Date: 11 Oct 92 15:58:19
From: Moderators (tk0jut2@mvs.cso.niu.edu)
Subject: File 6--Is Cyberspace a "Culture?"

The following comments may be of interest primarily to social
scientists, especially students doing research.  They derive from
discussions especially with grad students and a professors who have
experienced difficulty in convincing potential dissertation committee
members or editors that cyberspace constitutes a "culture" and is,
therefore, a legitimate topic for research for cultural analysis.
Ethnographers--those who study the meanings of a culture from the
natives' point of view--seem especially vulnerable to the criticism by
outsiders that little in the net-world is of cultural significance.
Although based on ignorance of the nets, this criticism dismisses as
legitimate the intents of potential scholars.  These comments are
simply an attempt to provide the initial basis for the question: "Can
studies of cyberspace be cultural or ethnographic?"

The concept of "culture" is one of the broadest and vaguest in use by
social scientists. Whether a given group does or does not constitute a
culture is usually a determination made by the researcher.  Although
I'm not convinced that culture is simply anything a researcher says it
is, I do agree that it is an ambiguous concept.  At a minimum, a
"culture" includes some identifiable set(s) of norms, language,
expectations, boundary mechanisms, identity formation processes,
entry/exit rituals, and other identifying symbolic artifacts and
social processes that link participants. A culture of "garage sales,"
"bar rooms," "little league baseball," or BBSes would surely qualify
as a culture. As would some specific newsgroups or "the internet
culture."

If we define culture broadly as a complex system of signs and codes,
then the def of Van Maanen and Barley is useful:

    In crude relief, culture can be understood as a set of solutions
    devised by a group of people to meet specific problems posed by
    situations they face in common. . .This notion of culture as a
    living, historical product of group problem solving allows an
    approach to cultural study that is applicable to any group, be it
    a society, a neighborhood, a family, a dance band, or an
    organization and its segments.

For social ethnographers, Chicago School ethnography provides the basic
model for how cultural studies of micro-cultures (or subcultures)
within a broader culture might proceed. Named after the University of
Chicago, where anthropological culture methods analysis were applied
to small-scale urban scenes in the 1920s and 1930s, the Chicago
School of ethnography emphasized, but was not restricted to,
participation with and interviews of participants in the chosen
research site. There are some who feel that cyberspace is not only not
a culture, even if it were it could not be studied as one because of
the absence of face-to-face contact.

In my view, the judgment that "Chicago school ethnography" is limited
to taxi-dance halls or hookers in hotels, as it is for many
conventional Chicago school adherents is abysmally narrow.  Early
Chicago ethnographers illustrated how documents can be used to
reconstruct cultural processes and meanings (eg, The Polish Peasant),
suggesting that cultural artifacts hardly need depend on participant
observation. More recent Chicago-influenced ethnographers, such as the
"Chicago Irregulars" of the 1960s and their followers, have expanded
the data sources dramatically.  Hence, neither the method (participant
observation ((PO)) nor the data source (a face-to-face setting) are
the defining characteristics of ethnography.

However, even if PO were a necessary criterion (which it's not), then
BBS/cyber-related research could certainly qualify.  It should also be
noted that the early Chicago ethnographers themselves revised the
then-conventional view of ethnography as defined primarily by
anthropologists as they applied broad cultural studies to a more
narrow urban scene.  Changing technology creates and opens up for
analysis new terrains that were not anticipated by the "originals." A
"hacker culture," for example, cannot be studied by hanging out in a
conventional locale requiring f2f interaction, which changes the
definition of PO, which normally presumes f2f interaction.

Cyber-culture (culture that exists in an electronic medium) provides a
number of artifacts by which to establish "the meaning of activity from
the participants' point of view"--on-line interactions (logs),
newsletters and other documents, clothes (t-shirts) and other stuff by
which to "read off" and analyze it. The works of semioticians and
postmodernists expand theoretical and conceptual methods by which to
do this (for those who want to move beyond the past).

Guess if I had to make a short  response to editors or others who
claimed that analysis of cyber-culture is not (Chicago) ethnography,
it would be "Get a clue!"

Comments?

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