I can see some uses for the sending of these brief messages to what amount to subscriber lists.  Journalists, for instance, might in some cases tweet an unfolding story instead of calling in; or an editor might deploy a company of reporters at a big event to get multiple simultaneous perspectives; family members or people trying to coordinate a meeting, perhaps at a crowded airport, might tweet.  At one remove, “alternative voices” might try to spin an unfolding event, as with allegedly on-the-spot messaging from and about street demonstrations over election manipulation recently in Iran that, in a sense, took the arguments into international cyberspace, where it can be hard to tell where they come from on the ground.[2] As my students might say, it’s “meet” space, not “meat” space now.

Commentators used to register this sort of testimony and the experience it represents as “dematerialization” or the “virtualization” of reality.  Those tropes from critical cultural studies have lost traction:  postmodernism and simulacra are old hat, at least for the generation that has grown up since those ideas were fresh.  Their realities are IT-mediated “meet” spaces, front-and-center among which are social networking sites, most famously nowadays Facebook.  Facebook did not invent the form; and, arguably, the now-declining MySpace actually perfected its rendition as expressive cultural performance.  But Facebook accumulated the numbers and the press to become the face of online social networking sites, and a very imperious one at that in aiming to become its users’ “platform.”

The platform metaphor comes from the IT-denominated cultural environment of Silicon Valley software startups, where an IT correspondent for Business Week reported it had become “meme” among twenty-something developers for the ambitions they held for their software.[3] As the web browser became a platform for other applications, so could a social networking site, essentially by harnessing (programming for) ever more of what users linked to – bits and sites of information, but also importantly to each other.  As software, the Internet itself is a stack of programs that provide platforms for more.  Structurally, too, the Internet is the platform for for the Web, which became platforms for portals, the Web’s first native format that aggregated information on the Internet around a theme, topic, interest.  Among those, after the portal declined, were social networking sites, which moved linking to like-minded persons from the implicit background to an explicit foreground.  The impetus to their development has been to connect persons and as continuously as possible, over connecting to information.  Some of this is marketing hype.  A decade ago, when portals were the center of developers’ attention, the meme was “Content is King.”  Now, it’s “Connectivity is King,” the idea being that it’s people that now draw people to the Internet, now that the Web (invented in 1990) has been around long enough for a generation to grow up with it, even – in some sense – “on” it.[4]

Certainly, this has been the identifying meme for Facebook, which went from a Harvard dormroom to Silicon Valley headquarters in less than a year and since has been rationalizing its vision as automation of networking practices. Its memes are “friends” and “friending” (linking to others) – or nodes and links in the sociology of networks – plus consumption profiles:  it joins networking with cultural performances, two of the basic and universal features of Internet uptake.[5] It has eclipsed predecessors, like Friendster, and those more focused on cultural performance, like MySpace, to feature networking as itself cultural performance, particularly as performed among college students.  Facebook invites and drives its users to accumulate “friends” and to use links to interests to link to persons sharing those interests (a sort of on-line “getting to know you”).  And it does so across a spectrum from primary bonding (partying, “relationships”) to secondary (around common interests) and tertiary (co-located but not interacting, like Georg Simmel’s “stranger,” the urban flâneur who observes but does not otherwise reciprocate the action around him) characteristic of college students’ developing spheres of intimacies in a sea of cohorts, and now on-line.

When describing what they do, Facebook’s founders, executives or commentators aren’t so much analytical as metaphysical.  The Web, in their view, is “natural” to their generation (the20-somethings who grew up with it), which has extended its forms of getting-to-know-you (i.e., expanding their networks and social experience) with the medium – much as, say, their grandparents and parents might have used automobiles.  Correlatively, they represent theirs as a new business model for the Web, a successor to the dot-com paradigm and generation’s focus on e-commerce that finally focuses on the networking potentials of the Web to bring and develop social, and not just economic, life on-line.  Heady stuff, the vision-thing of a new generation.

To what do such representations point?  There is a cultural shift in the “naturalness” of the Internet for the generation that grew up with a developed form of it, certainly; for them the “virtuality” trope is anachronistic at best, the foreign language of a past.  But this is only the surface.  Beneath it is a sense of and for interaction, as many point out, and beneath that a sense of what is knowledge, which is only beginning to come into view.

Some correlated data points are, with respect to youth, the view commonly reported that they hold their interactions with each other on the Web to be private, not exactly secret but not subject to surveillance, which would be intrusive.  Another is how they gather information, by going on line and getting it in bits.  Systematic search is out, along with libraries, it is said; they would agree with Margaret Mead who scandalized her science-minded colleagues in anthropology seventy-five years ago by arguing that one knew a description was complete when one is no longer surprised.[6] There are two ways this can happen, two ways that more data are redundant, and one of them is that interpretation settles into place and no longer registers “difference.”  A final data point is how my students register their easy assimilation of Twitter into these informational habits – as a tool that operationalizes a more constant level of connectivity that makes punctuality unnecessary, even upon reflection a bit obsessive or, as a reader of Manuel Castells might put it, “more structure than flow.”

All of these, and more, come together in the fuss over Facebook having hundreds of millions of users, of it becoming their “destination” or “home” on the Web.  Some of this is stirred up by Facebook developers who make it their goal not just to attract more users but to make it ever easier in ever more ways to stick around by sticking to others there.  Here is the notion of Facebook as “platform” for a new generation’s interactions on the Internet through “widgets” that, like programs earlier written for Web browsers, are written to run on Facebook.  This is the third typical register of encounters with the Internet that come with each new technology and each new user population that comes on-line: they become subjects for metaphysical reflection.

What I find compelling is that the reflection increasingly shifts the inflection on networking toward information-seeking, last seen about a decade ago around Google.  That was before the dot-com investment bust, which dashed or at least tarnished so many other hopes invested in the Internet.  Google seemed to represent some sort of apogee, some sort of almost purified version of what so many of us had taken up the Internet for – namely, gathering information.  Before Google, you had to know where to look or, for those with access to on-line databases, how to look.  Google turned the whole, or almost the whole, Web into a database.  Its promise was that anything would be, if not knowable, at least findable that found its way to the Web.  A Google search resulted in something that looked like a rough-and-ready index, and at the time gained a reputation for superiority over all other competing search programs for comprehensiveness and depth.  Scholars, in particular, exulted Google, not just for their own quick look ups or for the facility it introduced into those underbelly tasks of scholarship such as monitoring bodies of literature and events in the world that fall within one’s fields of expertise.  They extended this notion of enhanced agency from their own experience into studies of others’ uses of the Internet, particularly emancipatory uses that freed, or promised to free, people from constraints of bureaucracy, isolation, and the like into an age of dramatically increasing equal access to resources through ever-cheaper information technologies.  Much as the Web was the Internet to this generation, Google came to be represent the Web that, in practical terms, it presented.

This register of technological agency seems increasingly old-fashioned, or at least out of fashion, to those who grew up with Google.  They can take it for granted, while exulting in their own discovery and sense of creating Facebook.  I do not think that today’s twenty-somethings and college students are any more or less credulous about what Google searches turn up than were its users a decade ago, or before the dot-com bust.  The sense of marvel may be gone, dissolved like Margaret Mead’s getting used to what formerly was a strange place; but trust is another matter.  I don’t see today’s college students being particularly trusting; if anything, they seem less bothered by distrust in a post-ironic sort of “whatever” way.  They still seek information via Google searches; but they do something that those for whom Google was the marvel didn’t, couldn’t. The information the seek on-line has at the very least expanded to and perhaps substantively shifted its center of gravity to include – or in the ambitions of its developers to center on – Facebook or, more abstractly, on-line social networking in general.

Trend mavens registered this first, as “Connnectivity is King” replacing “Content is King;” and there is a small if growing chorus of anxiety, once again, over trash data, such as earlier visited on portals, the advent of on-line publishing, even the Web itself.[7] To put it bluntly, will it be the blind leading the blind if, instead of going to Google one turns to Facebook for information, to one’s friends (and “friends,” being anyone linked to) instead of the machine, to feckless youth instead of relentless machine.  There are several cultural differences coded into such comparisons – from emotionality vs. rationality to Harvard dropouts vs. Stanford engineers, even echoes of Frankenstein in Google opacity vs. “humanized” searching through friends – and these tend to surface as claims about knowledge.  Do you rely on a “web crawler” whose priorities (mathematical algorithms) you do not know or to your friends and acquaintances whose you know or at least expect are like your own?  In these terms, the most interesting difference to me is not between, say, Silicon Valley techies based in engineering and East Coast networkers for whom the model of post-graduate training is the business school.  There are too many overlaps between those populations to take such a distinction very far.  A more interesting difference is the possibility of a generation gap.

Some grew up with the Web (or before it the Internet); some did not.  The former take it for granted; it is part of their subjectivity.  For the latter, it is an object, a variable in their experience, and an independent variable at that.  Likewise with Google, yesterday’s marvel, today part of the furnishing of everyday life, and now it is the turn of Facebook.  Facebook is less a revolutionary technology than just a new one, which post-adolescents use to expand their social networks and enhance their social experience.  That may well include seeking information by asking people they know, instead of or in addition to Googling.  Their forebears might have checked the library or other sources in addition to quick Google queries.

I don’t know if this distinction is well enough founded to imagine Facebook competing with Google by mobilizing networks of friends for searches; but as a social scientist I would add two observations.  Beyond the fact that searching is a stratified activity, there are additional information-seeeking habits and practices in Facebook’s environment, such as encoded in Twitter – notably, the notion and practice of keeping in constant, if loose, touch that seems to displace the ethos of punctuality, which became a normative ideal of industrial-period bourgeois culture, with an ethos of availability.  Yes, they are more connected, today’s twenty-somethings, but to what?  To each other for sure and, it would seem, for recourse to more and more kinds of information.  If that extends from “what are you doing” to “what do you know,” the analytical issue is what do networks know?

This is not the same thing as what the digerati know, or don’t know.  Literary-based scholarship is likely in these post-critical times to idealize: science is what scientists say it is; networks of experts certify their knowledge, which is itself a construct of their customary practice.  Well, yes.  Sociologists of knowledge call these communities of practice; network sociologists refer to homophily.  Each, but particularly the latter, notes that people who are alike share the same information and so, in communicational terms, form echo-chambers of mutual affirmation, which network sociologists call “strong ties.”  If this were all there were to it, then the anxieties about the blind leading the blind would not be just a normative critique of information-seeking habits of the young; conservatives would be comforted by the thought that when those fail, Facebookers will (re)turn to Googling, maybe even to libraries.

Some might, but what network sociology shows is that the more immediate turn is to “weak ties,” the friends-of-friends who, located elsewhere, have access to other information.  In other words, in the sociology of networks, information is not stratified by how authoritative, or settled, it is but by social distance.  Information is on the margins, between noise and silence.  What networks know is not what their members share – that would not even be information, just identity – but what they don’t share.  It is not the case that this is subjective while the returns of Google searches are somehow objective (for having matched some search criteria).  What is the case instead is that information has a social life that is not exhausted by idealizations of its production and its reproduction.  So, one difference between Google and Facebook as sites of and practices for getting information from the Web is the nature and locus of trust or confidence:  a Google search might be “objective” in the sense of consistently returning the same results that match a query – it is, after all, a machine – but ultimately subjective in how that query is parsed and operationalized.  On the other hand, asking friends might produce “subjective” returns, more dependent on the friend, though ultimately objective in how a query is reinterpreted as it moves along to friends of friends of friends.  That it, it will achieve Margaret Mead’s closure that is registered by redundant returns.

Google already does this.  I do not know what Google’s search algorithms are.  They are trade secrets, so presumably no one outside the company knows.  Considerable discussion has circled around the relative weight of popularity of query terms in ranking results, which is not unlike the friends-or-friends return of “weak” ties.  I just don’t know who those co-queriers are, nor how deep are our similarities, how extensive our dissimilarities.  Neither do people in social networks know that about friends (whom they do not know) of friends (whom they know), although plausibly they could find out (at the cost of increasing the overhead of their querying), which one cannot in the case of Google, which lets users see their own individual searches but those of others only as aggregates.

So, what do we have?  Sociologically speaking, not much of a difference – friends of friends in social networks have their counterparts in Google searches – until one adds back the other informational habits and practices of the Facebook generation.  The generation that has embraced Facebook also embraces Twitter, and for as many different reasons, but around the same practices of loose-but-constant contact.  They may differ from those who earlier embraced Google, and invested some confidence in it, in various ways; but the compelling comparison seems generational.  They resemble each other in enthusiasms for and senses of using software to automate their information-seeking, but they do not resemble each other in their chosen software, in the software they find “new” and so both learn from (how to extend their social networks and expand their social experience) and “teach” (in the information they contribute that developers seek to use).

Looking at this as a generation gap instead of some other kind of cultural difference raises a host of other questions. Is it permanent, a “secular” change or evolutionary step that will turn into the platform for the next?  Or is it a cohort effect that will pass as the cohort ages, acquires experience and knowledge, and so becomes more like its predecessors?  Another is can older dogs learn new tricks?  As Facebook’s demographics grow to include older generations, will theirs be broad form information-providing and information-seeking uses or narrowly restricted to networking defined as “contacts”?    If, arguably, what Google exposed was not a generation gap but a much larger population to additional abstract, depersonalized information, is Facebook exposing information-seeking to social networking more extensive than in the past?  Pre-Facebookers already used social networking for information-seeking.  That’s not the generation gap.  The generation gap is in numbers and in exposure.

The preponderant finding of empirically grounded social scientific research on Internet behavior has consistently been that it is more a dependent than an independent variable, that social practices migrate to more than from the Internet, that it comes to resemble “normal” society the more its demographic sample resembles that universe.  Related to this, IT-mediation of interaction doesn’t seem to change anything even as it increases the level or “density” of interaction.  The reason is that in reducing marginal isolation less isolated actors transact smaller margins of difference.  Or, as the Washington Post recently reported about Facebookers’ linking to a page commemorating the death of a young Iranian woman, Neda Agha Soltan, in a street demonstration in Tehran that was recorded and viewable on YouTube, this sort of “click-through activism” represents the “easy virtue” of a low level of commitment, which is far more common than the dramatic examples of the Internet/Web/Facebook making a difference.

What is the difference that numbers actually make?  Just as Internet activism does not scale up the levels of commitment of more direct and comprehensive face-to-face relations even as it might scale up the number of interactions, Googlers are not “searching” in any academic sense and only loosely so by any academic model.  Using Google is less to move toward some academic sense of “research,” which is problematic in any case, than broadening access to anonymous, abstracted information.  Similarly, the difference that Facebook makes to information-searching is to extend the sociology of what networks know.  Metaphysicians of the Internet, both the critical and the enthusiastic, imagine it to bring a new model of knowledge; non-hierarchical is a favorite trope.  Yet “distributed” knowledge in a network is anything but non-hierarchical.  While it may lack institutional centers, part of what networks know is different ranges of information, and that what my friend likes is information also about her preference profile.

It is sociologically improbably that Facebook and Google would segregate for different kinds of information – Facebook for friends and Google for facts.  They already overlap for these, and both are post-modern formats of de-centered knowledge – one ad hoc, the other personal.  But then the popularity-ranking component in Google search results means that no search starts from nothing or from a flat data field, while network organization presupposes that some nodes have more information than others.  How they really segregate is generationally.

The lure of the new is most alluring to newbies, who are behind the curve of established uses:  what they have grown up with is not new, at least to them, though it may be to their predecessors.  What they come of age with is “new” to them, as it was to their predecessors.  At the collective level, embrace of newer technologies needs to include a sense of time; it is when these are put together that generation gaps begin to appear.  For today’s Facebook enthusiasts, Google lacks that sense of opening up the online world it had a decade ago and to a degree still has for last decade’s newbies.  Facebook now conveys that sense to those who grew up with Google, while Google or the Web before it or the Internet before that recede into the background as Dad’s or even Grandfather’s technologies.  The context for Facebook users is less backward to Google than to Twitter, which is also new, even newer and “the same” as Facebook, where virtuality has ceased to be a problem.

I don’t know if there is a cyberage generation gap between those who came of age when Google was coming of age with its paradigm of systematic, automated searching by prioritized criteria, and those coming of age with Facebook, with its emphasis on personal, highly situated links.  If there is, however, that is not the difference.   There is not much difference between the opacity of Google priorities and that of friends of friends.  But it does frame differences in a way that is based on the known sociology of networking, of information-seeking, and of what scales up (and what doesn’t).  Taken as a whole, knowledge in networks is not structured personally (whimsically?) but by strong and weak ties.  Cohort effects (differences) go a long way toward explaining on-line behaviors, particularly how people identify and identify with those behaviors; and cohort effects follow the sociology of anytime/anywhere connectivity in ways that other kinds of aggregation (regional, professional, etc.) fail to register.

Notes

[2] The Iranian Election on Twitter: The First Eighteen Days, Web Ecology Project (26 June 2009) http://webecologyproject.org/WEP-twitterFINAL.pdf; A Look at Twitter in Iran, Sysmos Blog (21 June 2009)http://blog.sysomos.com/2009/06/21/a-look-at-twitter-in-iran/; Twitter in Iran: Genuine or Orchestrated, The Hoot: Watching Media in the Subcontinent (20 June 2009) <http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=3923&mod=1&pg=1&sectionId=12&valid=true>; Digital Activism in Iran: Beyond the Headlines, DigiActive: A World of Digital Activists (20 June 2009) http://www.digiactive.org/2009/06/20/iran-beyond-headlines/; Reading Twitter in Tehran: Why the Real Revolution is on the Streets – and Online, Washington Post (21 June 2009) <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/19/AR2009061901598.html?referrer=delicious>

[3] Sarah Lacy, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good (Gotham Books, 2008).

[4] A view enshrined in Web scholarship by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (Persus Books, 2008).

[5] Daniel Miller & Don Slater, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (Berg, 2000); also Barry Wellman, ed., Networks in the Global Village (Westview 1999).

[6] Margaret Mead, More Comprehensive Field Methods.  American Anthropologist 35(1): 1-15, 1933.

[7] Arthur Koker & Michael Weinstein, Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class (Macmillan, 1994).

We all seem to be grappling with the new millennium through lists. So, for this part of the conference on Democracy, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in Old and New Media, I want to add Cyberspace and Internet Biographies in the Middle East. My goal is to tie tie these topics to what kind of social contract is emerging with networked communications. Since all of these concepts, and the data assembled around them, are problematic, let me begin with what I want to add and proceed to what I mean by the kind of social contract emerging with networked communications.

My starting point has been the Internet, first with Islam coming on line in the early 1990s, then in the Middle East in the middle 1990s, and more recently with how it plays with other information and communication technologies in wider worlds of transnational civil society organizations.[1] Comparing processes underway in transnational civil society with other regional ones helps shift the point of comparison and so what they share with other places, frames, instances or – as I suggest here – biographies of the Internet, its stories.

By ‘Internet biographies’ I mean those of Internet professionals but also Internet profession, or promotion, visions or conceptions of the Internet in the region. This might seem unpromising in comparison to other parts of Asia, for the Middle East scores poorly in global comparisons of connectivity, access, use, particularly in comparison to East Asia, where Korea is one of the most connected countries, and China already has one of the largest user communities in the world, while actively redefining ‘connection’. The Middle East even compares poorly within the Muslim world – where, in Southeast Asia, Malaysia has emerged as a global IT player and Indonesia as a hotbed of Internet activity, not to say activism.

But global indicators can be misleading for measuring what is not there instead of retrieving what is. So, I mean to shift the frame of reference to a more wholistic view of Internet experience in order to expand and deepen how we think about cyberspace and civil society in a world of networked communications. Before the Internet as a communications revolution recedes into taken-for-granted conventional wisdom, I think we need a better fix on more precisely what it engages. This has proved something of a slippery subject that has traced a familiar path from enthusiasm to subsequent disappointment, particularly in thinking about cyberspace and civil society, as well as about the Internet, in the Middle East.

Some reasons for this are ephemeral. The dot.com investment boom of the 1990s stoked enthusiasms for democratizing potentials of the Internet as a decentralizing force, a decisive shift from one-to-many communications regimes that accompanied the rise of mass industrial societies to a more open, post-modern, many-to-many communication. With the dot.com investment bust, interest waned or resolved into apologia for authoritarian states and celebrity culture. Critiques of democratization-by-information retraced implicitly or explicitly those since the Frankfort School of the 1930s of the ‘degeneration’ of mass media. Critical views for the Internet’s apparent failure to liberate, quite apart from liberalizing, recast the replacement of cognitive with affective functions that the left detected earlier in the massification of media. The Internet seemed to fall victim to tendencies in open markets for most attention flows to a few sites and most sites attract little. Not agora, it was said, circus, and relief for the authoritarians. The new reality was China: liberalization without liberation. Or Malaysia, a model for the Middle East, with IT for business and business as usual.

My reservations about such views are both critical and based on accumulating research about networked communications and their implications for expanding the public sphere of civil society and the social contract it actually embodies. Certainly, the malleability of the Internet has made it open to authoritarian constructions. In Saudi Arabia and Syria, for instance, extended discussion and experimentation were followed by Internet installation on the existing models of telephony, hierarchical centralization and oversight. However, the opposite ensued in Jordan and Egypt, where both internal pressures and pressures to gain WTO accession produced more open Internet regimes; and overall, there has been a rise in the number of voices, particularly alternative voices, along with numbers of users and producers. The public sphere has enlarged, and not just the discursive one of opinion. The impediment to recognizing more than liberation or cooptation is too narrow a conception of how communication is organized, produced and reproduced under conditions of networked communications, where the roles of gatekeepers from editors in the regimes of mass communications to cultural and political authorities become unmoored from their cohort cultures, reference groups, schemes of training and initiation of newcomers.

The problem here may be the old-regime model as point of comparison. In the Middle East, the destabilizing effects of the Internet’s many-to-many communication regime and generally freer access to produce as well as to consume were quickly grasped and, in retrospect, seem to have been contained by successfully extending models of control from broadcasting and models of centralization from telephony to installation, regulation, access, and use of the Internet. However, such analysis leaves over much data that had little place and less priority in views of information as liberating down to Habermas’ imperatives for civil society and its information regimes. So, what do they miss?

Let me start with the notion of cyberspace. As an anthropologist and not a political or media theorist, my own view is that initial conceptions of cyberspace as alternative or ‘virtual’ reality were wrong descriptively. All subsequent research that set out to test or specify this notion and related ones like ‘virtual community’ have turned up continuities, not discontinuities, with ‘real life’.[2] A classic example was the finding of a Pew survey in the US that traffic in pornography on the Internet declined when mothers followed their teenagers online, for email as they went off to university, shifting the balance of Internet use from expanding social experience toward relationship-maintenance. Not only do users project pre-existing activities, projects, and even capabilities into cyberspace, cyberspace itself is less a place, alternative or otherwise, than an idea. It is a projection altogether familiar in anthropology of a liminal beyond, the world reversed, where meanings are loosened, chimera and changelings abound, where order – temporal, spatial, social – generally dissolves in time out of time. In anthropology, the classic example and site is the bush in Africa folklore where, beyond the margins of the village and social order, boys are taken to loosen childish identities and sensibilities.[3] For us, cyberspace is the postmodern bush, often characterised as a ‘wild west’, frontierish, populated by monsters from child-molesters to shape-shifting teenagers lost in role-playing games, anti-social pornography, and unbridled fantasy.

In other words, cyberspace is a cultural projection of the ‘far out’, otherness, our Far Other. As such, it is a strong attractor of moral panics, which are themselves quintessentially over the anti-structural. In the Middle East, these panics focused on twin pillars of order – family and state – and linked pornography as sexual experience outside marriage and the family with political subversion as agency outside authority of the state as the threats posed by the Internet’s open access and free flow of information. In this way, the ‘near enemy’ of Civil Society acquired the additional ‘far out’ gloss of Cyberspace and, vice versa, was conveyed to imaginings of Cyberspace quite in advance of much actual experience of it.

The same Internet that posed a site for reflexion also provided sites for cultural performances and for networking. Police, including cultural police, were quickly brushed aside by voices touting the Internet as the material base of a post-industrial political economy not to be missed as the Industrial Revolution was said to have been missed and to have relegated the region to subordination by the West. Such views have been widely taken up not only in commercial sector, but also in the Arab Development Reports since 2002 that link developing ‘knowledge economies’ to the idea that ‘human capital’ was underdeveloped, or in the commercial sector underutilized resource. The Arab Human Development Reports echo views that crystallized from the 1970s to the 1990s that explicitly link development, civil society, and the Internet as an informational tool or, closer to the ground, have led practically every country to embrace the Internet for e-commerce, e-education, and especially as a development sector for participating in a post-industrial world. Departments of electrical engineering, computer science, and business or public administration have been detached from existing faculties and combined into new ones in state universities. Scores of private post-secondary institutions arise to offer similar combinations, and nothing more. Ministries of Communications have been dissolved – notably in Egypt and Jordan – and their functions recast in new Ministries of Communication and Information Technologies, often without the telephone companies but under a new cadre of IT technocrats and priorities for IT development.

I do not mean that there has been good cooptation of the Internet dream as well as bad, but instead that a fuller picture of Internet engagement than whether or not it is liberating, or even liberalizing, is that it is multidimensional. My goal is to open some analytical space between agency-enhancement on the one hand and institutional capture on the other by thinking of Internet engagement analytically along three dimensions of reflexion, cultural performance, and networking.[4] These are analytical dimensions of how people engage the Internet; all three are present all the time. I’ve already re-introduced Cyberspace as reflective engagement. It also provides an arena for cultural performance and for networking – remember those teens expanding their social experience and their social networks or mothers their relationship-maintenance. One could add gamers, bloggers, contributors to wikis, Facebookers, YouTubers, who also network on, perform on and take the measure of the Internet. Here, I would look at two other sets of actors who embrace of the Internet for cultural performance and for networking that more directly constitute than discursively envision a social contract under conditions of networked communication.

My first example is the Islamic Internet, which I have followed since the early 1990s and described as starting with technological adepts who first brought Islam on-line in pious acts of witness and because they could.[5] They were for the most part students and professionals, who were sent or went to work in high tech precincts where the Internet was developed and used. Like other users, they pursued avocational as well as vocational interests on-line that for them included the texts of Islam and forums for discussing those. They were for the most part among the best and brightest in their countries, tracked early into science and so essentially amateurs in religion, who applied a different intellectual as well as communicational technology to discussing it than the classic hermeneutics of religious professionals. In time, and when the technology became more user-friendly with the Web, they were followed by culture managers, who came on-line to give ‘correct’ information about Islam in the new medium. They were followed in turn by interpreters and styles of interpretation that were also more ‘user friendly’ to those making up the on-line population. That is, they found, or sought, a theologically correct but vernacular voice that spoke to Muslims in growing professional middle classes who sought work and leisure on-line. At the suggestion of Yves Gonzalez-Quijano, I call these post-modern nomads. They include both what Malika Zegdal identified as a “new ‘ulema,” who speak in vernacular terms to conditions of modern life,[6] and a kind of internal migrants within the Muslim world who seek on line an Islam speaking to their conditions that they cannot find locally. Some work on the Internet itself, others through it. They tend to be professionals and highly mobile, both occupationally – they move from one country to another – and socially in the sense of switching identities, not just jobs. In this, the biography of the Internet itself is mirrored in the biographies users – in that it grows by adding users, they grow by adding uses.

Engineers have long conceptualize the Internet this way as a ‘stack’, both of protocols that run it and in a more extended, social sense of adding users who build the Internet. The Internet was invented by engineers for their own work and in the image of that work. They built it as a collaborative structure, open and nearly self-administering or with ‘intelligence’ at the margins. It spread to scientists, who added their own work habits and values on free exchange of information and were among early rationalizers of the Internet as an informational commons, which attracted other academics and the professionals they trained, further adding the gloss of expertise to collaboration and contribution as Internet practice. In this sense, the Internet has been said both to be constructed by its users and to socialize them to its praxis, a seeming conundrum that resolves as a ‘stack’ of uses and of users that grows in time.

To communication with distant machines, the Internet’s inventors quickly added email for operators to communicate with each other, followed by more social (group-oriented) mailing lists and electronic bulletin boards as well as international connections. In this, the career or biography of the Internet parallels those of users: it became more social by the same means that users evolve into a sort of developer by adding data and routines that forge new uses. Each layer serves as a platform for additional applications. So, for example, the World Wide Web, which was conceived by its inventor as a “memory substitute” by adding linking to remote file access,[7] became the platform for portals, which turned it into a publication medium; and the subsequent development of HTML into XML turned the Weg into a medium in which users could interact with each other, the so-called Web 2.0 of blogs, wikis, and social networking sites.

Thinking of the Internet as a stack frees us from the other conundrum of technological determinism vs. social constructivism to see the Internet as a techno-social formation that becomes more social by amplifying certain uses and certain user characteristics. These have to do with the dimension of Internet engagement as cultural performance and networking.

The Islamic Internet is a site par excellence of cultural performances (tech adepts, culture managers, modulators) and examples of networking in the assembly of sites that provide not only sermons and fatwas, but also lessons for children and more informal advice, similar to the personal advice columns of newspapers that address social dilemmas, from how to get along with in-laws to more psychological advice. Few of these sites link extensively to others; most strive to provide a variety of services for a variety of user-seekers. Most also aggregate their interaction with users and make it searchable; so they are highly redundant as well as multiply internally linked. In network terms, they are nodes of strong ties and high informational redundancy that are linked to individual users by weak ties of high informational differentiation.[8] Strong ties are exemplified in friends and kin, who know each other well or share the same information. For that reason, they are said to form echo-chambers, which is the informational side of solidarity-affirmation. Weak ties are those with acquaintances, or that convey a bit, even a single bit in mathematical terms, of information. The distinction is classically put that friends cannot help you find a job, because they share the same information, but friends of friends can have the bit that makes a difference.

Weak ties engage the information-seeking power of the Internet, while solidarity-seeking turns out to be weaker, more problematic in this medium. Consider only the success of Google to have turned the Internet into an information appliance by contrast to the near universal tendency of discussion forums from listservs to chatrooms to dissolve in acrimony, shouting, and struggles to keep ‘on topic’. Groups may migrate to the Internet, but rare rarely form there, for the Internet has been designed for, and excels at, information-seeking over solidarity-seeking. So a third conundrum that virtual communities sometimes form, but that group-formation is more often overridden by individual agency enhancement dissolves into the different kinds of ties that these engage, Solidarity seeking and mutual affirmation are strong ties, hence the ‘echo chamber’ character or high informational redundancy. Information seeking proceeds through weak ties; with their information differentiation, they provide the links between nodes of strong ties.

Turning from sites in the Islamic Internet, this structure can be seen in how the Internet emerged in the Middle East. In that context, a similar set of actors has followed a similar emergence, a similar stack of users but different uses. Like the Islamic Internet, it began with some of the best and brightest studying high technology overseas, then bringing it back to work on national development. Like the tech adepts who brought Islam on line, these technocrats were creole journeymen comparable to Benedict Anderson’s creoles of early modernity who recognize each other and the common experience of continual movement between sites that refine this experience.[9] Those sites include variously privileged national labs and international conferences and agencies where new ideas are explored under high-status patronage, outside of the quotidian responsibilities of line ministries. Such sites include the Royal Scientific Society in Jordan under the patronage of then-Crown Prince Hassan, the Information and Decision Support Center located in the cabinet office of the Egyptian government, the Syrian Computer Society, a professional organization of computing engineers under the patronage of the sons of the Syrian president (one of whom succeeded his father as Syria’s president), or Saudi Arabia’s national science foundation. Each assembled a cadre of technocrats under patronage close to the ruler, but outside the line ministries and government agencies, to explore new technologies, initially for administrative modernization and in time expanding to other ‘soft infrastructures’ of development.

These technocrats maintained or developed ties with counterparts in other countries through international organizations, secondments, and conferences as well through alumni relations back to the countries or institutions where they trained. Such ties channeled not only technical knowledge but also theories of development and their evolution from modernization focused on infrastructure to globalization that focuses on ‘human capital’ that they focused on specific situations in their countries. That is, they were both conduits (through weak ties to other nodes) and refiners (through strong ties among actors who composed their nodes). In each country, these technocrats worked behind the scenes of operational government, partly outside it to channel information about the Internet, and inside it to find allies and build coalitions for it.

Initial goals were to bring the engineering behind the Internet to modernize the soft infrastructure of public administration, much as others brought civil engineering to modernizing hard infrastructure. As the dominant paradigms of development shifted from modernization to globalization, they began to seek other allies and build coalitions with actors in commercial and media sectors, financers, and new regulators for such services. Here, the creole journeymen met new elites who were like them in many ways – with advanced educations overseas, bent on appropriating the new information and communication technologies – but operating in the private sector, whereas the creole journeymen of the preceding generation had almost all worked in the public sector. Conversion of public sector into private sector assets is an old story, and not only here. It is also the middle phase of Internet development in the US, when the Internet extended throughout universities by the National Science Foundation during the 1970s was effectively privatized by business-friendly Reagan government in the 1980s. But the story here is not one of simple cooptation.

It is instead a story of alliance-building and forming coalitions to support the new technology. The Internet is a composite technology, so functionally too much media to be consigned to communications, too much engineering for media, and altogether too free-form. Its early developer-implementers in the Middle East were, too. They formed alliances from university engineering departments with graduates in the telephone companies to get hook-ups, used old school ties to get access to satellite ground links or military fiber optics, built coalitions for enhancing services that could become the bases for introducing Internet to the public with a compound of scientific and public-service legitimacies. Telemedicine installations were early vehicles in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, government businesses in Egypt and Syria. Jordan’s first electronic bulletin board was established by a business services company that enlisted a minister of information, himself trained in computer engineering, to go on-line and publicized it around the world as the region’s first “Ask the Minister” program that even parliaments didn’t have. Financeers were cultivated, and new regulators likewise for friendly implementations of WTO and WIPO requirements. That is, around the technology of the Internet assembled a dynamic, ever changing set of actors beginning with engineers pressing the Internet and IT generally as a new development tool and expanding to businesspeople pressing it as a new development sector, both eagerly abetted by market-oriented international development programs.[10]

These coalitions pushed back against early moral panics over the Internet, such as a 1997 denunciation in the Iraqi government newspaper al-Jamhuriyya of the Internet as an “the end of civilizations, cultures, interests, and ethics,”[11] and others like it from the Chief of Police in Abu Dhabi to cultural and religious sentinels. They pushed back with more benign visions first of reforming administration that often dated to the Ottoman period, then of digital delivery of education, and later of e-commerce, even reversing the outcome of the Industrial Revolution that consigned the region to the status of primary producers who, as a former US president once said, “sell wholesale but buy retail.” For them, the Internet was also a site of cultural performance of their expertise as engineers and as contributors of modernities their countries were capable of. In this, they refracted the high optimism of the 1990s into to using and building the Internet as a network and platform for cultural performances at once modern and Arab from advanced telemedicine to a plethora of Web-based portals.

Regional counterparts to the post-modern nomads also emerged by the late 1990s. At their core were developers of Internet applications – in fact, a range of applications from underlying programs, to web design, to programming in the media sense. A decade after then Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan began sponsoring and promoting projects of engineers at the Royal Scientific Society, a medical school graduate created the first pan-Arab Internet portal, which he subsequently sold to a Saudi media mogul and then reappeared as an IT venture capitalist himself. Programmers, web-designers, engineers circulated between Cairo, the Levant, the Gulf and beyond. A generation of engineers who founded the Syrian Computer Society followed their president, Bashar al-Asad, into government as ministers, ambassadors, governors, agency heads. IDSC technocrats in Egypt created and spun off applications for IT generally and the Internet specifically, while in Saudi Arabia the national scientific establishment was placed between the government and commercial sectors with responsibility for encouraging Internet development by data and media services as well as network installers.[12] In other words, a similar, and similarly mobile population that merged technological and cultural capabilities like those on the Islamic Internet emerged in the regional context of the Middle East. Both were interstitial with respect to traditional lines of organization and authority. Both trade on expertise and slip between different sorts while constantly ‘networking’ with counterparts, searching for allies, building coalitions around implementation and extension of the new technology of the Internet.

Putting these together, the Internet’s biography in the Middle East is a succession of creole journeymen, cultural elites, and their merger in post-modern nomads who modulate the socio-technical development, implementation, extension, pioneering of the Internet in the region.[13] Individual biographies tend to follow the career of the Internet itself. Both emerge as a stack of skills brought and acquired, but most importantly amplified on the Internet in the process of developing it. Thinking of these biographies – of Internet developers and of the Internet itself – as a stack of users’ contributing their cultures and of uses they develop resolves anomalies, uncertainties really, introduced thinking of the Internet as having a dynamic inertia that it imparts to or is absorbed by the static inertia of society.

As confusing initial pictures of the Internet recede – pictures of liberation and cooptation, of the enhancement of individual agency and of institutional takeover, of democratization seemingly thwarted by authoritarian states – we can see them as partial, even partisan, descriptions of more multidimensional engagements with the Internet. Such outcomes can be sorted more systematically to the different kinds of ties that actually compose networks and the sorts of communications they distribute. It’s been common to think of networks, and so of networked communications, as composed of ‘flows’,[14] with little attention to stratifying their content. That content, I am suggesting, can be broken analytically into strong and weak ties – the one characterizing solidarity-seeking and characterized by high informational redundancy, the other characterizing information-seeking and characterized by differentiation on the margins. The contradictory evidences of both agency enhancement and institutional cooptation occur at different parts of networks, in the links that pass and in the nodes that refine information. Networked communications turn out to be not just the breakdown of one-to-many communications by many-to-many. They do not atomize but, as web-media guru David Weinberger recently put it, ‘molecularize’ somewhere “between the expertise of men in the editorial boardroom and the ‘wisdom of crowds’.”[15]

If this is a more realistic sociology of the Internet, a ‘thicker description’ of it in anthropological terms, what does it mean as a social contract? What kind of society does networked communications sustain, encourage, amplify? We are accustomed to thinking of mass communications as a feature of mass society, amplifying mass culture, encouraging a mass subject, whether as the electorate or more grandly ‘the people’. What does networked communications sustain, encourage, amplify? I have suggested it is weak ties of information-seeking over stronger ties of solidarity seeking – crudely, linking over nodes – and this has consequences for the social contract, particularly democratic social contracts that convert voluntarism into the praxis of democratic politics.

The democratizing impact of the Internet was only a decade ago held out as its greatest promise, whether operationalized in electronic town halls, more open and responsive e-government, or for grass-roots organization.[16] The Jordanian Minister of Information’s experiment with an electronic chat room was one such demonstration project; so were plans for electronic delivery of government services from licenses to health insurance that would by-pass bureaucrats and the infamous slog from office to office for signature after signature. Similar experiments on the intra-governmental side were undertaken in Saudi Arabia and Syria. The democratizing impact has proven elusive, not because of institutional cooptation, but in its absence, partly because it flows through weak ties, which are the stronger force on the Internet than solidarity-affirming strong ties. Strong ties are more evident in nodes than in links, the weak ties that are the sites of enhancement of individual agency. The two, of course, go together; but it is the weak ties of information-seeking that leverage and are amplified in networked communication over affirmations of solidarity. In informational terms, networked communications open up the echo chambers of solidarity affirmation; but they do little for constituency formation, and, without that, agency enhancement does little for representation. “I represent no one, just myself” is increasingly the mantra of the wired up, linked in, postmodern social actor.

This is a sentiment that my colleagues, political scientist Jodi Dean and net-media critic Geert Lovink, and I encountered over and over during a recent Social Science Research Council project (on Information Technology and International Cooperation in transnational civil society organizations), and labeled “post-democratic governmentality.”[17] To a critic, this may sound like more postmodern nihilism, but by “post-democratic,” we mean not pre- or anti-democratic, for this is a field of often aggressively democratic rhetoric. What we mean is that affiliations and engagements amplified by networked information and communication technologies “replace democratic suppositions of representation, accountability, and legitimacy with a different set of values” such as subsidiarity, multistakeholderism, expertise, and reputation-management. And by “governmentality,” we mean those “codes of conduct, strategies of power and forms of knowledge” that surround and inform “the practice, systematization, and rationalization of a field to be governed.” Transnational civil society organizations are in some ways a unique field; but they are one where networked communications were uniquely expected to advance democratization, and they bear structural similarities to the Islamic Internet and to Internet implementation in the Middle East that I have discussed here.

These are, first of all, arenas of voluntary participation, but not of representational or constituency politics. Internet implementations in the Middle East emerge as alliance-seeking and coalition-building around the new technology and through some of its techno-social properties. It attracted diverse actors, who form networks around IT without representing constituency interests that would differentiate them from others, but rather skill sets. This amplifies cultural performances and e-visions, or what I have called the reflexive dimension of engagement with the Internet that project a ‘far out’ or more ultimate reality than the quotidian present. It is characteristic of the Islamic Internet to amplify universal values over the over those of specific communities. Indeed, networked communications seem generally to amplify appeals to more universal values – whether religious or human-rights, scientific or animal-rights – over more specific communities’ values or representation of those.

A second class of appeals is to expertise. As claim to participate, knowing how is the companion, as it were, of showing up or volunteering. Expertise here takes many forms but essentially refers to disciplined knowledge of how to do something. Expertise itself is a praxis – here, practical knowledge of Internet technology, understood to include more than machines or their formal properties. Internet technology has from the beginning included social and political knowledge, which also shape the machine by the addition of their properties to it. A product and tool of science and delivered by engineers, the Internet is also as part of the global political and cultural economy. In the Islamic field, it poses the challenge of creolization with the emergence of an additional transnational set of Islamic actors between the super-literacy of a high tradition (which is already transnational) and the widespread illiteracy, by that tradition’s lights, of popular local traditions (also, in forms such as Sufism, transnational). This is the space of pious, professional, emerging middle classes seeking an Islam that speaks to their situation between folk and elite. More than traditional or hermeneutic self-enclosure, expertise is their praxis. They trade on knowing how which, in practical terms, includes making the creole journeys of post-modern nomadism.

In an important study of free and open software movements, Christopher Kelty has characterized participation by working on its means of production as a ‘recursive public’. This is not Habermas’ public composed by a discourse that does not rely on the authority in a speaker, but a more practical one…

…that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public … a collective independent of other forms of constituted power … capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives.[18]

Kelty cautiously projects this kind of public back to the origins of the Internet itself; and it may be projected forward through its and its developers’ biographies that I have characterized as stacks. Such seems to be the case with post-modern nomads both in the Islamic realm who work on the Internet as a site and as builder-users and in the Middle Eastern realm who work on its implementation, first as development tool and then as development sector.

Understanding the Internet public as one that works on it as well as with it helps clarify the prominence of management of reputations for that. Reputation-management not only values participation over mere representation. Being known for that is part of the action, an elementary praxis in a regime of networked communication, where communication is through links forged instead of, as with mass communications, through broadcasting. This is not an attention economy so much as one of links. There is less fame for being famous, such as is the degenerate form of mass communications, than for showing up and knowing how. That may amount to spreading performances over multiple venues, such as Internet shaykhs’ appearing on television or at conferences or in expanding their interactions from giving traditional religious advice to more social and psychological advice on their websites, or religious lessons for children in addition to sermons. But it specifically includes managing reputations for activities that expand tie-ins which expand their networks.

A final feature I would draw attention to is the main one emphasized here in Internet biographies – the constantly morphing identities in them. It is not only that the Internet provides mobilities, both occupational and social, but that networking, cultural performances, and reflexion all amplify such mobilities which register as constantly morphing identities of actors and technologies. The Internet, as a machine, grows as a stack of applications that provide platforms for additional applications much as the biographies of users trace their development in some measure into developers themselves. This is not only because the first users have been its developers. The process continues in the extension of networks from strong-tie nodes of high redundancy through weak-tie links of high differentiation in information content that amplify the stronger force of information-seeking over solidarity-affirming on the Internet. Under conditions of networked communication, there simply is no mass subject corresponding to a single sender of messages, such as posited in the regime of mass communications.

Networked communications also display tendencies to subsidiarity as an outcome of these features. It does not require – indeed, is unfriendly to – hierarchy. A social contract built out of knowing how and showing up over representation and constituency formation, from assiduous attention to managing reputations for that and for formulating appeals to universal values over those of communities, should feature decision-making flowing to the margins, where there is new information, rather than concentrating centrally where it isn’t. And this seems to be what happens. In the nodes, everyone knows the same thing. Action in networks occurs where extra information makes a difference, where a weak tie is a resource, and alliances are formed.

These seem to be empirical features that emerge from comparisons of networked communications as components of a new social contract. I don’t expect the list is final, but I do expect these features will have to be taken into account for thinking about democracy, civil society, and the public sphere under the conditions of networked communication that research so far reveals.

To conclude, I do not mean to project a new social contract. ‘New’ is too frequently, sometimes too casually, and typically too categorically bandied about discussions of the Internet. We may be too enchanted by its impact on our own lives. What I do mean to suggest is that accumulating research points to amplification of practices of information-seeking over solidarity-seeking. They include or translate information-seeking into showing up, knowing how, and appeals to universal values as claims to participate, plus unceassing management of reputations for that, all over the head of representational politics and constituency formation that were centerpieces of last century’s social, political, and communications theories. Their mass subjects recede in an emerging regime of networked communications, in its public sphere, which seem to drive and to be driven by another set of practices, strategies, and forms of knowledge that amplify a different subject now only emerging.

Subjective engagement with the Internet includes reflective visions of cyberspace as ‘far out’, cultural performances or what people show, and networking or how people connect; and networking can be disaggregated into nodes of strong ties of mutual affirmation and high informational redundancy linked by weak ties, marked by information-seeking and low redundancy of information. This structure tends to push decision-making and so authority to lower levels at the expense of representation and constituency formation.  Instead, it brings to the fore participation based on expertise, appeals to universal values over values of specific communities, managing reputations for that expertise, and constantly morphing socio-technical identities.

References

I first outline Internet implantation and implementation in four Arab countries – Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia – and then compare two phases that are subjectively registered as alternative histories of the Internet in them and the region generally.  These are stories of the Internet as development tool and as development sector, of development as modernization and as globalization, of two different generations of engineering as well as of political leadership and patronage.  Both are stories of building coalitions around IT, of alliances in support of it and of rearranging institutions as their outcomes.  Neither is a story of ‘impacts’, in the simplified social physics that imagines the moving inertia of IT imparted to the static inertia of authortarian societies, on the one hand, nor of those societies’ absorbing or coopting the Internet’s dynamism to their own inertias, on the other.  Between these extremes that never meet is an overlapping  pair of stories of professional cultures, generational succession, building coalitions and forming alliances in support of technologies, and the translations of each into the other.

… agency, exceptionalism, technological determinism, STS constructivism

… Jordan to 2000, after

… foundations: Syria, Egypt, KSA

… timelines, cohorts, networks, conferences

… breaks, development theories and policies, political economy

… middle range, institutions

Silicon Valley is not the social-historical or technical home of the Internet, although some key components were developed here and some notorious developments happened here.  It has, however, been the subject of some good books at what appear to be crucial junctures of the Internet’s history, or ‘conjoncture’ when structures meet and get reassembled with some new elements (the idea is developed in Marshall Sahlins’ Islands of History, 1985).*  Passing quickly to the computer age, there’s Fire in the Valley by Paul Freiberger & MIchael Swaine (1984) on the making of the personal computer. People in it speak highly of its accuracy in delineating their relations and the relations of their ideas. That’s one baseline of good ethnography, not reproduction but recognizability.  The other is finding recurring patterns (structures) and how they recur (structures of structures). That was the demonstration in the classic ethnography of The Nuer (1940) whose author found a similar structure over and over in land use, time-reckoning, kinship, politics, religion. That is, similar but not identical, and that’s what you find when you study communities, as opposed to single institutions (even ‘as if’ communities themselves), and The Nuer established the basic model of community study consisting of ecology, political economy, social organization and reproduction, cosmology.  Fire tracks ideas about and implementations that joined personal+computer through groups that formed around them.

On Silicon Valley, I sometimes recommend Michael Lewis’ The Next New Thing (2000) as a sort of biography of a single person that manages to tell the local history of the Internet when it went public with the World Wide Web.  Its focus is a group of people and a cultural attitude that took IT developed in the public sector as a utility into the private sector as a business.  A serious history might focus earlier when Silicon Valley really was a site of Internet development (Where Wizards Stay up Late, Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon, 1996, for example), or on the public sector which was its larger site (Inventing the Internet, by Janate Abbate. MIT Press, 1999), on CERN where the Web was invented or even on the team at the University of Illinois that created the graphical browser. But Lewis’ focus on Netscape localizes in Silicon Valley through a figure in whom business and computing imaginations came together in order to tell the story of the software platform of the dot.com boom. This is the geek+billionaire story, which involves two arcane communities that partly became one sociologically but also culturally through a good deal of imaginative work – in other words, cultural creation. Good stuff for anthropologists: in the jungle, we learned that animals are good to think with (e.g., Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 1962), and in Silicon Valley that it’s software.

For Silicon Valley’s own story as a place where people live with, not just for, technology, I usually recommend the actual ethnography of Jan English-Lueck’s Cultures@SiliconValley (2002).  It really is a community study, of the community around San Jose and including everyone, not just the techies or high-tech institutions treated analytically as a community. It’s based on a decade of fieldwork by a team of professors and students who range across the whole social scale and across all social activities to trace how IT comes to ‘saturate’ all of life there, rather like cattle for Nuer even if they don’t herd.  ‘Technological saturation’ even re-denominates cultural difference from its typical American registers of boundaries into something like the popular postmodern brush-off of ‘whatever’, not as an organizing principle for social boundaries but into a resource that can be programmed. My students “totally get it,” as they put it. And that helps them get the more difficult theoretical points of how practice both generates and is generated by values.

Another author I recommend for “getting it” is Sarah Lacy, whose recent book Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good (2008) purports to be about the ‘rebirth’ of Silicon valley with the ‘rise of Web 2.0′ after the dot.com bust, which sounds like journalistic hype, and it is. But the book isn’t. It’s good ethnography for the same reason as these others in that it’s (a) about a place and (b) lines up a cultural sensibility with the social life that produces and is produced by it. The New York Times review of this book, by Katie Hafner, who co-wrote a popular history the earlier engineer-creators of the Internet (Where Wizards Stay up Late, Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon, 1996) that stands up with the first professional history of the subject (Inventing the Internet, by Janate Abbate. MIT Press, 1999), didn’t get Lacy’s treatment, or at least was cool to it, allowing as how it had some interesting insight into venture capital.

Well it might. Lacy was a Business Week tech-economy columnist covering Silicon Valley in what might have seemed the unpromising period after the dot.com bust in 2000. No new money, evaporating fortunes, and even the chroniclers were failing. Wired, the New Yorker of the tech set, shrank. Red Herring folded. Even the San Jose Mercury News cut back its coverage, which made it hard to follow the place from a distance. (I live and teach in Washington, DC, and do research on the Internet in the MIddle East, although my students’ interests are closer to home). So, too, the venture capitalists who were at a loss, and not only for something new to invest in.  They were also at a loss to understand another generation of developers and their seeming indifference to the boom-era venture capitalization model, even to finding them.  But Lacy wasn’t.  She was there, meeting a newly arriving set of actors, following their careers, learning what they thought, observing it acted out and then ‘coding’ that into software to support it. Anthropologists call this ‘participant-observation’, learning a way of life by learning how it’s lived. I can’t tell from the book if she has computer science training to ‘read code’, but she seems to understand people who write it and the conditions and values that they write into it. It’s like studying shamans. You don’t have to become one, but you typically have to be admitted to their modes of reproduction.

Her account is built around attitudes toward money, attitudes toward code, and attitudes toward social relations that densely interweave but basically resolve into two tensions. One is over ownership, a fierce feeling of ownership of software one writes and that it is not written to be sold quickly in the ‘flipping’ fashion of the dot.com boom but held close and privately, almost as part of the self. This is mysticism, but different from the others described by previous authors, and set in a different social context, which might account for Hafner’s cold review. The other tension is over what in an older language would be called ‘automation’. Software is imagined by engineers as machines that, in the fashion of machines, automate some process or action. The software-made-to-be-sold of the dot.com boom aimed to automate and thereby to extend business processes to the retail level. Amazon.com is the apodictic example, Pets.com the negative posterchild. But software identified as and identifying with the hocus-pocus of Web 2.0 (the concept of a marketing guru that software development had shifted from business processes to social ones) eschews ‘alienation’ both of selling out and of the removal of the actor in favor of a mythos of automating social relations, networking, interaction on the Web. The metaphor of choice is to create a ‘platform’, on the retrospective model of the browser as a platform for other applications (itself derived from the theory of software as a ‘stack’) that, Lacy finds, inspired the Web 2.0 developers she interviewed.

Although she doesn’t cite it, this resonates with English-Lueck’s research on Silicon Valley that took in the whole population.  On that scale, and not just for tech workers, English-Lueck found a broad identification over and over with “the Valley” as a symbolic identity, even a somewhat mystical one, and that this identification extended to notions of “working for the Valley” instead of for particular companies.  Not literally, of course, as a Chamber of Commerce employee or in public relations, and English-Lueck related this to high job mobility.  But the sense of identifying less with companies – many of which have symbolically ‘strong’ cultures and histories, such as Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Apple Computer or, now, Google – than with the place as ethos was present across all occupations and classes.  This mystification of place is like nationalism, of “imagined community” in the phrase of Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 1983).  Failing to grasp these data beyond and around the job except as ‘externalities’ may may be why business correspondents can’t detect much ‘business sense’, even as that is understood in Venture Capital terms, among Silicon Valley’s newest generation.

Lacy seems innocent of this larger context and so not altogether convinced that the segment of people she writes about have a grip on reality, but not because they eschew the rounds of venture capitalising in which a partly developed idea is sold, developed a bit and sold again, and the process repeated until it collapses like a ponzi scheme. Instead, she presents them as visionaries, a creative segment of the ‘whatever’ generation following yuppy strivers and Gen X slackers. These are, of course, cliches, handy, good-enough for journalism but that usually do not stand up to serious scrutiny by professional sociologists. That may be beside the point here, because few Web 2.0 developers cast theirs as improvements on existing technologies or of existing cultures.  Instead, they brought a new sensibility, and Lacy provides enough description and ‘thick’ enough description to show how this current sensibility finds expression and is socially organized. Base and superstructure if you’re a Marxist; social system and cultural system if you’re a structural-functionalist, conditions and dispositions if agency is your thing theoretically. In other words, she doesn’t ask, or seem to worry, whether her informants, these new natives of Silicon Valley, its latest pilgrims to the liminal reaches of industrial capitalism, are right or even if they have an accurate view of the world. Their view is, phenomenologically speaking, their world.  What she describes is how they construct the world and proceed to code for it, how they construe social relations (mostly as interactions that they live) and similarly construe coding them.

She also understands how money works (magically) and, in thosel terms, seems to be describing a post-corporate world. Not non- or anti-corporate, but post-corporate, such as some sociologists try to capture in notions like The Rise of the Network Society (Manuel Castells, 1996) or as a new urbanism (Global Network Linked Cities, edited by Saskia Sassen, 2002) which foreground what economists call ‘externalities’ as the primaries of a new, emerging political economy marked by flexible accumulation in comparison to the centralising political economy of capital accumulation of the industrial period. This is treacherous ground, but it is met – and a unique segment of it is described – in Lacy’s book. In business terms, its markers are out-sourcing, supply chains and other divestment at the corporate level and, at the individual level, flexible employment, freelance work, ‘network values’, and what seem like gift economies for exchanging what conventional economics cannot recognise as goods and services or even as derivatives of those. To some, this is a sea change; to others, just another, higher form of capitalism. To me, it seems to be counterpart in the private sector to what I and my colleagues perceived in the NGO sector, which we called the rise of a post-democratic governmentality (Reformatting Politics: Information Technology and Global Civil Society, 2006) that consists of showing up, claims to participate based on expertise and universal values, assiduous reputation management, and highly unstable or constantly morphing forms manifest both in networks and in information technologies.

That’s another story. Lacy’s story is of a sensibility and a social structure that implements and is implemented by it through ‘coding’ or software programs such as MySpace, Facebook, Friendster before them and LinkedIn after them, YouTube, Flikr, so-called social-bookmarking programs that let people pick and compare favorites on the Web and the phenomenon of Wikipedia – generally what in other corners are called ‘peer-to-peer’ distribution (actually, organization) and ‘open source’ movements. Likely, her informants and maybe Lacy herself would object to these corporate-period comparisons as at least anachronistic, or equally to precedents for their work in ‘community informatics’, in ‘content-management systems’, and the like. Functionally, that’s what they’re doing but expressively not dressing it that way. But there’s more.

For instance, I’m writing this on a blog, which functionally updates the listserv, a technology developed in the early 1970s on the heels (on the ‘platform’) of e-mail, with some added ‘widgets’ for generating indexes, tables of contents, registering links, and professionally designed graphics. They automate what I had to do ‘by hand’. So to me, a blog is like a listserv, or its obverse the newsgroup; but the reverse is not true for people who were born after the listserv and who do not see blogs as improving on that model but instead see blogs as modeling something else, something in their experience, giving expression to a sensibility that’s theirs but not – let’s say – mine, rather as Lacy gives voice to an experience with the Internet that wasn’t contained in Hafner’s founders in a previous generation. From an anthropological point of view, Lacy is describing a native cultural system. Looking at it in Silicon Valley as a place, this is not generational succession in the sense of one generation building on another, although it may look like that to the older generation. It’s more like the waves of settlement and resettlement in successions of ethnic neighborhoods in industrial cities, like Chicago, which may have some bearing on Hafner’s there-goes-the-neighborhood review. These are different cultures – engineering at Stanford and SRI in the 1970s, programming in the 2000s – of work, worldview and social relations that connect practice and perception.

So, Lacy describes a network of people who know each other, not quite a community, more like a cohort, but with a palpable density of social ties, which she traces out – indeed, maps out as a social network with different kinds of ties (movements of people, money, ideas) – and then follows how those traces or kinds of ties slowly add up through shared reflexivities to a cultural system.  Lining them up with the dot.com generation earlier and the engineering wizards before them suggests several things.  One is that just as the engineering wizards failed to reproduce themselves and their culture as the Internet’s users and the Internet’s culture – to them, ‘newbies’ were a problem – so, too, did the dot.comers.  Another is that such failures were only partial: just as Lacy is able to draw the links of a social network linking Web 2.0 to the WWW before it, one could be drawn from the latter back to SRI and Stanford University’s engineering departments.

I find this interesting because Lacy’s is an account of developers. I study developers, in the Middle East, much more than I study users. Users are too amorphous, not a group and barely a category, depictable culturally (as value and behavioral profiles) but not so well socially except in the sociology of crowds, cohorts and like analytical constructions (e.g., Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, 2008). But the interesting thing about Internet developers is that they are its first users, which gave rise to the idea that users ‘develop’ the Internet – true enough when users were programmers but more problematic when they aren’t, or when their ‘programming’ is metaphorical, such as in the guise of ‘user-generated content’. The wizard generation conceptualised their programming as ‘social engineering’, the dot.comers cast their automation in economic terms as ‘disintermediation’.  No clear cosmological re-presentation of Web 2.0 has emerged, except possibly that term itself; although ‘social software’ has been floated and much discussed.  The sociologist of networks Barry Wellman speaks of ‘affordances’, and practitioners seem to be gravitating toward ‘social media’. Here, the polysemy of concepts located in multiple communities is most apparent, from ‘programming’ itself to applications as ‘platforms’ for other applications.

Here, I don’t want to say that Lacy has written an anthropological book or even an ‘ethnography’ in the loose ways those terms can be bandied about. I do want to say that Once You’re Lucky has a density of description comparable to a few others on IT or Silicon Valley that an anthropologist can work with to grasp in the sensibilities and social relations she has indicated in a set of social actors, at least partly, a recognizable ecology, political economy, scheme of social relations and their reproduction, and their cosmological reflex. She does not so much build a story around these developers as elicit a story woven by them and in their practices and common cultural activity. As a first approximation, the account in this book is of writing a sensibility of social relations with family resemblances as interactive, tentative, multimodal and expressive into software that reifies particular inflections they have in a place and time as its social structure. She nails that down in her most nuanced account, which is of these software developers turning away from venture capitalists to retain ownership that isn’t just practical, it’s about identification with/through software, like Nuer with the cattle they herd. It contains a ‘primitive classification’ that can be traced in concepts and through parallel structures across multiple domains. In some ways, these actions may probe the social relations and their reflexive sensibilities for what some think is a new political economy (post-industrial in terms of economic organization, post-modern in culture, post-democratic politically) and a sociology of networks where showing up and knowing how matter but representation does not and is replaced by reputation-management. If this sounds familiar, then reading Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good provides an ethnography of IT from the inside, up close but not too personal to cloud the story; in this it joins a small number of other books on Silicon Valley that do likewise from different artifacts.

We know from STS (Science, Technology & Society) studies that people build their values into machines, before there are ‘impacts’ of technology (viewed as an independent variable).  We know that wizard engineers did that from the beginning and on the long slog through the public sector until the Internet was delivered over to commerce, where so did dot.com-ers.  From that, we know that socialization into an existing regime of practices and values is incomplete, the ‘newbie’ problem;  most comes before going on-line, and applying that, or building it in, re-socialises the Internet or makes it look like additional parts of the larger society.  We know that user communities expand outward from developers to those most like them;  we know these have first been professional and generational cohorts, but in time into more diverse actor networks; and we know that early among those are financiers and regulators.  Lacy seems to have intersected this process in the intersection of a developer cohort (generational and cultural) with the network-formation process.  She seems to have hit a context where the complementary additional actors were a residue of a previous ‘expansion’ generation not yet superceded or expunged from memory by the Next New Thing.  Absent a unified theory of this process – such as socialization of newbies failed to be, on the one hand, and cooptation theories fail to be, on the other hand – actor network theory captures the assembly phase of what community theory helps capture at the point of succession?

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* ‘Conjoncture’ is one of those French intellectual concepts less obscure in its original setting than when borrowed into other disciplines in the 1980s.  The French historian Emmanuel LeRoy Laudrie used the term to designate events or trends in contrast to long-term structures.  Sahlins’ usage refers to an event that exposes structure both to view and to risk, in which “Burdened with the world, … cultural meanings are thus altered” (1985: 138). Less poetically and more definitionally: “..the practical realization of the cultural categories in a specific historical context, as expressed in the interested action of the historical agents, including the microsociology of their interaction” (xiv) become evident, not self-evidence.

one of the islands of Tahiti. I go to Internet cafes in other countries, sometimes for the Internet but always to check them out. I’m an anthropologist, and this is part of my research subject. I wasn’t doing research here, just vacationing, and the Ao Api New World Internet shop is not quite on the beach. It’s above a dry goods store on the shopping street in Fare.

Such streets have long since replaced the beach – or become the beach in the modern period – where interisland and inland trade meet in the South Pacific. Fare’s is a classic one, a single line of shops that are strung along

a road facing the quay where interisland ships unload, and usually owned by Chinese families. Why Chinese?  In French Polynesia,  as across the Pacific islands, Chinese immigrants were brought during the colonial period for planatation labor, although fewer here than in Hawaii, and many ended up in trade.  This division of labor reflects not natural inclinations but ‘family values’:  obligations of Polynesian kinship to share, it was explained to me, would empty stores into kinship exchanges before the goods were exchanged for cash.  So these streets are where one circuit of exchange  meets another.

This is an ‘Old South Seas’ port scene of two-story buildings with balconies that serve as outside rooms above the street and help ventilate offices housing services over the shops – travel booker, insurance, some government offices, doctors, a bank, maybe an attorney – all facing the wharf. The form emerged in the colonial period that began Tahiti’s and other South Pacific islands’ incorporation into modern commerce; and the guidebooks say that Fare’s commercial street is as near Old South Seas as anyplace in Tahiti.  You can detect the form beneath later accretions in bigger ‘modern’ places (with international airports) like the Tahitian capital, Papeete,

or in repurposed places like Kailua on the Big Island of Hawaii, where a

pre-colonial king who unified islands gathered nobles around his seasonal residence that is now a park and native trust propertyat the end of this street .

But Internet cafes? The metaphor is a ‘strong attractor’ for more. ‘Window on the world’ is one that occurs to a lot of us.  It’s one that occured to me when looking around Internet cafes in the Middle East. I’ve done that in Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt. Cliche would have them look like one in Egypt’s Siwa oasis.

Most actually look like Haroon’s in Yarmook, across from the University on a street once claimed to have featured in the Guiness Book of World

Records for the most Internet cafes. The story was “over a hundred.” I didn’t check the book, and quit counting at thirty on the surrounding streets. Closer inspection reveals this one to be a shwarma shop (closed on Friday). Haroon’s story was that he aimed to attract students from the University across the street to an Internet place “where they could have something to eat, too.”  A bit of product differentiation?

Getting closer to local metaphors, here’s the “Internet Oasis” (Wahat al-Internet in the Arabic sign) across from another university in Jordan.

“Oasis” evokes both a place made fertile by water and a waystation along roads to someplace else, which might be a little nearer the local sense of things, or what anthropologists call “local knowledge.” Wahat al-Internet has a shwarma shop next door. The large brown thing by the door is its sign. When I took this picture, the Oasis just offered computers connected to the Internet.

What they connected to the Internet was mostly local youngsters, from students around universities to pre-teens in neighborhood shops. And they connected to familiar moral panics – anxieties, actually, about what they would connect to – from pornography to the politically incorrect to each other. I suppose. Proprietors of these cafes often told me the kids were ‘chatting’ across the room and surfing porn across the world. Well, why not? That’s what adolescents do: they extend their social networks and expand their social experience. The Internet’s been widely touted for that ever since it went public with the World Wide Web. But a few reality checks:

1. An early study in the Pew Internet and American Life surveys (Lenhart, Amanda, et al., The Ever-shifting Internet Population, 16 April 2003) reported that the relative proportion Internet traffic devoted to porn declined overall as Internet demographics expanded from male youth to include moms, who, coming on-line for email with their kids as they went off to college, brought moms’ information networking habits – i.e., relationship maintenance – to cyberspace.
2. In my more unsystematic observation, kids in Internet cafes in Jordan, who may also have surfed a bit of porn, were mostly looking at sites for car and muscle magazines (the boys) or fashion magazines (the girls) or at the webpages of US and other foreign universities (both boys and girls). Since an adult can’t observe these things too closely without becoming a little creepy, I surely missed a lot; but the point is …
3. Internet use, all research shows, extends social networks on their margins for all known uses and users, starting with the engineers, who built it for communication with distant machines and added email for communicating with their operators, down to suburbanites in Toronto (Wellman, B., Quan-Haase, A., Witte, J., & Hampton, K.N. Does the Internet increase, decrease, or supplement social capital? Social networks, participation, and community commitment. American Behavioral Scientist, 45 (3): 437-456, 2001) and, so far as I can tell, also in the Middle East.

In other words, the idea of reaching/looking way out is true only in a mythic sense. It’s a mystical image of protean hopes and fears for the Internet comparable to kula myths of the Argonauts of the Western Pacific about the vast plenipotentiary power in kula objects to connect across time and distance.

So, what about the Internet cafe as the new beach for cybernauts in the South Pacific?  Much as the Canadian geographer, Harold Innes, showed (The Bias of Communiction, 1951), new lines of communication are laid down over old ones and differ largely experientially. This is the source for the humanist, also Canadian and guru of the Toronto school of communications, Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.” Back in Fare on Huahine, there’s the beach where Polynesian canoes used to come ashore.  It’s now largely covered by a concrete quay for modern ships. Paralleling it is the street of Old South Seas shops that emerged in the colonial period of modernization: traders, government offices, a few stores, restaurants for travelers, shops and services that are the interface with the world of sea-borne communications. Paralleling that, literally on top of it, is the Internet cafe upstairs, where the post-modern world touches down, the beach in these post-colonial times.

I’ve not seen an Internet cafe in Polynesia named “Internet Beach” with the localizing panache that “Internet Oasis” has for the Middle East. In Jordan, the initial wave brought “cybertunnel@safeway” in a shopping mall, “Internet Cave,” “Mr. Internet,” “Internet Pioneers,” which convey something of a local register of the notion that the Internet ‘routes around’ obstacles to communication, but also Dar al-’Aql (“Abode of Wisdom”) and some international brands from teleco providers. They’re just “Internet” or “Internet Cafe” in Tahiti, where French is after all an official language. I did see one in Kailua, on Hawaii, called “Dog’s Internet Cafe,” apparently an evocation of the surfer circuit of the tourist trade. Huahine’s Ao Api Internet shop is glossed (in English!) as “New World,” which could mean anything, including postmodern irony – there is a French-language university on Tahiti – as well as something from/in a new world of global communication and information flows. What I saw in Fare was a shop that, in addition to computers connected to the Internet, also displays DVDs for sale and rent, advertises web-design services, sells computer accessories, has a few curios for tourists, plus local kids looking at things like on-line magazines, university webpages, and a lot of websites about dancing as well as lots of emailing to relatives overseas.

Like many former colonies, Tahiti has a many people gone overseas for work and education which, some guidebooks warn potential tourists, can be serious competitors for flights at holiday times;  so the email is understandable,  It’s a boon to maintaining family ties worldwide, as Daniel Miller & Don Slater showed for Trinidad (The Internet: An Ethnographic Account, 2000). But dancing?  This was in the month prior to the national celebration in Papeete, which is a stop on an international circuit of dance competitions in which nations all around the southern and western Pacific participate avidly. Moreover, every night everywhere while we were there, local dance groups were practicing in churches and town halls; there were fund-raisers at schools where kids put on dances they’d been practicing that included hip-hop and reggae as well as ‘traditional’ Polynesian ones.  In the daytime, pupils at elementary schools could be seen lined up for instruction and practice during recess. The local papers were full of preparations and play-offs for what amounted to a national fete of dance competitions with which Tahitians greet Bastille Day and make it their own national celebration, plus  stories about last year’s winners and travel agency adverts for packages to international dance exhibitions and contests, all addressed to the local market.  These competitions are immensely popular.  Go on YouTube, search for “dance” and the name of any Polynesia island nation (Tahiti, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, New Zealand, Hawaii, etc.) to see amateur and some professional video from them. Post-modern (and completely non-ironic) kula in the age of globalization.

Is this, as Marcel Mauss summed up Bronislaw Malinowski’s sprawling tome on the kula, “the most solemn part of a vast system of prestations and counter-prestations which seem to embrace the whole of life… the gathering point of many other institutions… set amidst a series of different kinds of exchange… giving them meaning… takes the whole tribe out of the narrow circle of its own frontiers” (The Gift, 1966, pp. 25-26; orig. Essai sur le don, 1925)?  Since this is, effectively, Mauss’s empirical respecification of Durkheim’s notion of “total social phenomena,” the question might be: is the Internet a total social phenomenon of the networked information society/age?  Is video on the Internet the gift that keeps on giving and so the Internet, the connector that keeps on connecting, the platform – the beach – for post-modern kula?

It could well be. In their ethnography of Internet use in Trinidad, Daniel Miller and Don Slater described its becoming a social networking and cultural phenomenon. “Trinis,” as the polyglot descendants of colonial-period immigrants who make up the population now call themselves, enthusiastically embraced email for keeping in touch with relatives who migrate overseas for work or education. They also embraced the Internet as a way to publicise Trinidad overseas, particularly to project a contemporary Trini identity that they sought to show in the best executed, most up-to-date formats by, among other things, putting the Miss Universe pageant on-line when it was held in Trinidad. Not only that, some local churches engaged in intense speculation about metaphysical significances of the Internet itself as communication way out, with the mystical Other for some (Hindu websites for Indian Trinidadians) and for others with the mystical self (Trinidad’s pentacostal churches), reflexively registering a spiritual dimension that in more secular precincts is celebrated as infinity in temporal, spatial and social terms such as ‘always on’, ‘death of distance’, ‘where do you want to go today’ (Bill Gates’ vision of the Internet), ‘being digital’, ‘network cultures’. How about ‘new world’, the Huahine gloss on the Internet?

The Internet has attracted interpretations like these from its beginning and everywhere it spreads.  “Cyberia” was an early anthropological one, when the Internet was newly public and speculation translated the sense of discovery into a notion that it was new space, a cyberspace.  Experience and spoil-sport social science that has shown how well cyberspace mirrors ‘real life’ have moved well beyond edge-of-the-earth frontier metaphors.  Comparisons also suggest a more universal and grounded analytical model that does not privilege any instance as archetypal or its type-site.

Each instance – Trinidad, Tahiti, Jordan, the US – features metaphors, cultural performances, and networking that could be said to domesticate, or in Innes’ terms, to settle the Internet .  Comparatively, it makes sense to think of the Internet that can be seen here, or in Trinidad or in the Middle East, or on Facebook as a layering of networking, performativity and reflexivity.  Networking is what Internet use extends and what extends Internet use into existing social relations, bringing them closer and pushing out their margins.  Communicating with relatives in London or Los Angeles is still communicating with relatives, more densely and ubiquitously perhaps than through letters and via the telephone, but still motivated by family values.  Likewise on Facebook with ‘friends’. Performativity, putting one’s culture (or, at the blog level, opinions) on the Internet, into global circulation with others and according to standards that the medium elevates, formalises or entextualises subjectivities.  And, finally, in reflexive re-presentation emphasising cosmological versions of experience, ’way out’ beyond ordinary or everyday boundaries are imageries of cyberia or networked cultures in the anthropological imagination, New World on Huahine, the Realm of Wisdom in Jordan, hyper-mobility and its correlate self-fashioning in America.

The lesson learned in media studies was social constructionism to get past the simplified social physics of ‘impacts’ to what are now called ‘affordances’. Taking technologies seriously as cultural and not natural puts agency back in users that automation would vest in machines or, in media studies, advertising would vest in the message. The resocialised IT ‘affords’ or facilitates the expression of social acts and relations on-line, in what used to be but is no longer seriously called ‘cyberspace’. This milder form of medium theory has the salutary effect of focusing attention on what people do instead of projecting theoretical capabilities of technologies taken abstractly or in isolation. So, Clay Shirky proposed a weak version of the Media Studies hope that structure can at least guide practice ( Social Software and the Politics of Groups, 2003) as facilitating ‘latencies’ in actors that has become Web 2.0 gospel. That is, social software enables actors to realise desires and capabilities (‘dispositions’ in the practice theory of Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1977) to make connections on-line that circumstances preclude off-line. To elicit that, he goes on to distinguished four types or levels of sociality, which he seems to define as intention + commitment (but compare sociological definition of sociality by Wellman et al (2002)) that social software ‘afford’ expression on-line: sharing, conversing, collaborating, collective action.

Sharing, conversing, collaboration and collective action can be more or less associated with particular ‘social software’ designed or used, sometimes ‘re-purposed’, for those kinds of interactions. Earlier, electronic bulletin board systems facilitated sharing, now it’s ‘bookmarking’ programs like Digg or del.icio.us, blogs, Flikr and Youtube across a spectrum of media (words, images, sound, video) that either bring things online to whare or find things online to share. For conversing, it was listservs earlier and now its social networking sites for an extended multimedia exchange of information beyond mere sharing. Collaboration, as working together, ups the ante; Shirky’s contemporary example is Wikis, which have a pre-history in groupware. For collective action, his examples of enabling software are fewer: Meetup is his best, and the rest of the discussion goes soft.

What’s going on here is not just matching tools to functions or, from a the point of view of designers (whom Shirky teaches), designing a tool for a function that will take that function (sharing, conversing, collaborating, organizing) on-line. There is an underlying theoretical commitment to a view of on-line life as realised latency. Social software is in this view almost neutral, and ideally transparent. The problem is a deficient view of what’s social in it. It’s a tool-user’s view, which strips down the social to functions.

One needn’t be a technological determinist, or even have recourse to medium theory, to see that tools are not just functional; and you don’t need critical theory to see them as socially constructued. Tools are also institutional. Julian Orr famously demonstrated in his study of Xerox machine repairmen (Talking about Machines, 1996), a machine is not just a physical object, It includes operators and knowledge about operation. Tack back to Marshall McLuhan, who was a student of the Canadian geographer Harold Innes who translated his observations from transportation studies to the humanities. The telegraph is not just keys and wires, or even Morse Code, but also operators and their informal knowledge, which included recognition of personal styles or ‘signatures’. It is also the delivery boy culture and customs that arose around sending telegrams (almost like telephone calls later). A technology includes all this; so does social software.

Shirky coined that term and gave an expansive definition (‘anything’ used on-line to conduct social interaction/relations), which we can use similarly to list what, besides code, it involves. Customs arise, even cultures, around specific social software – MySpace or Facebook, for instance. The sociologist danah boyd has observed that the user-communities for social networking software, Facebook and MySpace, tend to diverge class-wise, which she relates to their social histories, on the one hand, and to their ‘network effects’ or externalities, on the other hand. These are patterns of behavior arising apart from and not dependent on reflexive apprehension (the strict sense of what critical cultural studies focus on); and she’s careful not to attribute these patterns to the software but to their social origins and user communities, which are well beyond mere intention or commitment.

One could go further. The anthropologist and ‘digital ethnographer’ Michael Wesch observes how YouTube technically facilitates and so socially encourages ‘remix’, a particular practice that can solidify some non-individual features of relations (bonding) and extend others (bridging). To put it differently, social software, taken in the extensive sense of technologies including not only machines but their operators, practices and practical knowledge, isn’t just’ affordance’ of something ‘latent’ . Social software encode rules, procedures, practices for doing – and, beyond that, for participating in – something on-line.

So it seems more straightforward to think of social software as social institutions for arranging life on-line (as channeling social relations rather than as channeling human nature, as Shirky does). And it doesn’t merely convey social relations on line, as the ‘migration’ thesis that I and others have used would hold; not is it ‘alternative’ to non-IT-enabled interaction and expression as frequently cast in political analyses. First, it couldn’t be mere conveyance since no social software conveys more than a narrow range of behavior and none conveys the full density of social life. They don’t simulate so much as sample. Second, as rules and procedures it does not proceed from nature, but from culture. (Nothing really radical here. These are actually fundamental discoveries on which the modern social sciences were founded – that is, to deal with data that do not depend on and cannot be reduced to properties of individuals or facts about individuals.)

Such a perspective, for one thing, gets past the lingering uncertainty in trying to match particular bits of software with particular types of social behavior, which is that the matching is never one-to-one. Listservs may be used for sharing, conversing, even collaborating; while wikis may be mostly about collaborating, they record conversations and manifest sharing. LIkewise, blogs could be sharing (as publications) or conversations, and so can social networking sites. These relationships are indeterminate. They’re not so indeterminate, howeveer, when social software is thought of as institutions.

First, SS corresponds to the fundamental feature of social institutions, what Durkehim called ‘exteriority’ and ‘constraint’ (to individuals), no matter how much simplified net-praxis theory (you are what you do) would have it otherwise. This doesn’t mean they’re determinative of individual behavior, because their second feature is what Goffman called ‘framing’ (Frame Analysis, 1974). Social institutions, met in the strong form as rules, in weaker ones as expectations, and somewhere in between as procedures, are experienced as frames of reference, subjectively. Such experience doesn’t depend on personal commitment to them. Actors can be alienated from a frame of reference as ontology but still register it, even accurately, as epistemology. You may be alienated from while still thoroughly comprehending corporate life. Indeed, this can be a powerful experience of ‘newbies’, whose socialisation into an institutional way of doing things is partial and on-going; it has not, in the hard form of ‘total institutions’ (Goffman, Asylums, 1961), obliterated memory of before or of any place to stand outside.

Thanks to Wesch, we have fairly clear start on understanding how this happens with YouTube, or “on” YouTube as a platform for constructing and enacting social relations (identities, interactions), or to boyd for social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace that could be compared to earlier ones like Friendster or more specific ones like LinkedIn. Backing away from the limited sociology needed for media studies (audiences, preference profiles, essentially the sociology of crowds, no matter how ‘smart’ the mobs), much as media studies backed away from tech studies (machines as automation) that also limited sociology (essentialy to the structural-functionalist moot that structure determines practice that engineers learned from efficiency studies), what does social software look like as social institutions.

First, as tools, they’re designed to perform a function.

Second, their functions are far less calculation than connection – connecting persons to persons, persons to ideas, ideas to ideas.

Third, they’re not just in but about what’s on-line. This is not a remnant of the notion of cyberspace as a sort of virtual place, mundanely recognised to be a vast realm of information, but a measure of reflexivity.

Fourth, social software offers/promises/is designed to introduce localised measures of organization in this vast sea. Designers dream of their application becoming a ‘platform’ much as the browser is imagined to have, then the portal, and now as some claim social networking sites become for youth.

Even the seemingly simplest and least ‘social’ acts, searching for information on Google registers its now-institutional character. It turns that program, as a ‘platform’, into order of the space, which Google is ordering not as a flat data field but by adding the algorithms of users’ searches to its own indexing. Facebook and MySpace, Flikr and Youtube up the ante in trying to match that success, as does socialbookmarking and, its mirror image, wikis, both of which bring bits of information together by structuring relations to do that (membership criteria, rules of behavior, rewards and sanction systems). Likewise, blogs form a continuum between between private musings written down and publications composed for an audience, which is reflexively registered as a tension (and in debates about) self-revelation vs. self-promotion. Quite apart from how actors are so motivated (by human nature, by reference groups), they are able to register and join in these practices. So, what gets in the way of seeing this?

Shirky’s is a sociology for media studies that captures levels of commitment plus density of interaction with an eye to how these can be scaled up through social software, which breaks barriers to connecting with others (to a lesser extent with other ideas). Basically, an Internet-updated version of the Global Village. In a sense, a sociological sense, this is going backwards, for the great discovery of modern social science was how to think coherently about the order not at the level of villages (like-mindedness, multifunctional institutions and few of those) but of complex industrial societies. It’s key was the discovery, or conceptualisation, of institutions; in modern, industrial, complex, mass society you know the institution instead of its individual personnel, bakers and not the baker – or as Simmel (1907) put it, The Stranger as a type, not individual strangers, who if known as individuals wouldn’t be strangers any more. No one’s been nostalgic about this sort of society. Witness Robert Putnam who feels empty when the last vestiges of village-like community seem to recede and what’s left of Metropolitan Life is nothing; it doesn’t have its basis in personal commitment + interaction. It’s diagnostic figures have run from Simmel’s ‘stranger’ to Whyte’s ‘organization man’.

To a considerable extent, the Internet was greeted as a way out of this sort of world, while preserving its advantages, not least because that was the way engineers who developed it cast it socially, as renewal of agency. Tthough many have hoped it could, from Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Community (1993) and Lawrence Grossman’s Electronic Republic (1994) to Negroponte’s Being Digtal (1995), it would not seem likely that the Internet is, or could be, taking us back to a pre-industrial sociality.

Cultural critics writing from the other end of the spectrum have a clearer picture of the Internet as a system and where that is taking us, perhaps too clear a picture, and it is not that direction. It is into a world of out-sourcing, free-lancing, work given away while income is made from derivatives and modeled on selling property from selling the business to collecting royalties. Flexible actors for a political economy of flexible accumulation replace the industrial period’s political economy of capital accumulation. Fine as far as it goes, this tends to dichotomise micro-level and macro-level analyses and to miss what’s the sociological middle ground where parameters of order not so much built into social software either by Free Agents or by The System but that social software builds for users.

If we go back to specific social software, we can see how this works. In one of the better pieces of inside reporting on Silicon Valley, Sarah Lacy’s Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good (2008) casts as a tale of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs’ having learned lessons from the 1990s dot.com boom-and-bust to create platforms. To an anthropological eye, hers is an ethnography not just of re-negotiating the developer identity but of developer practice into an extended process of trying to write some social behavior into code, continuously modified or ‘tweaked’ into ever denser (additional) social practices. The goal, as earlier, was to attract users by encoding their desired but especially already practiced uses; the innovation was imagined to be getting out of the way of users’ interacting with each other at a distance with users and using releases to test whether or not they had added desired practices. Engineering values (such as elegant code) as well as practices (testing, quality control) went by the board in favor of social values (connecting to stuff on the Web, to people on – not just through – the Web) and practices (gathering, identity). Developers a sensibility for the Web as a ‘platform’ socially for reference groups, whose structuring principles they would instantiate in code but that, objectively speaking, code provide as the structure of life on-line in the form of routines, scripts, practices for which users would turn to their programs. This is not just agency enhanced or community virtualised but something in between, or that combines both, a sensibility for reference groups as more than categories.

The significance of providing structure for users (aka, ‘platforms’) comes with recognizing practices that can be captured as ‘meta-data’, which would be data about the social fields themselves. Why? These are unconscious patterns that, as categories, are features of structure. Users described in these studies are not ‘using’ the Internet to get to something else (the functional account), nor exploring another continent (the reification account); they not connecting through the Web or with the Web as an object, so much as they are connecting to its properties in the way that people conform to institutions. Directed by institutions, enclosed within them such that whatever else their actions may ‘mean’ in some other terms, they have specific meanings (intentions, interpretations) within the system of actions in which they participate.

When the Internet was young, listservs and newsgroups provided this sort of structure, but not enough to prevent ‘flaming’ or to keep users on topic. They had to do that independently of the software, or not do it at all. Particularly to particularly to early users who were also the Internet’s developers, it registered as a transparent medium; and there was a sense of beginning with a purer or stripped down social environment. It is the addition of sanctions (membership criteria, moderators, content filters), however, that doesn’t just co-opt or ‘appropriate’ the space but, instead, complete its sociality. Contemporary ‘social software’ starts off being more social by operating in an environment that is already more social, such as represented in the notion of an application, like the browser, becoming or being transformed by other applications into a platform. This seems a lot less a matter of releasing latent potentials than of structuring behavior on-line with an eye to what’s on-line as well. This is the recursive, self-referential and, experientially, self-evident property of institutions, which are not reducible to aggregation of individual behaviors.

The issue whether people bring their culture(s) on line or fine one there is moot, as is the conflict viewing software as ‘affording’ on-line something already available off-line, on the one hand, or structuring practices directly, on the other hand. So, I think the more productive way to view ‘social software’ is neither as determinant of action nor conduit of action – the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ constructions of ‘channel’ – but as institutions in on-line social life, that institutions typically are multi-functional, that they involve both overtly recognized and covertly realised patterns of behavior, that some of those may be reflexively registered in the form of myth and ritual that re-present them in ‘other’ words (concepts) and deeds (actions).

But the problem is deeper andcan be seen in Shirky’s examples, which are good and plentiful for sharing, conversing, collaborating. Those readily match technologies such as electronic bulletin boards earlier and Flikr/YouTube/Facebook or blogs now for sharing, or listservs earlier and IM-ing now for conversing, file-sharing earlier and wikis now for collaborating. These are also all activities that display what he calls “power law distributions,” elsewhere the so-called 80/20 rule, that a few sites get most of the views, a few users make most of the contributions, a few topics get most of the attention. This is the media-world measure of sociality as traffic; it has all the social density of crowds and falls apart with collective action on-line.

Shirky’s aware of this, and attributes it to the relative recentness of the technologies and of on-line life they sustain; but that’s still the problem. His is a view implicitly that social life grows from primitives, that these primitives are exchanges or transactions of, essentially, selflessness. This is the positive Putnam, the urban migrant who has to build a social life one relationship at a time, aware that this is work and that such relations require constant tending. There is no society out there: the apodictic social actor is a migrant. This is also a very special kind of migrant, not the Mexican or Salvadoran with dense ties to a home village or province, enmeshed in networks of kin and patronage relations who brings, gone north for work not available at home. Instead it is the classic American migrant to the city to make good, to start a new life, leaving behind family, starting anew or starting over, the Self-Made Man. It’s a masculine figure, the relationship-maker, not the female-inflected relationship-maintainer. Interestingly, Shirky’s best example of collective action is women using MeetUp.

What’s missing in this vision of sociality as interaction that grows on-line with tools that facilitate interaction and particularly projects is much sense for the social as phenomena beyond mere aggregation. That is what classical sociological theory held to be the additional data (actually, additional ontology) about social phenomena that are not reducible to facts about individuals. This is basic sociology; but the case can be made empirically. Two examples:

First, a recent story, “Virtual Worlds Get Real About Punishment,” in the Washington Post discusses sims and games where what can only be described as social institutions develop to deal with bad or disruptive behavior. These include courts, even governments, bordering on vigilante committees, that apply and enforce classic social punishments of exclusion – in this case, situation-specific ones of shunning, recognising that boredom is punishment for users seeking engagement, and filth-filters that exclude communictation. Sounds a lot like a small community, because that’s where these social behaviors work. At an individual level, they could be said to be about commitment, but only in the most stripped-down objective (tautological?) sense. They are better seen for what they are, which is institutions or bodies of rules that actors follow not out of choice but to be in the game.

This essential discovery of the social sciences – of social reality or phenomena independent of or not reducible to facts about individuals – is weakly developed in media studies. With its ties to advertising (and to journalism as information service), media studies’ sociality is met as audiences, preferences, profiles that are essentially aggregations, ultimately of choices. In this field, sense for the social in itself is typically framed as critique of macro-systematics: industrial capitalism produces a particular kind of actor, post-industrial capitalism another, to fit their respective “demands” or, less provocatively but no less tautologically, “requirements” or what engineers might call “system parameters” perhaps. The problem with this division of interpretive labor is that microsociology makes actors seem like schemers while macrosociology makes them seem like dopes (“over-socialized” as a classic sociology article put it) and so comes across as critical, and negative at that.

The empirical shortcoming of this division of interpretive labor is to leave out the middle range social phenomena where actors meet social phenomena that are both intractable and optional: reference groups, for instance, networks, institutions that are there without us. Where do we find this on-line? One answer is in “meta-data,” or data about data, what in anthropology would be called a classification. In computer programming, these would be field names. Meta-data abound in detritus of on-line activities, computer searches, links, and other connectives; cookies report meta-data such as sites visited, for instance. These are user-contributed content but not user-defined content.

The anthropologist Michael Wesch, doing “digital ethnography,” zeros in on such meta-data of what he calls “user-generated organization” or, with specific reference to YouTube videos (but could also be applied to blogs), “user-generated distribution” (An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube). This is real social science: it looks beyond the media studies focus on content, and the notion of “user-generated content,” and also beyond interaction, to to their organisational contexts or frames. He begins with remix as an example, tracing the spread of a bit of music that included various re-uses and re-mixtures with other music, visuals, stories, relationships. Those traces, which he was able to retrieve partly from computer meta-data and partly thorugh off-line ethnography, are also “user-generated content” but what is user-generated is not content like the videos themselves but connections: organization and distribution.

He calls this a “community,” but it is a weak sort – objectively a community in the sense of a bunch of people interacting, but subjectively not quite up to a village or tribe, such as he studied in New Guinea. But New Guinea is a good place to start for such communities, which there are notoriously built out as exchange systems dominated by “big men.” But these are systems independent of the actors, whose actions a system frames and toward which those actions – gaining fame, establishing identity as an exemplary actor – are directed. And this is good enough for on-line social life, which resembles nothing so much as a potlatch or the classic Melanesian kula system.

Kula was – is – a system of interisland trade in ritual objects by the region’s “biggest” men. It is also much more, as Marcel Mauss pointed out: kula covers other exchanges and gives them meaning. Mauss recast the whole (including the littler exchanges of lesser valuables down to mundane utilitarian objects and produce) as a vast scheme of relations, of which kula was the most solemn version, gathering up and giving meaning to others and at once political, economic, domestic, religious.

YouTube is a lot like this. The motives of individual content contributors are various but all are in that context expressions (mostly of identity) and action (exchange within a social circle), including their extension. The key meta-datum, and one underdeveloped in Shirky’s scale of social commitment, is reference groups: for whom does one perform/post? Usually to less than a hundred people, Wesch suggests. (While he doesn’t cite evidence for this claim, it accords with the observation of sociologist danah boyd that teens on Facebook or MySpace are not, subjectively, broadcasting to the world but to their specific friends also there.) In other words, this is not quite the intentional “community” Shirky imagines as united by or dedicated to collective action (a sort of super-committed crowd, but nevertheless a crowd). It is a community in the sense of displaying a set of institutions not reducible to individual motives or intentions but, instead, shaping those.

Anthropologists have liked these sorts of communities, for they can be found everywhere. They extensively populate the range between crowds, on the one hand, and on the other the strong-form communities to which sociologists contrasted modern life among strangers – that is, the commune, Gemeinschaft, small town or, in the term made famous by Ervin Goffman “total institutions.” Communities do not have to be corporate to have institutions; but also social actors don’t have to be either dopes encased in a “cake of custom” or free agents “negotiating” contingent individual realities.

In pointing to meta-data for doing “digital ethnography,” Wesch goes beyond modeling social life in terms of the properties of audiences (united by otherwise unacccounted “like-mindedness”) brought by media studies’ updating of crowd sociology (as “smart mobs,” for example), to which the only alternative in critical cultural studies has been macro-systemic features of political economy. Sociologically, he is pointing to the same sort of phenomena that have been conceptualised as “network effects” or, in economists’ terms, as “externalities” or relegated in the language of critical cultural studies to sub-texts. Anthropologists call these, perhaps too blandly, “contexts” that surround and are points of reference conferring meanings that are not, sensu strictu, in the overt texts of behavior. They are not so much “readings” (interpretations of interpretations, in Geertz’s phrase) as they are what actors “read” (interpret) with. Call them “scripts” or “narratives;” as they settle into recognised patterns, they constitute “institutions,” which Durkheim identified as the social phenomena not reducible to individual participation.

There is a lot else that can be said about them – from how they instantiate and serve a larger system, such as in exemplifying the “flexibility” so much more adapted to an economy of out-sourcing and freelancing, to how they appear to respond directly to, or instantiate, “fragmentation” or “decline of meta-narratives.” But it is necessary to appreciate how they are institutoinal forms of on-line social life above and beyond its crowd phenomena, no matter how “smart” the actors in them may be, that at base are Shirky’s data points – and the data from which notions such as “smart mobs” or “network effects” or the “wisdom of crowds” have been generalised. Those generalisations are limited by limiting data to content, overlooking the additional order of data in “user-contributed organisation.” Indeed, as he puts it, what Shirky focuses on, and exclusively, is organization without organizations; but the case is not made that this is what – all – that social software “affords.” I’d guess this is why Shirky doesn’t have much to say about games (or sims), which are explicitly rule-dense

The question for responsible analysis is whether this is all the social organization there is on-line, or whether we just haven’t located and described the organizations. Wesch’s use of meta-data is a step toward resolving whether the matter is analytical (a creature of method) or ontological (a feature of the creature).

Where to go next: (1) are social software institutions? (2) is there cyber-culture?

I’ ve been taking pictures like this for years: photographic evidence – documentation? – of the worldwide spread of the info revolution. Everybody has.  My first was from the terrace of an archaeological research institute when I initially went to Jordan, well over a decade ago, to study the spread of the Internet into the Middle East. Arrayed below on the hill was a row of smaller, older, individual family homes with one or more satellite dishes on their roofs. In fields on both sides, shepherds tended flocks, practically a biblical – not to say neolithic – scene.  I used that shot to illustrate lectures, and to show students in courses, that the info rev indeed had a palpable global reality.

There’s more to that story, though. In the house at the bottom of the hill, those flocks were kept in an underground garage. The house was occupied by a member of a tribe that owned the land, and in Summer he erected a sort of bedouin tent on the terrace over his garage. Only some of the sheep were his, the rest belonging to tribesmen in the country, whose younger or poorer relatives did the herding, not least to keep tribal claims on the land fresh in everyone’s minds. The sheep were partly for the market, partly for feasts, and partly for showing the flag, four-legged members of the tribe that relieved the two-legged from constantly walking the perimeters of the property. Urban encroachment made this prime development land between garden-like grounds of the national university and almost-country homes of new elites.

There’s likewise more to the lagoon house with the satellite dish. I took this picture from the deck of a pearl farming workshop and showroom, also on stilts in the lagoon, that I and a dozen other tourists were visiting during an all-day excursion to snorkel on reefs and dine Polynesian style on the island in the background.  The hut with the satellite dish probably – I neglected to ask – belonged to the proprietor of the pearl farm. Close inspection shows it’s not really a hut, and outside the frame were others, on the beach rather than in the water, including a number of maison secondaire or weekend get-away places of people in the capital, Papeete, on Tahiti. Their piece of paradise, like the mountain cabins that some in my hometown, also a capital (Washington, DC), have for weekends away, a back to nature-and-culture combinations of a good view plus local products.

I saw other houses on stilts that did look more like huts, with nets hung to dry, in the lagoon of Huahine. This is a working (farming-fishing) island more than Moorea or Bora Bora, which modeled James Michner’s Bali Hai. Some had satellite dishes, too; but by then the water had become too rough and the sky too grey for so good a picture as this one as just a picture, a virtual fact in another story.

Back stories are the ethnographic grist for anthropological mills about culture that’s grounded in the world and not just in the gaze. The rest of this one is that almost everyone I met on that trip to Amman and in other Middle Eastern cities over the years has been working for even more years to bring, install, exploit, spread the Internet into their countries. Some were e-entrepreneurs fresh out of college; others were graduates from computer engineering programs two decades previously who had since been working behind the scenes to install their models into the soft infrastructures of their countries. Many were accomplished in the international and regional circuits from Silicon Valley universities and Boston area business colleges to the rounds of mid-level conferences on IT implementation where they’d come to know their counterparts in neighboring countries in pursuit of  their piece of the globalization pie. Bali Hai moments, too, for Internet Pioneers.

In a similar vein, Tahiti also is hardly so remote or exotic anymore.  Beyond globalization in the familiar economic sense – Tahiti ‘exports’ tourism by importing tourists, and thousands of Tahitians are on contemporary circuits of transnational migrants’ seeking work or education abroad – globalization is also social and cultural, which a satellite dish on a hut that is not just a ‘hut’ barely hints.  But that’s another story.

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