigation’ (172).

‘Mark Poster, Sherry Turkle, and Howard Rheingold are just a few of the theorists who embrace and understanding of virtual communities as possible postmodern communities. . . . The virtual communitarians’ main emphases are on the following: the proliferation of multiple identities that can be enacted through the use of the Internet; the removal of the constraints on embodied identity and the ability to play with alternate forms of identity/ and the removal of the constraints of time and space from social relations and practices’ (177).

‘I prefer, rather than stressing the difference of each technology, to examine the processes that are involved/implicated in their usage, since it is rare that simply one process applies to one technology. For example, as was explained in Chapter Two, the Internet enacts a number of processes and degrees of interactivity. Surveillance, communication, information retrieval and creation, and commercial transactions all take place’ (194).

‘While this book does not wish to advocate abandoning technology as a way of extending social relations and social practices – that would be both unrealistic and idealistic – it does cast doubts on this solutionistic attitude toward the use of technology [the idea that technology will solve our communications problems worldwide and provide utopia]. It also asserts the theoretical necessity of considering the forms of relations that are evident within and between these mediated spaces’ (206).

‘These practices and understandings [whereby wifi connects us to the world at the same time we are isolated from and strangers to many people in physical proximity] accentuate the importance of control over choice, and of the individual nature of such control. Exposure to the Other is filtered out except in chosen and controlled circumstances. . . . This accentuation on the individual cultivated by the intersection of the processes of abstraction, extension, and rationalization on ontological forms undermines awareness or consideration of the social except as a resource to be accessed by the individual, not as something within which the individual is already necessarily immersed’ (211).

‘Technology in and of itself does not predetermine social direction of the predominance of particular social forms. However, the manner in which technology is utilized, the purposes to which it is applied, and the processes that are enacted through such unilization do have consequences for our social relations. This book has attempted to unpack some of these consequences to discern aspects and areas that arise out of the intersection of the technological and the social . . . that warrant further academic analysis’ (225).