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6/07 p2/CIRCIDateDueindd-p1

FOLLOW THE LINK: CRITICAL NARRATIVES OF THE INTERNET
By

Nicholas Joel Sheltrown

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY
Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Special Education

2007

 

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ABSTRACT
FOLLOW THE LINK: CRITICAL NARRATIVES OF THE INTERNET
By
Nicholas Joel Sheltrown

This dissertation attempts to examine the lntemet through the lenses of
philosophy, sociology, psychology, and history in an effort to reconsider the impact of
the Internet on life outside its wires. The overarching goal of this work is to effectively
describe the lntemet through the collection of practices that comprise it, and in the
process, offer fresh perspectives to the meaning and signiﬁcance of this socio-technical
phenomenon. Key sites of analysis include knowledge, power, credibility, narrative,
democracy, and semiotics.

The dissertation begins with a historical analysis of the Internet’s development.
As part of the analysis, I emphasize how representational media impact the relationship
between humans and their knowledge, as evidenced in the differences in the organization
of information between codex books and hypertext. This change in relationship is also
reﬂected in the manner by which knowledge is made on the Internet, one that mirrors
descriptions of power/knowledge advanced by Michel Foucault. A primary ﬁnding of
the dissertation is that knowledge on the lntemet is created through a circuit of exchange
between those that produce, consume, and sort information on the lntemet.

Also important to this work is the recognition that the lntemet is much more than
an information network. Speciﬁcally, it offers unique opportunities for the exploration

and construction of the user’s sense self. I identify three important narrative dimensions

 

 

of the lntemet - surfing, sharing, and submerging — that form the basis of the storied
nature of the Net.

The lntemet also represents a unique opportunity to examine linguistic evolution
and an exciting development for those interested in linguistics and literary theory. It
presents an opportunity to think about the ﬁmdamental notions of literature and language
— the author, the reader, the text, the construction of meaning — in an entirely novel way.
Part of this dissertation is dedicated to exploring these possibilities by feeling out the
boundaries of structural and post-structural understandings of linguistics and the lntemet.
Alternative understandings of hyperlinks and search engines that emphasize the
connection between words and their meaning are offered as a result of the work in this
dissertation.

Several chapters of this dissertation challenge past practices in lntemet studies,
including the method of assessment of e-democracy. I propose that when discussing
democracy and the lntemet, one should move the conversation away from singular
notions of democracy and the lntemet and embrace a more pluralistic understanding of
both. Using John Dewey’s sense of becoming, I offer a comprehensive continuum for the
evaluation of democratic activity on the lntemet, as well as a pluralistic understanding of
the lntemet. Finally, this dissertation also challenges how scholars of lntemet studies
construct the notion of credibility, arguing that framing lntemet credibility decisions as a
staged-process is valuable but limiting. In addition to credibility algorithms, I propose

the value of intuition and perception for assessing information on the lntemet

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

No matter how diligent and committed one is, writing a dissertation is not for the
faint of heart. While I enjoyed the activity of exploring varying dimensions of the
lntemet, I cannot imagine completing this work without the unwavering support of the
following individuals:

0 A special and heartfelt thank you goes to Elizabeth Heilman — my teacher,
mentor, and friend. Dr. Heilman not only convinced me that I could do this work,
but she taught me how to do it. Whatever is of value in this dissertation is
because of Dr. Heilman. While I'll likely never understand how she does all that
she does, I will always be grateful that she decided to invest so heavily in
graduate student whose enthusiasm often exceeded his understanding.

0 Rand Spiro, who is the best advisor and friend I could have ever asked for. His
continuous sheparding, guidance, and positive disposition were ﬁxtures by which
I anchored my graduate school experience. Dr. Spiro models what I hope to be
some day.

0 I am deeply indebted to Lynn F endler and Punya Mishra, two of the ﬁnest
educators I have ever known. What I appreciate most about these two is that they
always cared enough to be honest about my work.

0 Special thanks to my wife, Patti, who still married me, even though I didn’t have
this dissertation done. Without her total support, I could not have ﬁnished this

project.

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................. ix

LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................ x
CHAPTER 1

THE BEGINNING .............................................................................................................. 1

A Research Question ....................................................................................................... 3

Deﬁning the Internet as a Set of Practices ....................................................................... 4

Basic Binaries: How Scholars Talk About Technology ................................................. 6

Overview of Dissertation ............................................................................................... 12

The Word ....................................................................................................................... 20

Levels of Analysis in this Dissertation .......................................................................... 23

Contradictory Uses of Representation ........................................................................... 25

Critical Narratives .......................................................................................................... 27
CHAPTER 2

TECHNOLOGY’S DRAMA — WHERE NO ACTOR’S PART IS TOO SMALL ......... 30

Framing Technological Development ........................................................................... 30

Technology Development as Transactions ................................................................. 32

The Bus is Young and Honest ..................................................................................... 34

Ambiactivity ................................................................................................................ 36

Constructure ............................................................................................................... 38

The Growth of Print Media ........................................................................................... 39

Small Villages, Big Problems ..................................................................................... 40

An Agricultural Revolution ........................................................................................ 42

Gutenberg ’5 Quest ............................................................ . .......................................... 44

Catalyst for the Gutenberg Press ............................................................................... 46

The Demand for Print ................................................................................................ 47

A standard church. .................................................................................................. 47

A standard trade. .................................................................................................... 48

A standard education. ............................................................................................. 48

Gutenberg ’s Breakthrough ......................................................................................... 50

The Legacy of Print Media: Scholarly Eﬁ’ects .......................................................... 51

The Legacy of Print Media: Religious Eﬂects .......................................................... 53

The role of Martin Luther. ...................................................................................... 53

The reformers. ......................................................................................................... 54

Factors that aided the Protestant revolution. ......................................................... 55

The immediate outcome. ......................................................................................... 55

Insights from the Print Media Revolution .................................................................. 56
CHAPTER 3

A GENEALOGY OF REPRESENTATIONAL MEDIA ................................................. 59

Changes Associated with Standard Print ....................................................................... 59

Depersonalizing the Universe: From “Motive Soul” to “Force ” ............................ 6O

A Method for Science ................................................................................................. 63

Sorting, Organizing, Naming, and Arranging ........................................................... 64
From Classification to Industrialization .................................................................... 68
From the Ashes: A New Problem of Representation ................................................... 70
Bush ’s Problem .......................................................................................................... 73
Constructure ............................................................................................................... 76
C onstructure and Print ............................................................................................... 80
A Growing Need for Hypertext .................................................................................. 81
Actors of in the Drama of the Internet’s Development ................................................. 83
Other Factors of Development for the Internet .......................................................... 87
Ambiactivity Revisited ................................................................................................ 93

CHAPTER 4
THE DISCIPLINE OF KNOWLEDGE ON THE NET ................................................... 97
The Need for Search ...................................................................................................... 99
Early Navigation on a New Kind of Network ........................................................... 100
The Origins of Search .............................................................................................. 102
The Challenges of Search ......................................................................................... 103
The Anatomy of Search ............................................................................................ 105
Along Came Google .................................................................................................... 106
Origins of Google ..................................................................................................... 108
Google ’s Market Success ......................................................................................... 1 l 1
Why Google? ............................................................................................................ 112
Asking Questions of a Query ....................................................................................... 114
Utopian-Egalitarian Perspective of the Internet ...................................................... 116
A Structural Perspective: Bourdieu ......................................................................... 1 19
A Post-Structural Perspective: Foucault ................................................................. 122
The Central Question: How? ....................................................................................... 125
Power/Knowledge/Truth Circuit and Google .......................................................... 126
Normalization on the Net: Google as a Dividing Practice ...................................... 131
An Army of Davids: A Case Study ............................................................................ 134
A Complicated Summary ............................................................................................ 137

CHAPTER 5
HYPERTEXT SEMIOTICS ........................................................................................... 140
The Reaction to Nomenclaturism ................................................................................ 143
Arbitrariness: Through Inheritance and Use ........................................................... 144
Ferdinand de Saussure ................................................................................................. 146
Cours: The Language of Linguistics ........................................................................ 147
Ludwig Wittgenstein ................................................................................................... 150
Wittgenstein ’s T ractatus ........................................................................................... 150
Meaning as Use ........................................................................................................ 152
The Language Game ................................................................................................ 154
The Inﬂuence of Technology in Language Theory ..................................................... 155
Hypertext Semiotics .................................................................................................... 158
The Linguistic Significance of the Hyperlink ........................................................... 159
The Linguistic Significance of Search Engines ........................................................ 160

vi

 

Linguistic Change ........................................................................................................ 163

Superﬁcial Language Change through Technology ................................................. 165
Changing the Nature of the Idiom through Technology .......................................... 167
The Need for a Poststructural Perspective ................................................................... 168
City of Language ......................................................................................................... 172
CHAPTER 6
THE STORIED NATURE OF THE NET ...................................................................... 175
A Narrative for Narrative ............................................................................................ 178
The Importance of Language ................................................................................... 179
Goodman ’s Worlds ................................................................................................... 183
We Are Stories in the Making ..................................................................................... 187
The Intemet’s Narrative: Surf, Share and Submerge ................................................. 190
Surfing: The Narrative Structure of the Internet ..................................................... 191
Sharing: Narrative Technologies on the Net ............................................................ 197
Submersion: Where the Virtual Is Pretty Real ......................................................... 201
Ways of World Making Revisited ............................................................................... 207
World Making and the Internet ................................................................................ 209
The Autonomy of the Web ......................................................................................... 21 1
End of the Story ........................................................................................................... 212
CHAPTER 7
CREDIBILITY AT A CLICK: INFORMATION EVALUATION IN OPEN
NETWORKS .................................................................................................................. 215
Explorations of Credibility .......................................................................................... 216
Aristotle’s Rhetoric ...................................................................................................... 220
Logos, Ethos, and Pathos ......................................................................................... 221
Aristotle’s Sense of Style .......................................................................................... 223
Aristotle’s Scene Painting ........................................................................................ 225
Assessing the Internet with Scene Painting .............................................................. 226
Gestalt Psychology ...................................................................................................... 229
Principles of Gestalt Psychology ............................................................................. 231
Gestalt and the Internet ............................................................................................ 233
Judging Style: Application of Gestalt Psychology ..................................................... 234
Addressing the Incongruency ................................................................................... 235
Gut and Guess Strategies ......................................................................................... 237
Gut and Guess Strategies: Implications for Education ............................................... 239
Klein ’s Naturalistic Studies ...................................................................................... 239
Teaching Intuition .................................................................................................... 242
Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 244
CHAPTER 8
THE DEMOCRATIC VALUE OF THE INTERNET ................................................... 246
Meanings of Democracy .............................................................................................. 249
Considering the Democratic Effects of the lntemet: Held’s Sites of Power .............. 251
The Advantages of Held ’s Framework for Internet Studies ..................................... 252
A General Limitation of the Internet ........................................................................ 252
vii

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Health ....................................................................................................................... 254

Limitations of the Internet for Health Rights ........................................................... 258
Social ........................................................................................................................ 261
Limitations of the Internet for Universal Education ................................................ 263
Cultural and Civic .................................................................................................... 265
Limitations of the Internet on C ultural/C ivic Rights ................................................ 268
Economy ................................................................................................................... 272
Paciﬁc ....................................................................................................................... 276
Legal and Political ................................................................................................... 278
Reigning Opinions on the Democratic Value of the lntemet ...................................... 281
Optimism, Democracy, and the Internet .................................................................. 282
Pessimism, Democracy, and the Internet ................................................................. 284
Essentialism, Democracy, and the Internet .............................................................. 286
Instrumentalism, Democracy, and the Internet ........................................................ 287
The Limitations of the Two-Axes Approach to E-Democracy ................................... 288
The lntemet and Democracy: Becoming and Plurality ............................................... 291
Democracy — A Work in Progress ............................................................................ 293
The Plurality of the Internet ..................................................................................... 294
The Nature of Space ................................................................................................. 296
Looking Back .............................................................................................................. 298
CHAPTER 9
LESSONS FROM LINKS .............................................................................................. 301
Lesson #1 : The Difﬁculty of Theorizing on a Developing Phenomenon .................... 302
Lesson #2: The Difﬁculty of Theorizing on an Established Phenomenon .................. 303
Lesson #3: The Importance of Theorizing about Technology .................................... 307
Lesson #4: Implications for lntemet Theory ............................................................... 311
The Plurality of the Internet ..................................................................................... 312
The Value of Multiple Methods ................................................................................ 313
Direction for Future Research ................................................................................. 314
Lesson #5: Implications for Education ....................................................................... 315
The Medium-Knowledge Connection ....................................................................... 318
The Importance of Power Relations ......................................................................... 319
Credibility in Online Spaces .................................................................................... 320
The End of the Internet/ The End of a Dissertation ..................................................... 326
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................... 328

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1 Summary of perspectives ............................................................. 116

 

 

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 Reiﬁcation .................................................................................. 231
Figure 2 Closure ........................................................................................ 232
Figure 3 Continuum of democracy/technology perspectives .................... 281
ll.

 

CHAPTER 1
THE BEGINNING

“What hath God wrought?”
Samuel Morse ’s first telegraph message ( I 84 4)

knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.
Michel. Foucault

Michel Foucault (1994b) begins his essay, “For an Ethic of Discomfort,” with the

following recollection:

I

It was toward the end of the Age of Enlightenment, in 1784. A Berlin journal
asked a few worthy thinkers the question, ‘What is enlightenment?’ Immanuel
Kant answered, after Moses Mendelssohn. I ﬁnd the question more noteworthy
than the answers. Because enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century,
was not news, was not an invention, a revolution, or a party. It was something
familiar and diffuse, something that was going on - and fading out. The Prussian
newspaper was basically asking: ‘What is it that has happened to us? What is this
event that is nothing else but what we have just said, thought, and done — nothing
else but ourselves, nothing but that something which we have been and still are?
(p. 443).
In many ways, the same could be said for a dissertation that asks the question,
“What is the Internet, and what does it mean for humankind?” Like the enlightenment at
the end of the eighteenth century, the lntemet is no longer novel to many in the world.
Rather, the lntemet has received intense attention over the past ten years in news media,
television programming, education, academics, and entertainment. For this reason, it
may seem unusual to add yet another book to the long list of attempts to describe the
lntemet, its properties and core attributes. Though much has been written about the
lntemet, there is the feeling for those who make the lntemet the primary platform of their
work that the lntemet is still very much misunderstood, undertheorized, and unknown.

There is great difﬁculty in studying the lntemet, primarily because it is undergoing such

rapid change. The sweeping tide of new applications coupled with its ever increasing

 

 

user base raises a number of important questions. Of what lntemet do we speak? Which
applications, technologies, sites, or uses will serve as the bedrock for our understanding?
How does one describe today’s lntemet without dating the description, making it
irrelevant for tomorrow’s lntemet? How does one determine the relevant features for the
Internet of tomorrow?

As is often the case with technology, visibility and stability do not often coincide.
This problem is not new by any means, as William Galston illustrates through his
example of the measuring the social impact of the television in the early 19503. As a
young medium, television was proliferating at an explosive rate, starting in obscurity in
the 19405 to “near ubiquity only a decade later” (Galston, 2004, p. 59). It would have
been reasonable for a scholar studying the social impact of television in the early 19503
to conclude that television was the latest activity to bring neighbors and friends together
as they “crowded into a living room to watch the only set on the block.” Yet, as studies
by Putnam (2000) and Gitlin (2002) have demonstrated, television as a mature medium
erodes at community rather than reinforcing it.

The potential for this same trap is found in the case of the Internet, perhaps to an
even greater degree. Internet studies is far from a cohesive ﬁeld, if it is a field at all, and
as such, lacks a clearly distinguishable identity. In recounting his keynote speech to the
2003 Association of lntemet Researchers Conference, Steve Jones describes (2005) that
“there is not yet a canon; there are not departments and degrees. . .There are not yet
methods speciﬁc to Internet studies. Perhaps most importantly, there is not yet a

theoretical structure or exploration of Internet” (p. 233). I View this not as a problem, but

an opportunity; however, Jones’ observations also necessitate that in such an ill-deﬁned

 

 

 

environment, it is important to deﬁne terms and explain the purpose for an extended

installment of lntemet study.

A Research Question

The primary research question for this dissertation is to answer the question:
What is the lntemet? Such a question seems fairly straightforward, an exercise
measuring the writer’s ability to describe the Internet by its technical dimensions — the
hardware, infrastructure, and software that process, store, and transfer information
between users and servers in a vast global network of data. Most would describe the
lntemet as the latest — and perhaps greatest —- of new class of technologies that include the
personal computer and telecommunication technologies. It is the “information
superhighway,” the greatest collection of information in human history. Such a
description is accurate in summarizing a particular aspect of the lntemet, but is this really
what the Internet is? Is the lntemet merely a collection of signals moving bits and bytes
of data? By asking the question, I implicitly suggest that the lntemet is far greater than
the sum of its technical components. To say that the lntemet is a data network would be
similar to describing a human being as a collection of cells, organs, and biological
systems. While technically true, it does not properly deﬁne the totality of what it means
to be human. Likewise, to conceptualize the lntemet through its technical components is
to deﬁne it only by the material that comprises it. Art may be paint applied to a canvas,
but that is not what art is. Many entities — social, cultural, and even technological — are

far greater than the sum of their parts.

 

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The primary research purpose of this dissertation is to effectively describe the
lntemet through the collection of practices that comprise it, an exercise that should
extend the discussion beyond technical deﬁnitions or the resuscitation of a series of
synonyms — information network, knowledge network, global village, virtual world, etc.

In her ground-breaking book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet,
Sherry Turkle (1995) examines how users of the Internet construct their identities through
their online experiences. She describes some sensational examples in which users use
their “life on the screen” to explore new, different, and multiple facets of their identity.
Hers is a story told from the vantage point of the user; however, I seek to reverse the
direction of analysis. Rather than exploring the virtual identities of real-life people, I

hope to explore the real-world identity of a virtual entity, the lntemet.

Deﬁning the lntemet as a Set of Practices
The lntemet can mean a lot of different things to different people, depending on
their attitudes, beliefs, values, technological practices, occupations, age, social circle, and

SO forth. As I have already argued, the most common view of the lntemet is a
technological one. For many, the lntemet is the most fundamental technology in this
“information age,” a unique conﬁguration of hardware, software, consumer electronics,

and connectivity. It is a collection of components which work together to pass data

around the world. A general survey of the deﬁnitions of the lntemet reveals a general
conceptual preference for the Internet as hardware and software. Some of the most

commonly used words in these deﬁnitions include network(s), computer(s), worldwide,

global, TCP, protocols, and system. So while it is important to understand the

 

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engineering of the Internet (for values are often embedded in code), there is certainly
more to this encompassing technology.
A more expanded deﬁnition of the lntemet may include the relationship between
users and the technology, satisfying Don Idhe’s (1993) three qualifying characteristics of
technology: concrete or material component, human use, and a relationship between the
technology and humans. For some users, the lntemet is a tool to manage their ﬁnances;
others may leverage it as a political tool such as political candidates (Howard Dean,
Barack Obama) and proliﬁc pundits (blogger extraordinaire Glenn Reynolds); while still
others may use it as a global dating service. This second understanding of the lntemet is
closer to the intended deﬁnition used in this dissertation, and yet, it still stops short of the
comprehensive understanding I seek for the lntemet. Yes, the lntemet is a technology,
one that forms a relationship with its users by virtue of their use. Yet, such a formulation
separates a technology and its use. I believe such a separation to be arbitrary, and turn to
Ferre’ s (1995) speculation about the boundaries of technology for guidance:

But is ‘it’ a ‘thing’ at all? Is technology even a collection of many things, like

tools and engines, utensils and machines, devices and artifacts? Or is ‘it,’ instead,

more like science or religion or education, a combination of things with activities

and beliefs and attitudes. (p. 14-15)

Drawing from Wittegenstein, Ferre (1995) seeks to free us all from the rational
cage of the deﬁnition: “Definitions are context-and-purpose dependent and should not be
allowed to tyrannize their makers” (p. 21, italics in original). We see from the examples
above and Ferre’s warning that deﬁnitions embody values. They not only give meaning,
but they prescribe conceptual boundaries for ideas. For my research, the lntemet is more

than the wires, routers, and protocols that move bits of information, or a network of

interlinking text, images, video, and audio. It is more than a tool leveraged by humans

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for social, political, and economic motivations. Rather, the lntemet is the virtual

embodiment of the ideas, people, organizations, governments, and cultures it connects.

The lntemet is a set of social, cultural, economic, and political practices. These practices

occur over the largest information network in human history, but wires, routers, servers,

and hubs that embody the technical infrastructure of the lntemet form the platform for
such practices. The infrastructure is important, as we will see in several of the chapters,
but to deﬁne the entire entity by its physical components is shortsighted and limiting.
Paraphrasing Ferre, the lntemet is more like institutions such as science, religion, and
education. It is people and practices, information and ideology.

As a set of practices, the lntemet this text examines is necessarily broad in its
scope and allows for a wide range of questions to be asked of it. An inclusive
understanding of the lntemet aligns with the loose use of the term in current research,

which may be used interchangeably with the World Wide Web, the Web, the Net, the
information superhighway, and a number of other names. While there are technical
nuances that separate these technological entities, the lntemet of which I speak is
inclusive of them all. In this dissertation, all online life composes varying facets of the

lntemet, though hypertext and hypermedia gather more attention than other activities

online.

Basic Binaries: How Scholars Talk About Technology
While much has been written about the lntemet (and information technology and
media in general), scholars have struggled to reach consensus on even the most basic
questions about it. Often this is because technology studies fall victim to the reductive

traps of the binary distinctive. As Mehta and Darier (1998) describe, most Internet theory

cast the lntemet into one of two dominant conceptions, “a neo—utopian, technological-

deterrninist one and a dystopic, technocratic one” (p. 107). Carl Mitcham frames this

division similarly, as a tension between two rival “fraternal twins” — a pro-technology,

engineering perspective versus critical humanities approach (Johnson, 1998). Both

descriptions use a black/white, left/right, good/bad distinction to organize the division of
views about technology and media. Because there are more scholars who hold great
suspicion for technology and promote the “problems” associated with its broad adoption,
this review will begin by discussing some of the more important personalities found
within the cynical side of the technology binary.

Alarmed by the centralization of mass media and what has been taken as the
alienating effects of the technological condition, philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse,
Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, T. W. Adomo, Lewis Mumford, Max Horkheimer,

Langdon Winner and many more critics have raised innumerable concerns over the
legitimacy of the technology as a liberation project. Many of these philosophers view
technology as in an implicit power relationship with their users, or more accurately over
their users. We are cogs in a large machine, trapped by technology’s deterministic
effects. Emblematic of this position, Theodor Adomo and Max Horkheimer (1944) cast
media and technology as “aesthetic activities” that bind us to “the rhythm of an iron
system.” In what has become a common argument in the sociology of technology,
Adomo and Horkheimer see hegemony, control, and monolithic power in technology and
media, a system that makes subjects of its users. Writing two decades later, Herbert
Marcuse (1964) voices similar concerns as Adorno and Horkheimer. He argues that‘ In

the medium of technology, culture, politics, and the economy merge into an omnipresent

system which swallows up or repulses all alternatives.” As a Marxist, Marcuse saw the
needs of the industrial capitalists merging with those of the entertainment industry
simultaneously producing false needs within each consumer and eliminating independent
thought and criticism. As such, Marcuse anticipates the “one-dimensional man,” where
personal interests are collapsed into a public, corporate agenda through the technologies
of mass media. It is argued that technology has made it possible, more so than ever
before, for capitalists to both create nations of consumers as well as eliminate the
dissidence of the worker.

As a contemporary of Marcuse, Jacques Ellul took technology and
reconceptualized it as “Technology,” representative of the reiﬁcation of technical
products and systems into a style of thinking, a mode of thought, one that could subsume

all other forms previous to it (Idhe, 1993). Ellul proved extremely inﬂuential in
describing Technology as autonomous and deterministic. As Technology impacted all
forms of social life, it became social in nature. Ellul (1964) rejects the man versus
machine dichotomy, arguing that “when technique enters every area of life, including the
human, it ceases to be external to man and becomes his very substance. It is no longer
face to face with man but is integrated with him, and it progressively absorbs him” (p. 6).
Thoroughly absorbed, techniques conform each person into “economic man”, a citizen of
the planned economy and society (p. 218). For Ellul, freedom is not a possibility in a
technological society.
While the predominant perspective of sociologists, philosophers, and media
Critics is one of suspicion toward the deep penetration of technology into the human

experience, there is a sizable coalition of scholars who see progress, potential, and

 

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freedom in the same technological condition that causes great concern for so many others
(Bolter, 2001; Drexler, 1987; McCorduck, 1985; Zuboff, 1988). Though some have seen
the promise in television, movies, and video games (Gee, 2003; S. Johnson, 2005), most
scholars reserve their techno-optimism for the lntemet and the extended connectedness it
brings to its users (Lessig, 2002; Poster, 1990; Rheingold, 2003; Trippi, 2004). For
example, Peter Lurie (2003) argues that the lntemet holds great political promise. Aside
from the usual rhetoric about the lntemet being a medium without gatekeepers, Lurie
predicts that the activity of surﬁng itself will revolutionize politics in a way that other
forms of media, namely television, movies, and print media, have been unable to do. As
he says, “surﬁng mimics a postmodern, deconstructionist perspective by undermining the
authority of texts. Anyone who has spent a lot of time online, particularly the very young,
will ﬁnd themselves thinking about content -- articles, texts, pictures -- in ways that
would be familiar to any deconstructionist critic.” For Lurie, surﬁng teaches lntemet
users to question the authority of the texts, even those held sacred (the Bible) and
foundational (the US. Constitution). Through hyperlinks and the intertextuality of the
Web, lntemet users will recognize the cultural milieu in which ideas are born. This
activity will cause many to question the authority of all texts, and in the process, lntemet
users will develop a postmodern disposition toward interpreting the Web. When

authority has been deconstructed, tolerance is the default politic. As Lurie predicts, a

Web user:

...will come to think, consciously or not, of everything he reads as linked,
associative and contingent. He will be disinclined to accept the authority of any
text, whether religious, political or artistic, since he has learned that there IS no
such thing as the last word, or indeed even a series of words that do. not link, in
some way, to some other text or game. For those who grow up reading online,
reading will come to seem a game, one that endlessly plays out in unllmrted

 

 

 

 

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directions. The web, in providing link aﬁer associative link, commentary upon

every picture and paragraph, allows, indeed requires, users to engage in a
postmodernist inquiry.

If Lurie is right, the Web may be raising an entire generation of politically astute
critical citizens who reject authority for authority’s sake. Notably, Lurie’s perspective
echoes Eisenstein’s (2005) commentary about the inﬂuence of the abundance of print
since Gutenberg’s revolution on the critical reader: “More abundantly stocked
bookshelves obviously increased opportunities to consult and compare different texts.
Merely by making more scrambled data available, by increasing the output of
Aristotelian, Alexandrian, and Arabic texts, printers encouraged efforts to unscramble
these data. . .Contradictions became more visible, divergent traditions more difﬁcult to
reconcile” (p. 48). Like Lurie, Eisenstein also recognizes the relationship between
abundance of information with divergent thinking. The primary difference between the
two writers is the medium of interest (hypertext of lntemet vs. codex of book).
Not surprisingly, Lurie is not a soloist in trumpeting the promise of the Web.
George Landow (1997) concludes his book Hypertext 2.0 with a cautious endorsement
for the hypertext similar to Lurie’s: “The strangeness, the newness, the difference of
hypertext permits us, however transiently and however ineffectively, to decenter many of
our culture’s assumptions about reading, writing, authorship, and creativity” (p. 307).
Like Lurie, Weinberger (2002) casts the Web as a technology that transforms bedrock
Concepts such as space, time, knowledge, matter, perfection, togetherness, and hope.
JOhn Seely Brown (2000) also recognizes the great potential in the lntemet, positing this
New medium as the rich fabric for complex, learning ecologies. What makes Brown’s

Internet unique is that it is truly a new medium — one that supports multiple intelligences,

10

 

is bi-directional (push-pull), and leverages the small efforts of many with the large efforts
of a few (p. 12).

What uniﬁes these perspectives is the appreciation each writer has for the lntemet
to transform and create a new world, a new experience. Like those pessimistic about
technology’s hegemonic potential, lntemet optimists also see a technological condition

rising from the bits and bytes, wires and webs of the lntemet, but unlike their
predecessors, they celebrate the change as a shift from modem to postmodern, industrial
to po stindustrial, from centralized to decentralized, from the death of the author to the
birth of the reader. But does either of these positions fully describe the lived experience
of the lntemet? Is there a space in between technology as hegemony and technology as
heaven?

This dissertation will take aim at the dichotomies often used to describe
technology and speciﬁcally the lntemet — problems vs. promises, essentialist vs.
instIIlmentalist, revolutionary vs. restricting, democratic vs. hegemonic, etc. It is my
hope that I can engage the lntemet in a way that avoids the polarizing analysis of the past,
much in the tradition of insightful philosophers of technology such as Nicholas Burbules,

D011 Ihde, Federick F erre, and Andrew Feenberg. If we insist on describing technology
in a way that requires an either/or distinction we paint ourselves into a corner, forcing a
dichotomy which may be artiﬁcial and not reﬂective of the complexities of a
SociOtechnical context. In the pages of this dissertation, my goal is to unearth from the
trite tales of the Internet fresh perspectives that illuminate the ways in which the lntemet

StIventrally and experientially reinforces the technological condition early philosophers

ll

warned against, as well as resurrect the potential that lies within the greatest knowledge
network in human history.
My hope is that a course of research considering the design and experience of the
Internet will have clear ecological validity. The proliferation of the lntemet as the
technology for the “knowledge society” and its resulting social impact has important
implications for society and education (Hargreaves, 2003). And although I desire to study
that which impacts students, teachers, and administrators, pragmatism is not the sole
reason for crafting this study. Candidly, this topic satisﬁes my own intellectual curiosity,
a critical aspect to doing quality work. Even if it does not bear out in practical
signiﬁcance, I embrace my intellectual interests like those before me. As Jerome Bruner
(l 983) recollected of his own graduate school experience, “I felt starved for intellectual
problems that grow out of curiosity rather than out of necessity” (p. 51). Fortunately, the
Internet is undertheorized, so perhaps this study is born out of necessity.
Overview of Dissertation
What the following chapters offer is a critical narrative of the lntemet, my way of
answering the primary research question of this dissertation: What is our relationship
With the lntemet? Speciﬁcally, I will examine the real-life identity of the lntemet as a
cOllection of practices, and how the lived lntemet affects the world outside its wires.
SuCh an interrogation of lntemet practice is organized into nine chapters:
Chapter One: The Beginning
Chapter Two: Technology’s Drama: Where No Actor’s Part Is Too Small
Chapter Three: A Genealogy of Representational Media
Chapter Four: The Discipline of Knowledge on the Net
Chapter Five: Hypertext Semiotics
Chapter Six: The Storied Nature of the Net

Chapter Seven: Credibility at a Click: Information Evaluation in Open
Networks

12

Chapter Eight: The Democratic Value of the lntemet
Chapter Nine: Lessons from Links

Chapters two and three are meant to be read together, as they collectively explore
the question of why we have an lntemet. Chapter two begins by discussing the question
of technological development, and in doing so, challenges traditional models which cast
the forces of technological development as linear vectors. Rather than assuming cause-
eﬂ‘ect, sequential vectors of inﬂuence, chapter two suggests that technological
development is best understood through the inﬂuence of a mesh of forces. Before
discussing the conﬁguration of inﬂuences that prompted an lntemet, chapter two begins
with the last revolution in informational representation — the printing press. Featured are
an array of forces that contributed to the development of print media. Chapter three
begins where the previous chapter left off — the enduring effects of the print revolution.
The proliferation of print transformed the intellectual, political, and religious landscape
0f the West. Linked to print media is the rise of the industrial nation-state and modernity.
The chapter concludes by outlining the development of the Internet as a factor of
eGonomic and political forces, noting similarities and differences with the development of
Print media.

Through chapters two and three, two key concepts are introduced. The ﬁrst is
Constructure, which is a portmanteau combining “construct” and “structure.”
C0nstructure deﬁnes the relationship between form of representation and knowledge. It
is Seen as an important variable when considering transformations in informational
representation, such as the print media and hypermedia. The second term is ambiactivity.
Often in technology studies, commentators describe the interplay of forces within

technological development as “interactional”— meaning relations between elements, or as

13

 

 

 

 

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“transactional”, meaning across elements. Chapters two and three introduce a new term
which suggests a non-linear conceptualization of the network of forces involved — that of
ambiactional, or relations encircling, encompassing, and environing elements. Instead of
framing inﬂuence through vectors of force, ambiactivity implies forces acting through
spheres of inﬂuence.

After exploring the development of representational technology in general,
speciﬁcally print media and hypermedia, the remainder of the dissertation examines
different ways in which the effects of a virtual entity are felt in the non-virtual world. In
other words, chapters four through eight explore different dimensions of the lntemet as a

collection of practices. The ﬁrst of these is found in chapter four, which untangles power
relations on the lntemet and reveals the inextricable relationship between power and
knowledge. As is the case for much of this dissertation, the philosophy of Michel
Foucault guides this chapter. In chapter four, I use several F oucaultian ideas to describe
the production of knowledge on the Net. Foucault saw knowledge not as universal or
ﬁxed, but as arbitrary, situated, and culturally constructed. What counts as knowledge is
created through a circuit of exchange. Foucault revealed that knowledge and power work
together, as “the formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce
one another in a circular process" (Foucault, 1994a, p. 224). As such, knowledge and
Power cannot be separated as they work together to produce truth, making the notion of
“Value-free” information a contradiction in terms.
The power/knowledge/truth circuit aptly describes the interaction between the
different elements of the Internet as an informational experience: Google, billions of web

pages, and the Internet user. It explains how users, website designers, and popular search

14

 

 

engines interact in the ﬁeld of power relations to transform bits and bytes of information
into knowledge. Chapter four provides an extended discussion conﬁrming Rieder’s
(2005) conclusion: “Power runs through the capillaries of this network and with reference
to Foucault we have to understand power as a productive force, not as an inhibitor.
Search engines are best understood as producers, not censors” (p. 29).

Chapter ﬁve emphasizes the linguistic importance of the lntemet. The lntemet is
an exciting development for those that work in linguistics and literary theory, as it
presents an opportunity to think about the fundamental notions of literature and language
— the author, the reader, the text, the construction of meaning — in an entirely novel way.

The marriage between literary theory and hypertext is one that is well formed, drawing

extensive discussion from Nelson (1981), Landow (1992, 1997), and Bolter (2001),

among others. This chapter then seeks to add to this strong tradition by describing some
Of the ways in which the lntemet does shape language and language theory. Featured in
this chapter is the work of Swiss linguistic Ferdinand de Saussure and inﬂuential
twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Chapter ﬁve discusses the ways in which the Internet offers a rich canvas to
exPlore linguistics, particularly the ever-important concept of the signiﬁer and the
Sigllified. The ﬁrst and most important of these is the hyperlink, a form of representation
on the lntemet that connects (links) words or phrases with ideas meant to represent them.
This chapter extends the traditional notion of the hyperlink as a connection between
W0l'cls to a connection between signiﬁer and signiﬁed. Second, this chapter interrogates
the function of the search engine in the arbitrary evolution of language. Search engines

are more than a means of ﬁnding information in discursive environments; rather, they

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connect words and phrases (in the form of queries) with constructed meaning (in the form
of website hits). Lastly, we should consider the Web’s unique geography and its
consequences for the developments and interspersion of language. Linguistically, the
Internet may represent the end of geography. Chapter ﬁve argues that within the lntemet
we ﬁnd the validation for and limitation of a structural understanding of linguistics.
Having tested the boundaries of structural linguistics, a brief discussion of the value of
poststructural literary theory for a hypertext semiotics will be pursued. The chapter
concludes by exploring Wittengenstein’s notion of a “city of language” and “meaning
j ust is use” to describe the interplay between Web and words.

Stories are a dominant force in human societies around the globe and throughout
time. The sixth chapter of this dissertation consists of an examination of the types of
experiences available to users on the lntemet. I argue for the “storied nature” of the
Internet, meaning that I believe the lntemet to offer a different form of experience, one
that is narrative in its organization. I describe the storied nature of the lntemet through
three dimensions: surﬁng, sharing, and submerging. As the root metaphor for the
Internet, surﬁng consists of all general use of the lntemet, and includes general web
bI’OWSing and searching the lntemet. The unique properties of the lntemet amplify our
narrative sensibilities, gifting us with a form of media that promotes agency for the
individual. I describe how lntemet users bring life elements to the lntemet to construct
new worlds and modify existing identities through the opportunities for recombination
the Web provides. Sharing through the lntemet includes Web-based activities in which
Intel‘net users leave personal records, prose, pictures, video, and ideas for others to ﬁnd.

PerSonal artifacts on the lntemet embody the active construction of stories and self.

16

More often than not, sharing is conducted through Web-based social networking
technologies such as MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, YouTube, and of course, blogs.
The third and ﬁnal category is that of submerging. Some lntemet websites, applications,
and environments offer immersive opportunities for users to (re)deﬁne self and rearrange,
add, and delete the building blocks of their life narrative. A case study of the popular
online world Second Life will illustrate the explicit nature of this form of narrative
construction of reality. I will conclude the chapter by examining the combinatory effects
of surﬁng, sharing, and submerging on the lntemet as they relate to Nelson Goodman’s
ways of “world making.”

Chapter seven addresses one of the more popular questions in lntemet studies:
how do we assess the credibility of information found online? This is the principle
question of media literacy, whose advocates seek to equip students to effectively engage
the dubious world of lntemet information. Much if not most of the work that has been

done in media literacy focuses on instructing students to use a script of key questions
I When surﬁng the lntemet. A representative example may be found in Gardner, Benham,
and Newell’s (1999) discussion on teaching students how to evaluate the credibility from
Sources from the lntemet. The authors offer ﬁve general categories by which the quality
Of a Web source should be evaluated: authorship, accuracy, objectivity, currency, and
coVerage. In this chapter, I characterize such efforts as part of the growing “checklist”
approach to lntemet credibility. There is, I believe, a utility for framing credibility
St“dies as a staged process, depending on the purpose of the searcher and the kind of

information they may encounter online. However, as I argue in this chapter, information

17

on the lntemet is far too diverse and ill-structured to be adequately evaluated with the use
of one lntemet strategy.

What is needed are other evaluative tools for the lntemet, those that are better

suited when the information online is ambiguous in its authorship, “objectivity,” and
coverage. Using two seemingly unrelated schools of thought in Aristotle’s description of
style and Gestalt psychology’s emphasis on human perception, I will describe the value
of intuition as a way of knowing on the Web. Scholars such as Klein (1989) describe in
their studies the value of intuition in natural-setting decision making. The lntemet is a
natural setting for its users, particularly the students that we teach. I make the argument
that through processes like reiﬁcation and closure, lntemet surfers employ “gut and
guess” strategies to evaluate the lntemet. They rely on their perception of credibility,
Which is informed by their many experiences surﬁng the lntemet. They learn alternative
Ways of assessing credibility that is dynamic and adaptive to the many genres, purposes,
and informational practices found on the lntemet. As such, I suggest that educators
Should acknowledge the value of perceptive credibility as they teach students strategies
for being media literate.

One of the most common points of contention regarding the lntemet is its
democratic potential. Chapter eight takes up the question of the democratic attributes of
the lntemet by dividing the body of commentary on the politics of the Web into a two
dimensional grid. In this grid, the horizontal axis ranges from optimism to pessimism
and the vertical axis spans from essentialism to instrumentalism. As one would expect,
those optimistic about the democratic value of the lntemet emphasize its “essence” or

“Essential” nature as an open platform for idea exchange. Those pessimistic about the

18

lntemet’s value as an agent for democratic change often emphasize the “instrumental”
nature of technology, meaning that the true character of a technology is realized through
its use. Hence, the lntemet is of minimal democratic value if it is dominated by
reductive, commercial sites that do little for democratic exchange.
Reacting to the polarizing nature of much of the past commentary on democracy
and the lntemet, I provide an analysis of the Internet that encompasses many of the
“sites” of democratic activity. In using David Held’s (1995) seven “sites of power,” I
provide a detailed assessment of the current state of the Internet’s role in promoting
democracy. Such an evaluation will reveal the need for an understanding of the lntemet
that stresses its plurality — not one, but many Internets.

I conclude chapter eight by suggesting that the disagreements between the
pessimistic-instrtunentalists and the optimistic-essentialist can be explained by the
existence of multiple Internets. The phrase “the Internet” improperly represents this
broad collection of practices monolithically and singularly, when in effect there are many
Internets (two of which are discussed in this chapter). The lntemet common to our
thinking is a large, open discursive network of information, a platform for connections

betWeen people, organizations, and ideas. It is the “Deep Web,” the lntemet of a
“thousand plateaus,” a collection of “small pieces loosely joined.” Certainly, this lntemet
exiSts, but there is also the Internet in effect. This is the lntemet that is realized in
eV€31’yday surﬁng. It is the popular and visible parts of the Web, the commercial sites that
dominate the search engine listings and garner the vast majority of user activity. This is
the “Shallow Web.” The difference between these two Internets is much like the

difference between the known and unknown Universe, or at least the difference between

19

commercial television and public television. The Shallow Web mimics television’s
reductive presentation of the knowledge universe; whereas, the Deep Web leverages the
rhizomatic structure of hypertext to create a medium that is worthy of labels such as
revolutionary and evolutionary. The Deep Web is also the lntemet that offers the most
potential for democratic activity. Chapter eight draws on principles from Plato and
Foucault to tease out the theoretical implications of multiple Internets.

To summarize the seven chapters of analysis found in this dissertation, each offers
a provisional answer to a question related to the real world identity of lntemet, a virtual
entity. Such questions include:

Chapters Twwd Three: How does the lntemet offer a different relationship

with text than previous media forms?

Chapter Four: What does the lntemet, particularly the role of its search engines,

mean for our relationship with knowledge and power?

Chapter Five: How will linguistic evolution and language theory be inﬂuenced by

the lntemet, including fundamental notions of time and space?

Chapter Six: How is the lntemet inﬂuential in constructing the storied self and

world making?

Chapter Seven: What inﬂuence will the lntemet have on longstanding

conceptions of credibility, speciﬁcally Aristotle’s logos, ethos, and pathos?

Chapter Eight: What impact will the lntemet have on democratic development?

The Word

While this dissertation is organized around seven chapters that feature distinctive
concepts, there are some key themes that run throughout the seven chapters with varying
degrees of visibility. Several of these concepts have already been discussed, including
constructure, ambiactivity, the presence of binary distinctions in lntemet studies, and the

role of power on the lntemet. These themes manifest themselves in different ways

throughout the text, and provide some continuity to the collection of work presented here.

20

One other theme that is important to this critical narrative of the lntemet is the role of
language and “the word” as an act of representation.

Words hold a special place in intellectual history. Whether through speech or
print, poetry or hypermedia, words are humanity’s most robust mechanism of
representing patterns of thought. It is through the word that we enhance our abilities of
reﬂection, abstraction, and intellectual exploration. The importance of words has not
gone unnoticed over the intellectual history of the West. Dating back since before
Socrates, philosophers and religious leaders have held “the word” in high esteem, going
as far as deifying the concept. Around the sixth century BC, Heraclitus elevated the
importance of the word with his use of the term logos (meaning word, speech, or thought)
to represent a universal organizing principle for all life. From Heracalitus’ viewpoint,
“All things are in constant ﬂux, and yet are fundamentally related and ordered through
the universal Logos, which is also manifest in the human being’s power of reason”
(Tamas, 1991, p. 45). Early Christians, inﬂuenced no doubt by the Hellenistic culture in
which they lived, intentionally equated Jesus as the Word in human form. Introducing
his gospel, John writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.” In the original Greek text of this passage, John’s words read,
“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.”
Such an explicit connection would be hard to miss for cultural Greeks, but for the
purposes of this dissertation, the gospel of John reafﬁrms a strong commitment to the
importance of the word.

Tied to the word is the notion of representation. For Heracalitus, the Logos

represented order, structure, and stability; for Christians, the Word is Christ himself, God

21

 

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in man form. Even outside of religious contexts, the word is an important act of
representation. Words represent human thought and expression. As a collection of
words, language frees us from the boundaries of our immediate perceptual experience,
and allows us to extend knowing to the unseen, the unexperienced, and the unknown.
More than anything, language is a tool used to make sense of the world (Brunet, 1986, p.
72). Early in life, language ﬁlters into the child’s subterranean mental processes, giving
structure to experience. When children use language, they ascribe to a system presented
by their culture in an effort to construct a coherent representation of the world. It is more
than merely a means of communicating; rather, it is the means by which social interaction
and higher psychological functions are internalized (Miller, 2002). As Bruner (1991)
concisely stated, “The structure of language and the structure of thought eventually
become inextricable” (p. 5). So if the word is the extemalization of thought, how we
represent the word is an activity of incredible importance.

Much of this dissertation is concerned with the epistemological effects of
different transitions in representation of the word, particularly the most recent being from
print media to hypermedia. What inﬂuence does hypermedia, a developing form of
representation of the word, have on human thought? A goal of this dissertation is to
provide a partial answer to that question. It is no wonder that scholars such as James
O’Donnell identify this change as one of historic importance. “We live in a historical
moment,” writes James O’Donnell (1998), “when the media on which the word relies are
changing their nature and extending their range to an extent not seen since the invention

of movable type” (p. 9). O’Donnell’s words, as well as Drucker (1994), Weinberger

(2002), and others, captures the enormity of this moment in human history. For ﬁve-

22

 

hundred years, Gutenberg’s insights shaped the economy of ideas, spreading information
far and wide. Like the Gutenberg revolution, the lntemet represents new relationships
related to human thought. How the word is represented provides opportunities and
constraints on human thought and the nature of knowledge. As chapters two and three
will show, the standardization associated with print media offered a different
informational taxonomy, one that was hierarchical and linear. A strong theme in the
chapters that follow is how hypermedia affords a new informational taxonomy, one not
easily reproduced in print media.

Levels of Analysis in this Dissertation

As I have already indicated, this dissertation considers those questions revolving
around the Internet’s nascent identity by drawing from multiple disciplines including
philosophy, psychology, sociology, and history, among others. Such an interdisciplinary
approach to technology research is advocated by scholars such as Robert Johnson (1998)
who argue that infusing multiple disciplines into the pulse of our research is the best way
to complicate technology, challenging its longstanding or unnoticed assumptions from a
variety of perspectives.

Complementing this integrative approach are multiple levels of analysis and
theory. As Elizabeth Heilman reveals in “Escaping the Bind Between Utopia and
Dystopia,” theories work at varying levels of analysis, namely macro—theorizing, micro-
theorizing, and mew-theorizing. “Macro-theorizing concerns the operation of social
institutions, entire cultural systems, and whole societies,” explains Heilman (2005),
“...while micro-theorizing deals with distinctive expressions of time, space, and people,

and tends to avoid abstraction and generalization (p. 115-116).” Meso-theories tie the

23

macro and micro levels of analysis together. Heilman convincingly describes how these
levels work in efforts of critical theorists, from the macro-perspective of the structuralists
to the micro-practices of post-structuralist feminists.

This dissertation features varying levels of analysis and theorization. In the ﬁrst
few chapters, 1 provide a general overview of the historical forces at play in the
development of the Internet and other representational media. My early writing focuses
on the broad forces at work in the relationship between humans and their information,
and as such, may be best described as macro-level theorization. Later, however, I move
to micro-level theory as I discuss the nature of power on the lntemet, and the relationship
among individual actors of the lntemet search (search engines, Internet surfers,
information producers). During such discussions, “the immediate micro experiences of
power, possibility, control and/or oppression in speciﬁc...settings and sets of individuals”
are described. As I move in and between chapters, several “meso” themes emerge that
tie together the early macro-work of the dissertation to the intermediate micro-analysis.
The ﬁnal chapters offer discussion of a “new criticality” for educators binds together
some of this disparate work, as do the implications of the meso-concept of
“constructure.”

While theorizing at different levels and through different research traditions can
provide a more interesting and complex set of conclusions, such a practice does
complicate the ﬁnal product and creates inconsistencies across the dissertation. Because
I explore the intemet at different levels, difﬁculty can arise as certain views, approaches,

or frameworks sometimes conﬂict with one another as I discuss the structural

implications of the Intemet’s essence, the hyperlink, and the post-structural nature of the

24

 

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Web in the same dissertation. However each level and type of theory creating a willful
theoretical bricolage of complementary elements as I explain chapter two. Such an
approaches to theory and analysis is evident in my ranging use of the word
“representation” for example.
Contradictory Uses of Representation
In the pages of this dissertation are many uses of the word representation.

Sometimes, most notably in Chapter 3 ("A Genealogy of Representational Media"), I
speak of "representation" within the context of lntemet and media studies, implying a
particular meaning and use of the term. Media are, by their nature, acts of representation.
They provide a particular view of the world. By using the term "representational media,"
media scholars make that act of representation explicit (even though the term is
somewhat redundant). Emphasizing the activity of representation is an important part of
keeping the problems of representation in clear view. For example, being a critical
viewer of television programming is to realize that TV programmers construct a
particular reality, one designed to entice viewership and generate advertising revenue.
Because the purpose of television programming is to sell commercial space, the actions
of TV executives reﬂect those values and the world that is presented to us is necessarily
artiﬁcial (Media critic Todd Gitlin (2002) emphasizes this point: “As CBS’s vice
president for television research once told me: ‘I’m not interested in culture. I’m not
interested in pro-social values. I have only one interest. That’s whether people watch the
program. That’s my deﬁnition of good, that’s my deﬁnition of bad (p. 204)”). As I
outline the genealogy of representational media, I am examining the immediate and

enduring effects of those media on what and how they represent. As such, I am using the

25

 

term in a particular context with a speciﬁc history to convey what I believe to be
important elements of a critical approach to the lntemet.

Other times, I speak of “representation” more generally, or at least outside the
context of media studies and draw from the tradition of post-structural philosophers, most
notably Derrida, who argue that there is an inevitable lack of ﬁxity in the meaning of
words, creating movement and play between sign and signiﬁer. In “Structure, sign, and
play in the discourse of human sciences,” Derrida (1988) illustrated for his readers a
fundamental ﬂaw in structural conceptualization of meaning. In describing the
“structurality of structure,” Derrida argues that all structures organize themselves around
a center, such as freedom, power, hegemony, or capital. These centers serve as an
organizing principle for the structure, but as such, cannot be affected by the structures
that surround them. In his own words, Derrida showed that “...it has always been thought
that the center, which is by deﬁnition unique, constituted that very thing within a
structure which while governing the structure, escapes stucturality” (p. 109). Centers
were necessarily outside the inﬂuence of the structure; consequently, Derrida argued that
the center of any structure most not be located in the center, but outside the structure.
“The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the
totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere” (p. 109, emphasis
in original). This was Derrida’s great “rupture” between structural and post-structural
ways of drinking. He revealed that though structures necessitate the existence of centers
though centers necessitate the deconstruction of the structure. No form of human

discourse can be outside of discourse itself.

26

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It is in this context that I sometimes employ the word “representation” in this
dissertation, as an act or activity that restricts the possibility for ﬁxed meaning and
necessitates movement and play between sign and signiﬁer. “Representation” in this
context falls closer to what some might consider a post-structural understanding of the
term. Such an implementation of “representation” differs from the use of the term in
media studies, which is ﬁxed, static, structural, and stable. This tension between a stable
and unstable meaning of “representation” exists throughout most pages of the
dissertation. I do not seek to rectify the sometimes contradictory ways I use the term, but
rather I only seek to describe it and make the reader aware that I too feel this tension as I
write even as I ﬁnd a multiplicity of levels of analysis fruitful.

Critical Narratives

The full title of this work is “Follow the Link: Critical Narratives of the Internet.”
Titles can say a lot or a little, depending on how much you work at them. I chose the
phrase “critical narrative” as it captures the two-sided nature of this work. By casting
away assumptions and the familiar numbness we have of the Internet, this dissertation is
“critical” (F endler, 1999). However, “narrative” is indicative of what I believe to be the
essential role of narrative as an epistemological template. Any effort to examine a socio-
technical trend as large and sprawling as the lntemet is to tell a particular story (or more
accurately, a collection of stories). The stories contained in chapters two through eight
are only some of many possible tales one could tell of the lntemet. I ﬁnd this stance to be
in concert with Jones’ (2005) observation: “There is much to the notion, I think, that the

lntemet shows us what we want it to be, and much to the obverse notion, that what we

want the lntemet to he shows through in our research and scholarship” (p. 23 5). So it is

27

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with any telling of the lntemet. As Nietzsche (1997) once argued, “This is my way;
where is yours?... For the way --- it doth not exist!”

The collection of chapters presented in this dissertation address what I believe to
be important consequences (and in some cases attributes) of the lntemet. My goal with
these chapters is to leave the reader with the understanding of the unique effects of this
medium while avoiding the usual rhetoric for or railing against technology and media.
The order of the chapters in this dissertation is not random, but represents “layers” of
Internet practices. The early chapters introduce themes that inﬂuence discussion later on
in the dissertation, though certainly not all chapters relate evenly to the others.

At its core (chapters two and three), this dissertation explores issues related to the
cons tructural effects of the lntemet. I argue that the lntemet offers a different
relationship with knowledge, a change that has broad implications for the social, political,

and economic order. Expanding out from the core are power relations on the Web
(Chapter four), which run through every dimension of Internet practice. The next layer in
this series involves the relationship between language and the lntemet (chapter ﬁve). As
I haVe expressed, language is a root practice and is of particular importance to lntemet
Stlldies. These ﬁve chapters provide a basis for the sixth, which addresses issues of
identity, as the lntemet is becoming an important space for the construction of self and
Worlds. Next, I consider how users of the lntemet perceive credibility online and how
Scholars construct credibility standards for the lntemet (chapter seven). The credibility of
the Internet should certainly inﬂuence to some degree the democratic value of the

Internet (chapter eight). The ﬁnal layer of this dissertation is a capstone chapter which

28

distills the lessons presented in the previous eight chapters and provides direction for

ﬁiture research.
With a thumbnail sketch of this dissertation in hand, I now turn to the ﬁrst task of

thi 5 project — a discussion about the development of representational media.

29

 

CHAPTER 2
TECHNOLOGY’S DRAMA - WHERE NO ACTOR’S PART IS TOO SMALL

Indeed, those who seem to agree that the momentous changes were entailed
always seem to stop short of telling us just what they were.
Elizabeth Eisenstein, Printing Revolution in Modern Europe (2005)

The lntemet is the largest single network in the history of humankind. For many
of us, a “network” is a constellation of technical components — computers, browsers,
servers, infrastructure, protocols, and the bits of information that ﬂow over its wires. But
the Internet is more than a hardware universe; rather, it can be best understood as loose
collection of people, places, ideas, values, practices — a sociotechnical entity. Often
scho lars prefer to discuss the internal qualities of the lntemet or its realized effects in the

lives of those that use the Web, but few have examined the development of this
technological organism. How did the lntemet come to be?
Framing Technological Development
A common approach may be to examine the forces leading up to the birth of the
Internet. Like water’s afﬁnity for the path of least resistance, such a story easily falls
along the lines of a single, master narrative. “Tradition wisdom about the nature of
technology has customarily stressed the importance of necessity and utility,” writes
George Basalla (1988). It is often convenient to reduce the development of technology to
huInﬁnity’s attempt to address a problem in its immediate reality; as the old adage goes,
ne‘3essity is the mother of invention. Those technologies that best address humanity’s
imInediate challenges are adopted and perhaps developed further. In this way,
technOlogy is a material form of progress, and its utility is the driving force for its

Wldespread adoption. Some technologies do conform to this meritocratic

conceptualization of technological development. In the late eighteenth century, Eli

30

Whitney invented the cotton gin to mechanize the time-consuming process of hand

c leaning cotton. During World War II, the US. government established the highly secret
and devastatingly effective Manhattan project to build an atomic bomb before Nazi
Germany did (Diamond, 1999). Often, medical technologies are developed with a
particular problem in mind, such the Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine in 1957. So in some
cases, technology is the direct offspring of mother necessity and her husband utility,
causing some to equate technology with progress, but is technology always explained as a
response to our immediate environment?

In truth, very few informed observers would subscribe to the naive proposition
that technological development is best explained as responses to necessity and utility.
Such a linear account of technological development is clearly insufﬁcient when held to
the scrutiny of the real-world examples. Often, technologies are not a reaction to a
market, a need, or a problem, but are better viewed as the product of extended tinkering

by the inventor, creating a technology without immediate application. “Once an inventor
has discovered a use for new technology, the next step is to persuade society to adapt to
it,” Writes Jared Diamond (1999) in his best selling Guns, Germs and Steel. As evidence,
Diamond offers the example of Thomas Edison, for whom it took over twenty-years to be
convinced that his phonograph should be used commercially for playing music.
Son’letimes through failure, inventors ﬁnd useful applications for their inventions. A 3M
researcher named Spencer Silver was trying to make a strong adhesive, but actually
prodLlced incredibly weak glue. Years later Arthur Fry proposed that such glue be used

to cl‘eate 3M’s now famous “Post-it Note” product. This is an example of the “Rudolf

31

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effect,” whose bright, red nose was a “technology” without application, until one foggy

Christmas Eve.
Technology Development as Transactions

What unites both of these two approaches to technological development —
technology as a reaction to problems and technology as a product of curiosity — is that
neither account adequately considers the relationship between society and technology.
Though human beings create technologies at times in response to their immediate reality
and others out of curiosity, those technologies, if used, often shape and mold the very
soc iety that developed them. As such, some scholars complicate the theory of
technological development suggesting that while humans shape technology as a means to
overcome immediate problems, technologies also inﬂuence humans through their use,
thus create a revolving current of inﬂuence. Thus, some envision the relationship
between humans and their technologies as what Csikszentmihalyi and Rocherb-Halton
(198 1) have termed as “transactional.” In The Meaning of Things these scholars argue

that :

It is quite obvious that interaction with objects alters the pattern of life; for
instance, that refrigerators have revolutionized shopping and eating habits, that
automobiles created suburbs and increased geographical mobility, or that

television is changing how family members relate to one another. (p. 14)

For Csikszentmihalyi and Rocherb-Halton, objects are created in response to an
in'lfl‘lediate reality, but invariably shape any future reality. It would appear that objects are
“modes of” and “modes for” reality. “In the ﬁrst sense, they reﬂect what is,” suggest the
auth01's, “in the second, they foreshadow what could be...” (p. 27). Under such thinking,

the automobile reﬂected 19th century America’s need for a more robust transportation

Solution in the face of emerging industrialism. But the use of cars over time has affected

32

far more than just how we get to work, home, and to our social spots; rather, they
changed where we work, live, and play. While the car reﬂected the need for more robust
transportation, it also impacted society in many unanticipated ways. The same can be
said for a variety of domestic technologies, including the washing machine, refrigerator,
television, central heating, and so on.

While more sophisticated, the transactional theory of technological development
stil 1 frames technological development and its subsequent adoption as a response to what
is - 'This represents a sort of technological inevitability — that certain technologies
surfaced independent of forces outside of a basic need. Transactional theory does not
adequately account for the social, economic, and political forces at work in technological
development. In response, a number of a growing number of historians and sociologists
of technology have questioned deterministic, value-free theories of technology

development. They argue that technological development can only be explained properly
through the wide variety of forces at work in the process: economic, social, political,
governmental, and technical.

In How the Refrigerator Got Its Hum (MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1985), a
collection of scholars illustrate how a number of technologies were developed or adopted
not out of necessity or utility, but to achieve a more arbitrary end. They include evidence
detai ling how a closed military culture threatened by external innovation created
conditions that adversely affected the technical proﬁciency of military riﬂes used in the
Vietnam War, how certain technologies, such as electric powered refrigerators became

established consumer products over the competing gas-powered reﬁigerators because the

econOrnic clout of companies such as General Electric, and how other “domestic

33

technologies” like the portable vacuum cleaner assumed market dominance over the more
efﬁcient central vacuum cleaner because of the effective marketing techniques of door-
to—door vacuum salesmen. These examples show that much more than market logic goes
into the design and success of many technologies. This is particularly evident in the
earlier example of motorized transportation. Basalla (1988) writes:
National leaders, inﬂuential thinkers, and editorial writers were not calling for the
replacement of the horse, nor were ordinary citizens anxiously hoping that some
inventors would soon ﬁll a serious societal and personal need for motor
transportation. In fact, during the ﬁrst decade of existence, 1895-1905, the
automobile was a toy, a plaything for those who could afford to buy one. (p. 6-7)
For Basalla, the automobile cannot be viewed as a response to society’s growing
transportation problem, though it did transform transportation around the globe. Rather,
he suggests that the “invention of vehicles powered by internal combustion engines gave
birth to the necessity of motor transportation” (emphasis in original, p. 7). Oﬁen, this
“necessity” was reinforced by even larger forces at work: corporate (inﬂuence of General
Motors on zoning ordinances), governmental (passage of Federal Highway Aid Act of
195 6), industrial (assembly line techniques), and affective (marketing techniques such as
the axlnual model). The rich interplay of a meshed network of social forces on
technological development is best seen in the adoption of bus as a solution to urban mass
trans it.
The B as is Young and Honest
In his revealing account of the adoption of the bus in mass transit in New York,
Schl‘ag (2000) describes how technical superiority is not the only factor inﬂuencing the

proliferation of a particular technology, and often it is not even the most important. As a

Case Study, he uses the volatile politics of the New York City in the 19203 and 19305 to

34

 

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illustrate how technologies of transportation were positioned as a proxy for political and
economic forces. From the 18305 through the 19205, the rail systems of New York
operated in absence of competition. They were the ﬁrst urban mass transit system and
en j oyed enormous proﬁts, so much so, that they bound themselves to particularly harsh
contracts with the city in order to secure their right to operate. They paid heavy taxes on
their gross proﬁts, agreed to a rigid price controls (nickel fares), and consented to paving
city streets. Despite such binding agreements, the rail system thrived for decades and
en j oyed terriﬁc proﬁts until automobiles, subways, and inﬂation threatened the industry.
More damaging, though, was the view of city hall oﬁicials (particularly the Mayor) that
the rail systems were corrupt and price gougers. “Their monopolistic proﬁts in the 18905
had stained transit companies as greedy, dangerous menaces,” writes Schrag (p. 61).
Public ofﬁcials sought a means by which to undermine the operating authority of the
privately owned rails, and in the bus, they found a viable, public alternative. The bus
Systems did not carry the stigma or history of the rail system, and in this way, they were
Viewed as “young and honest.” In his detailed account, Schrag describes how Mayor
TYlan and his Tammany Hall cronies engaged in a protracted battle with the rail
Companies over control of Manhattan surface transit. While Schrag’s account of this
conﬂ ict reveals a number of social, political, and economic forces at work, for our
PUI‘poses, his conclusion is most important:
In an ideal world, perhaps, transit companies could have chosen the vehicles best
suited for their cities independently of considerations of fares, schedules, routes,
taxes, and other conditions of operation. In real American cities, however,
technical choice was inextricably bound up with decades of laws and customs that
had grown up with the street railway. Such interplay between innovation and

regulation occurs not only in transportation but in all industries deemed public
utilities. (p. 77)

35

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What Schrag reveals through the example of the bus is a network of forces at
work in technological design, development, and adoption. This is ﬁtting as this chapter is
not so much concerned with the technological invention as it is with technological

development. Too often historical accounts of technological development climax at the
inception of the invention. We are often obsessed with the “heroic inventor” — Alexander
Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Ben Franklin, Tim Bemers-Lee. Invention is important
(as Plato said, “The beginning is the most important part of the work”), but it only
provides the introduction of the story. Development, on the other hand, offers those
factors that inﬂuence the maturation of the technology. It provides the details of what
happened to and through the technology that made the artifact what it is today. Implicit
to the process of technological development are social, political, and economic forces that
foml a grid of power relations in which technologies evolve. As Foucault argued, power
relations constrain the actions of and produce opportunities for actions. Thus, no
technology can be seen as an inevitable step forward; rather, only as an outcome of range

0f forces, interests, ideas, and actions.

Arnbiactivity

It should be clear that when discussing the historical origins of any technology, it

is Critical to deﬁne what questions we seek to answer. Technological origins cannot be
easily explained through linear representations of inﬂuence: does inﬂuence ﬂow from
humans to their technologies, technologies to humanity, both, or neither? No matter the
anSVVer, I suggest the geometry of such a relationship (A — B // B - A) is misunderstood.
Such an understanding implies a particular chronology of inﬂuence — humans make

technologies, which change the human experience, which changes what humans design

36

next, etc. This does not usually reﬂect the realities of technological evolution, in which
power relationships are enacted in simultaneity, not sequentially. Also, the A-B // B—A
model of technological development implies a symmetry of interaction: it is perceived
that the forces at work offer equality in impact and inﬂuence. This is rarely the case. As
Postman (1998) explains, “Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. . .What
happens if we place a drop of red dye into a beaker of clear water? Do we have clear
water plus a spot of red dye? Obviously not.” So change from the human-technology
relationship is qualitative, not quantitative. Lastly, the forces involved in technological
development are often conceptualized as linear vectors. We often describe the interplay
of forces within technological development as “interactional”- meaning relations
between elements, or as “transactional” (Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton, 1981),
meaning across elements. This chapter introduces a new term which suggest a non-
linear conceptualization of the network of forces involved — that of ambiactional, or
relations encircling, encompassing, and environing elements. Instead of framing
influence through vectors of force, ambiactivity implies forces acting through spheres of
iIlﬂuence. Similar to a magnet, the inﬂuence of actors involved in broad scale
technological change works in all directions. Through the examples found in the printing
press and lntemet, the encompassing relationships deeply mired in complex matrix of
pOWer, culture, and law will become apparent.
If technology and society embody an ambiactional relationship (as is evident in
the eI~tample of buses in Manhattan surface transit), then we should consider the social,
cultUral, political, legal, scientiﬁc, and technological forces that created the lntemet —

Why do we have the lntemet and why now? An obvious answer rests in the development

37

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o f technology itself — that throughout the mid-twentieth century engineers developed the
necessary computer hardware, software, protocols and infrastructure to allow them to
communicate over wide-area networks. The 20th century’s rapid advances in
telecommunications and computing were certainly a requirement for the development of
tlle Internet, but is technological readiness the only reason for technological
development? This chapter argues otherwise.
C o nstructure
In my exploration of the conditions under which technologies develop, I will
begin with the inception of printing press and the proliferation of print media in medieval
Etlrope. The birth and growth of printing will serve as a case study to understand not
only the circumstances that surround technological change in general, but those particular
to informational technologies and representational media. Through the example of the
printing press, I hope to show that while the basic ingredients for technological
development may draw from economic, social, and technical spheres, radical shifts in
representational media are associated with what I will term a constructural gap.
Constructure is the relationship between representation of information and its
ePi Stemological effects. In other words, how information is represented inﬂuences what
is represented. The type of informational technology in use, whether it is a song that is
Sung, or a book that is read, or a web site that is browsed, inﬂuences and sets limits on
the kind of interactions with knowledge contained in the media. When representational
media no longer offer the necessary informational architecture to support the production
of knowledge, then such pressures contribute to the proper conditions for dramatic shifts

1n representations. Such a shift occurred in the development of the printing press, and I

38

 

believe the current germination of information dissemination found in the lntemet
represents the fulﬁllment of another constructural gap.
The Growth of Print Media
To begin, we must remove ourselves from our familiar 21St century context, and
reach back through the centuries to a much different world. If the lntemet represents a
revolution in representation, then a good starting point in exploring its development may
be found with a detailed treatment of the last great revolution in informational
representation, the growth of print media as a result of the Gutenberg press. Printing is a
good choice because “its impact on society can be viewed in full, from the stir made
among the literate few by the ﬁrst inventions in the ﬁﬁeenth century to the effects of
almost universal literacy among the western nations 400 years later” (Derry & Williams,
1 96 1 , p. 214). Other information technologies — such as language and writing systems —
found maturity before reliable records were kept, while others - including photography,
radio, TV, and ﬁlm — are still too new to fully access their impact. Print media, however,
is well positioned for the curious to explore both the conditions of its development and
lasting impact of its use. This quest will take us back over a millennium to a Europe far
different than the one we now know. In this example, the complex interrelations between
teehrlology and the social, political, and economic forces of the day will be conﬁrmed.
Like the automobile, the birth of print media can be viewed as a predictable
r eaetion to many of the prevailing conditions of the day. The need for what Eisenstein
(2005) calls “typographical ﬁxity” was ﬁrmly felt by the growing trade industries located
in developing urban centers, by ofﬁcials of the Roman Catholic Church who increasingly

requilted standardize religious tracts to consolidate power and ensure uniformity in the

39

religious experiences across Europe, and certainly by the growing number of learning
organizations such as universities also created a demand for printed books and pamphlets.
Aside from a demonstrable need, Europe had also cleared the way for Gutenberg’s
revolution by slowly acquiring the various related technical necessities of mass produced
print: oil-based ink, malleable metals for punches, screw-based presses, and paper.
Many of these innovations diffused into Europe from Arabic and Chinese civilizations.
But also like the automobile, the printing press’s story is more complicated than

the proposition that need drove development. Though there was a demand for print and
requisite pre-technologies were in place, the story of print is certainly not one that can be
reduced to technological determinism. In the sections that follow, I will provide
evidence that the general atmosphere for innovation was less than ideal and certainly not
optimal, as a review of the need of print would indicate. Printing was for Medieval
Europeans, a great surprise, prompting some to describe it as a gift from God. As the

preceding paragraphs indicate, the road is long. The journey begins in Europe, 1000

A.D-
Small Villages, Big Problems

Around 1000 A.D., Christian Europe was understandably much smaller and
disj Ointed than its modern counterpart, and even lagged behind other civilizations of the
day- The European land mass was an “empty vessel a cultural, intellectual, economic,
technological, and demographic backwater that paled before the technological and
ScieI‘ltiﬁc vitality of contemporary centers of civilization in Islam, Byzantium, India,

China, Mesoamerica, and South America” (McCellan & Dom, 1999, p. 175). It is

difﬁcult to determine exactly why medieval Europeans lagged so far behind their

40

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contemporaries. Some suggest that the European’s ecological arrangement limited
Emope’s political and social development. These scholars argue that the combination of
me regular rainfall in the spring and fall seasons, combined with the natural irrigation
supplied by the streams of the European countryside, made the necessity for a centrally
organized society less necessary. Civilizations in less amiable environments, such as the
early Egyptians and Mesopotamians, established a pattern of collaboration as they built
public irrigation systems (Derry & Williams, 1961). Other scholars point to the
convoluted political relationships in Europe as damping the proliferation of innovation.
Political elites required the authority of the Church and its clergy to legitimize them, and
the clergy required spiritual and intellectual monopoly. Both parties would view the
Sporadic innovation and technological development as a possible threat to the long
Standing social order (Matossian, 1997). Still, others look to the enormous social and
political upheavals of barbarian invasions as the root cause for the European
technological setback (Tamas, 1991). Whatever the reasons, the centuries leading up to
the end of the millennium found Europe far behind most of the other medieval societies.
Villages in EurOpe were isolated communities, often separated by long walks
laSting the better part of a day. The geographic separation related to the absence of
t1’aITISportation technology necessitated political separation, as monarchs in Europe
StI’llggled to exert their inﬂuence throughout their lands. The strongest unifying force of
this time was the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope’s arm extended throughout Europe,
affecting most aspects of life in Germany, France, Italy and England, although more
peripheral areas were characterized more by local traditions. Church dogma dictated

existential and ethical meaning, symbolic life and daily activities for most of the

41

 

continent’s inhabitants. There was no visible separation between Church and state, or
even Church and science. The people of Europe were, on the whole, a religious people
who worked hard to earn penitence for their transgressions, and dutifully supported the
activities of the Church in Rome (including paying taxes used to build enormous basilicas
and ﬁnance crusades against the Muslims). This created a society comprised of a vast
majority of uneducated, illiterate peasants, and a small caste of political and religious
el ites. Such a society was far different than that of China, which as early as the Sung
Dynasty (960-1279), featured civil services exams and government funded schools to
extend the possibility of acquiring wealth, prestige, and power to all its citizens
(Matossian, 1997, p. 69).
A n Agricultural Revolution
Between 1000 AD. and 1500 A.D., Europe experienced an Agricultural
Revolution. While Europe’s population remained considerably smaller than that of the
Islamic empires, India, and China, the population of Europe as a whole did rise 38
Percent between 600 and 1000 (McCellan & Dom, 1999, p. 177). The increase was due
to moderate improvements in agricultural technology which then increased calories and
Population and put additional pressures on existing farming methods. The Agricultural
Revolution in Europe was primarily spurred on by the adoption and development of
Several key technologies designed to harness power, including the waterwheel, the
windmill, horse collar, stirrup, the three-ﬁeld rotation system, and heavy plow (Derry &
Williams, 1961; McCellan & Dorn, 1999). “With such inventions, the natural
environment began to be exploited with unprecedented skill and energy,” writes Tamas

(1 99 l, p. 173). Most importantly for Europeans, the proliferation of agricultural

42

technology satisﬁed the demand for increased food production while decreasing the
mount of human power required. With their “fascination for new machines and new
somces of power medieval Europe became the ﬁrst great civilization not to be run
primarily by human power” (McCellan & Dom, 1999, p. 180).

The agricultural advancement of Europe from 1000 to 1500 AD. should not be
overstated. I offer three reasons for such a disclaimer. First, for most Europeans, the
Agricultural Revolution that began around 1000 was quite conservative in its social
effects. The implementation of the heavy plow, an enormous instrument consisting of an
iron plow ﬁxed on wheels, required the strength of eight oxen to pull it. The cost of this
equipment was well beyond the reach of the typical European peasant, and thus
reinforced the strength of the stratiﬁed feudal system. The stirrup had this same effect, as
it created the possibility for knights to stay mounted during combat. With armor, lance,
Shield, and sword, a mounted cavalry of knights were a formidable, but expensive
military force. Thus, knights generally provided protection to their feudal lords, who
Could afford to equip and pay them. With feudal lords ﬁrmly in charge, the typical serf
Was hard pressed to feel any of the “liberating” effects of the Agricultural Revolution. 1

Second, even though the Europeans had become far more adept at feeding their
p0pulation, their understanding of the natural world was still largely incomplete. This is
illustrated by the enormous distress cause by the unforgiving and unexplainable epidemic
tIlat was swept across Europe in the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries. The Bubonic

1elague, or Black Death, was the name for deadly bacteria which spread via ﬂeas (oﬁen
carried by rats) to humans. The disease gathered its name-sake from the little dark

S\Wellings, “buboes,” which appeared over the infected lymph nodes. For most of those

43

exposed, an unpleasant death was a near certainty. The effects of this epidemic are
particularly shocking to modern eyes: some estimate that one out of every three
Europeans died from the Black Death. And if one-third of Europeans died from the
plague, the remaining two-thirds were deeply affected by the mysterious nature of the
disease. As Man (2002) describes, “Of the causes, no one knew anything at all at the
time, and therein lay the true horror. . .It is the lack of explanation that unhinges minds”
(p- 21).

Third, though agricultural technologies helped meet the demand for calories by
medieval Europeans, it did not necessitate a rational, orderly community. Black magic
and devil worship ﬂourished inside European villages. Many of these rituals featured
“group ﬂagellation, the dance of death in cemeteries, the black mass, the Inquisition,
tortures and burnings at the stake. . .Apocalyptic expectations abounded” (Tamas, 1991 ,

p- 225). The Church itself, though a core institution, was rampant with corruption and

decadence. Its lack of spiritual integrity was unsettling.

Gutenberg 's Quest

So was the world occupied by Johann Gutenberg (1400-1468) — one of ignorance,

fear, struggle, and separation. He lived in a time ﬁlled with doubt and uncertainty, a
SOeially and economically stratiﬁed era that made economic mobility a contradiction in
tenths. Born in a family with some economic means, Gutenberg should have been slated
to DUrsue the comfortable life of a patrician, but due to his mother’s low birth as a
Sho12>keeper’s daughter, Gutenberg was restricted in his economic opportunities. Both his
fatl'ler and his uncle were Companions of the mint, which certainly exposed young

Gutenberg to the art of coin making, but given his low social status, Gutenberg knew he

44

could never work for the imperial mint. This probably seemed to Gutenberg a bit of bad
luck, but what he could not have known was that those informal lessons of his youth
would be quite instrumental in what lay before him, a project of grand ambition — the
development of movable type.

Though Gutenberg received no substantial inheritance, no privileged access to
aristocratic life, and no signiﬁcant property rights from his family, he was provided a
quality education. Young Johann attended schools in his hometown of Mainz, Germany
in which he learned printing, Latin, and other skills that would bear well in his future
endeavors. Once of age, Gutenberg set out to make his fortune. The story of his
entrepreneurial trials and tribulations is a long and complicated one, but to summarize,
Gutenberg regularly demonstrated a prescient foresight for market opportunities. This
can be illustrated through Gutenberg’s development of the press, but even before this, he

recognized a good opportunity when it presented itself. For example, when large masses
made regular journeys to Aachen to view the holy relics stored there, very few of the
thousands of pilgrims could get close enough to touch the relics. Some in Aachen
Suggested that pilgrims use small mirrors to harness the power of the relics from afar, in
the event that they could not touch them. Seeing an enormous market (tens of thousands
rmade the pilgrimage) with an insatiable desire for supernatural assistance against the
Plague, Gutenberg borrowed money to mass manufacture the mirrors. It is unclear
whether Gutenberg was successful in this endeavor, though delays caused by fresh
epidemics of the Plague did not help his ﬂedgling business. What is clear from this
e)"iarnple is Gutenberg’s ambition and his desire to build wealth — the same motives that

drove his pursuit of movable type printing.

45

Catalyst for the Gutenberg Press
The catalyst for movable type’s development was not a technological one —

actually, the underlying tools for Gutenberg’s system had existed for a long time in
Europe, and even earlier in Asia. Pi Sheng in China developed a movable type system
out of wet clay in the eleventh century; inventors in the Korean continent were the ﬁrst to
construct movable type from metal, printing the ﬁfty-volume Prescribed Ritual Texts of
the Past and Present in 1234 (Matossian, 1997). If the creative cultures in East Asia
produced movable type centuries before Gutenberg, why are we not talking about the
revolution of print media that spread from the East outwards, rather than a European
germination? Why was Gutenberg’s solution so successful? Did he provide a better
technology in the ﬁfteenth century than the Chinese or Koreans had available to them?
This is possible, but not likely. While China’s paper was not suitable for printing press

Operations and they lacked the availability of wine presses from which to model their

printing press, China was still a leader in scientiﬁc and technological innovation,

producing many tools earlier than their Western contemporaries. It would appear that

Gutenberg’s advantage, according to Man’s (2002) thorough account on the matter, can

be reduced to the differences in writing systems between the East and West. Gutenberg’s

advantage lays in the simplicity, ﬂexibility, and scalability of the Western practice of
alphabetic writing systems. As Man (2002) describes, “The genius of the alphabet, the
underlying principle —- is that it uses a few symbols, typically between twenty-ﬁve and
forty, to represent the whole range of linguistic sounds. . .Its astonishing power comes
form its vagueness, its fuzziness, its ﬂexibility, its ability to record anything spoken

Sir“ply by rearranging the same few symbols” (p. 102). By relying on a small set of

46

symbols to represent the range of sounds in a language, alphabetic systems were far
easier to adapt to movable type. Gutenberg’s advantage was that he need only determine
how to mass produce the stamps for each of the twenty-ﬁve to forty letters. To
accomplish the same feat with the pictorial language systems of Asia, such as Chinese,
would require a movable type system that would accommodate over 40,000 different
symbols. Clearly, the challenges of pictorial language systems could not be easily met
with 13th century technology.

The Demand for Print

Having a writing system that was easily adaptable to mechanization, Gutenberg
had an enormous advantage in creating his printing press, but there were certainly other
factors that made for an environment conducive to this technological development. One
can also make the case that Europe in the Middle Ages was ripe for the advent of
movable type, and had Gutenberg not developed it, someone else would have met the
growing demand for books. What follows are three growing markets for standardized
print media.

A standard church.

In particular, the Roman Catholic Church had a growing need for standardized
texts (missals) of worship. Some in the Church hierarchy, most notably Nicholas of
Cusa, dreamed of unifying the Christian experience for all worshippers across Europe.

Standardizing the liturgy, song book, and prayer book was one way of unifying the
Church and also reafﬁrming that the locus of control for Catholicism hovered over the
Pope’s quarters in Rome. This could only be done if Rome controlled the production and

distribution of all ofﬁcial Church texts. Most of Europe was still illiterate at this time,

47

though most priests were literate and able to read ofﬁcial church theology. Hence, from
the Church’s perspective, if they can control the information received by the priests they
could standardize the Christian experience throughout Europe, sacriﬁcing autonomy and
spontaneity for control, assurance, and predictability (O'Donnell, 1998, p. 37).

A standard trade.

As the Middle Ages progressed economically and socially, literacy and education
became increasingly important, affecting Europe’s demand for printed material and
books. With increasing regularity, Europeans expanded sea exploration in the pursuit of
trade. It is suggested by Derry and Williams (1961) that “in the Middle Ages transport
costs were a smaller proportion of total costs than at present day” (p. 203). The
economical viability of sea travel combined with the technological improvements in
navigation (improvements on the Chinese compass and increased efforts in map making)
made sea voyages a growth industry. Increased trade associated with these efforts
required a more standardized form of print literature. Maps needed to be shared amongst
navigators, contract language needed to be developed and disseminated between traders,
and measurement of goods needed standardization. Mass printing would prove quite
valuable to the growing merchant class of the Middle Ages. With the possibilities of
mass production of print, Ortelius made his T heatrum a living atlas, frequently
incorporating the feedback of his vast readership into his next edition — a total of 28 such

editions by the time of his death (Eisenstein, 2005, p. 82).
A standard education.
Institutions of advanced learning began to slowly emerge throughout the Middle

Ages - In 789 A.D., the Frankish King Charlemagne issued a decree for the formation of

48

 

“cathedral schools” in order to guarantee a reliable supply of literate priests. Secular
universities began to develop before 1200, and by 1500 there were around eighty such
institutions scattered around Europe (McCellan & Dom, 1999, p. 183). In the early
twelﬂh century, Hugh of Saint Victor proposed a radical battery of secular topics for
study at the Augustinian Abbey in Paris. Hugh’s curriculum, in support of his mantra of
“learn everything,” included subjects such as mathematics, grammar, rhetoric, music,
astronomy, among others (Tamas, 1991, p. 185). This increased attention toward
learning by the Church and state would quite naturally indicate a general need for less
expensive, more reliable, and more diverse collection of printed texts.

As the fog began to lift from Europe’s “dark ages,” the desire for printed
materials also rose. People began to read and write in their own language (rather than the
academically inclined Latin), and private collections of books became more common,
particularly of the wealthy patricians. Yet, scribes could only copy around two high
quality, densely conﬁgured pages per week, leading to a burgeoning supply-demand
problem (Man, 2002). Manual reproduction was inadequate to meet the supply of texts in
the face of increasing demand, and the imbalance contributed to enormous cost of printed
materials. In the late fourteenth and early ﬁfteenth centuries, a single medical book
required three months’ cost of living for the average person and a single law book sold
for the equivalent of sixteen months of living expenses (Matossian, 1997, p. 80). Not

on] y did the scribes have difﬁculty keeping up with the demand for print media, they also
had difﬁculty ensuring accuracy. Late medieval scribes were supervised, but the controls
Often quite lax (Eisenstein, 2005, p. 56). After hours of hand copying, scribes were

bound to make mistakes, and some even intentionally altered the received text. This

49

created problems for the Church and its orthodoxy, as well as for those in the academic
realm (teaching materials that contained mistakes, inconsistencies). So, while the
continent was mired with plague outbreaks, political and religious problems (which were
one and the same in those days), civil wars, and general angst (due to fear of the Plague),
it still became increasingly clear that if someone developed a way to mass produce
inexpensive but accurate books they would gain enormous fame and fortune. It certainly
seems that this message did not elude Johann Gutenberg.

The desire for standard religious experiences, standard education, and standard
trade all likely contributed to Gutenberg’s breakthrough. This short list of factors is
meant to illustrate that Gutenberg’s accomplishment did not occur in a vacuum. The
climate of Europe at this time was one well-disposed for the development of the printing
press. It had the necessary technological preconditions and a growing desire of its
religious, economic, and political leaders for the advantages in control of text that
standard print allows.

Gutenberg ’s Breakthrough
Given the ripe market conditions and the availability of the necessary tools (metal
punches for lettering, screw-driven presses, high-quality paper), Gutenberg labored
through the remaining technical challenges (ink quality, assembly of characters on the
press, reproduction of punches) to create the West’s model for movable type. His success
came in 1447, when he began to successfully mass produce a standard text on Latin
grammar called Ars Grammatica. Gutenberg would argue that his books were not merely
as good as those produced by scribes, but they were actually superior in their presentation

and accuracy. His work spread rapidly through Europe, as trained apprentices often

50

 

ventured to new towns (those with signiﬁcant Churches, universities, and schools) to start
their own printing operation. By 1480, only twelve years after Gutenberg’s death, 122
towns in Western Europe had at least one printing press (Man, 2002). By 1500, there
were nearly 40,000 recorded editions of books produced by printing presses in fourteen
European countries (though the presses of Germany and Italy account for two-thirds of
these) (Derry & Williams, 1961, p. 240). The 40,000 titles produced from 1450-1500
totaled around ten million copies. This substantial collection of early printed materials
has been termed the incunabula or “cradle” of print (Boorstin, 1983; Matossian, 1997).
Though the amount of printed materials saw a meteoric rise within the ﬁrst ﬁfty
years of the printing press, it should be noted that an increased abundance of text does not
necessitate the equal distribution of text. Some suggest that over three-quarters of the
texts produced before 1500 were in Latin, the language of the educated elite and clergy
(Moss, 2000). Not surprisingly, religious works dominated this distribution, accounting

for nearly half the published texts, followed by classical, medieval and contemporary

literatures comprising over thirty percent of all printed materials.

The Legacy of Print Media: Scholarly Effects

The rapid rise of book production in Europe left an indelible mark on the political,
social, religious, and academic landscape, and most certainly movable type affected the
academic realms in several tangible ways. Before the printing press, books for academic

inquiry were exceedingly rare, requiring those that wish to consult a variety of texts to
assulne the identity of the “wandering scholar” (Eisenstein, 2005). Boorstin’s (1983)

Picture of scholarly life before the printing press is particularly vivid:

In the heyday of medieval libraries books had been so valuable that they were
chained to their shelf or to a horizontal bar above the desk where they were to be

51

 

consulted. The symbol of the old library was the chained book. . .None of the

consequences of printing was far more far-reaching than the power of the press to

free books from these chains. (p. 534)

Not surprisingly, Gutenberg’s work changed all this by allowing academic texts to
gain a much wider distribution and readership, and extensive travel was no longer a
requirement to consult different books. Print abundance also provided medieval scholars
the opportunity to form a consensus over the critical questions of their ﬁeld. The
fragmented efforts of individual scholars began to coalesce into ﬁelds of studies.
Contradictions and opposing viewpoints became more visible, and the nature of academic
activity changed. Eisenstein (2005) describes that “successive generations of sedentary
scholars were less apt to be engrossed by a single text and expend their energies in
elaborating on it. The era of the glossator and commentator came to an end, and a new
‘ era of intense cross referencing between one book and another’ began” (p. 47).
Academics discovered the creative value of cross-pollination, and this led to new species
of academic and literary discourse. This period was witness to the rise of new forms of
writing, speciﬁcally essays and novels. This germination can also be attributed to the
standardizing effects of the printing press. While movable type increased the
“combinatory intellectual effects,” it also created uniformity through its mass production.
Soon, artists and writers developed new forms of writing as a reaction against the
Standardizing effects of the printing press, such as the Essays of Montaigne (Eisenstein,

2005)
Academic inquiry steadily increased, coupling the discoveries from the new world
with a much more effective distribution technology that would eventually lead them

directly into the Renaissance. And while these are important changes to Europe’s

52

landscape, the greatest changes associated with the proliferation of print lie in the arenas

of politics and religion.

The Legacy of Print Media: Religious Eﬂects

The Church in Rome initially viewed this new technology with great favor.
Movable type provided the Church with resources to help ﬁnance the Crusades through
the selling of indulgences, and it also was a helpful resource in Rome’s efforts to
standardize religious activity across Europe through its common texts. The Church
desired a uniﬁed Christianity, one that participated in common worship through identical
texts creating a consistent and predictable religious experience that began (in effect) in

Rome. I do not mean to cast such actions as controlling or hegemonic; rather, I only
mean to acknowledge that control is a fundamental characteristic of printed text. As
O’Donnell (1998) argues, “Yet the most important feature of such a text is not what it
does but that it does what it does: it makes the life of a community depend neither on
spontaneous choice nor on the orally assimilated customs and wisdom of the past nor
again on a charismatic leader, but rather on speciﬁc rules and regulations written down
on a page” (emphasis in original, p. 37). Thus, movable type’s beneﬁt of standard text
did structure the experiences of parishioners around Europe in a particular fashion;
however, as is often the case, use of technology often runs in unforeseen directions. The
technology of movable type introduced many unintended effects.

The role of Martin Luther.

While control over religious experiences was desirable to papal ofﬁcials, the

Ch urch’s honeymoon with the printing press was short lived. The Church’s perspective

drastically changed as Martin Luther, the now infamous monk from Germany, effectively

53

 

 

 

 

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fractured the Church over disputes ranging from theological disagreements to corrupt
practices. Luther’s Protestant Revolution began with a common theological question,

one that has interested professors of theology and lay people equally: What must one do
to be saved? Luther’s answer came from his study of the Bible, in which he found that it
was through God’s grace alone that humans could be saved (Tamas, 1991). Medieval
Catholic doctrine emphasized both grace and good works as the two required elements of
salvation. Additionally, Luther objected to other practices of the Church. He rejected the
practice of pluralism (holding of multiple ofﬁce by Church ofﬁcials) and the selling of
indulgences, in which one could pay the Church to deliver a soul from purgatory. It said
that Monk Johann Tetzel pumped his sales with the slogan, “As soon as the coin in the
coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs” (Duiker & Spielvogel, 2001 ).

The reformers.

In many ways, Luther’s actions were congruent with the activities of a small, but
growing line of religious reformers (or dissidents - depending on your perspective) that
preceded him. Prior to Luther, Christian Humanists (most famous of which was
Erasmus) argued the Christianity should be enacted as a set of values that affect daily
1iVing rather than a comprehensive, systematic, and dogmatic theology (Duiker &
Spielvogel, 2001, p. 426). Reformers such as Jan Hus and Jerome paved the way for
I«uther by speaking out against Church doctrine in sermons and attacked papal authority
t1'll‘ough their writings (Man, 2002). Even Luther’s most famous act — the nailing of the
ninety-ﬁve theses against the Church doors at Wittenberg — was not inherently
revolutionary. “It was entirely conventional for professors to hold disputations over an

lSSue such as indulgences, and ‘church doors were the customary place for medieval

54

 

 

 

[U

 

publicity,”’ writes Eisenstein (2005, p. 168). How then did Luther ﬁnd himself at the
center of one of the most important moments in the history of the Christian Church?
Factors that aided the Protestant revolution.
There were several factors that undoubtedly fed Luther’s Protestant Reformation

of the Church. Certainly, the political environment in Germany gave aid to Luther’s

case. Germany was a land of several hundred states, all which strove for greater
independence from the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V of Spain. By supporting
Luther, they were undermining not only the sovereignty of the Church, but of the throne
in Spain as well. But politics alone cannot explain the religious revolution led by Luther.
Certainly, Luther’s theological message would have a certain popularity with many
practicing Christians (particularly the peasantry). He advocated for the “priesthood” of
all believers, removing the formal clergy as a necessary intermediary between the people
and God. He also wrote that the people should read and interpret the Bible themselves,
and supported his position by translating the Bible from Latin to the native language of
the Germans. However, Luther’s translation of the Bible from Latin to German would
not have found an audience without the ﬁnal cause of the Protestant Reformation: the
Printing press. Luther’s ideas spread throughout Germany primarily because the printing
press made the replication of Luther’s tracts quick, efﬁcient, and inexpensive.

The immediate outcome.
Combining Luther’s proliﬁc propensity toward publication and the new

possibilities of movable type was a powerful combination: it is recorded that during one
Seven year stretch, a third of all printed materials in Germany were authored by Luther

(Man, 2002). Between 1517 and 1520, Luther’s thirty publications likely sold over

55

 

300,000 copies — an enormous amount for the time period. The Church, who had once
exercised complete control over Middle Age media outlets — the scribes, artists, and
priests — suddenly had lost its monopoly to a simple monk in Germany. Luther’s
audacity enraged the papal authorities and Charles V of Spain, who denounced Luther at
Worms: “a single friar who goes counter to all Christianity for a thousand years must be
wrong.” Ofﬁcially, Luther lost his battle with the Church, having been made an outlaw in
the empire by the Edict of Worms, but Luther’s revolution continued, culminating in an
international Protestant movement — one that drew from other religious luminaries such
as John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli. One must wonder: if Luther did not have the
advantage of the ubiquitous presence of his writings around Germany, would he have
been as successful? Most scholars think not. As Eisenstein (2005) suggests, “. . .it seems
difﬁcult to exaggerate the signiﬁcance of the Press, without which a revolution of this
magnitude could scarcely have been consummated” (p. 164). Tamas (1991) makes a
similar conclusion: “Without [the printing press], the Reformation would have been
limited to a relatively minor theological dispute in a remote German province” (p. 223).
Insights from the Print Media Revolution

To summarize, this chapter has provided what I hope to be an adequate, though
certainly incomplete, discussion of the rise and impact of movable type in Europe. In the
eXample of movable type, we ﬁnd strangely fertile soil for technological innovation. To
be sure, there was a growing need for the mechanization of printing, a need felt by the
Chutch and the nascent academic community consisting of schools and early universities.
C1lurch ofﬁcials, particularly Nicholas of Cusa, recognized the advantages of

Standardized religious tracts would have in advancing their goal of unity across the

56

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Church. Certainly, universities needed accurate and readily available texts to achieve
their common missions. Yet, in 1455, all of Europe’s printed books would have ﬁt in a
single wagon from that era (Man, 2002). This statistic ﬁrst demonstrates the enormous
need for printed materials, but it also illustrates the far reaching impact Gutenberg’s work
had on the proliferation of print media. We also see from this example that radical
technological shifts, such as the one from scribe to movable type, cannot occur without a
sufﬁcient technological base. Gutenberg’s advantage over his Asian colleagues was that
the basic technologies to create an effective printing press already existed in Europe at
the time of his experimentation: the screw-based press, appropriate paper, an alphabetic
writing system, metal punches, etc. Gutenberg’s challenge was leveraging these various
technologies to create a simple, but effective metal-based, movable type printing press.
In this way, he can be thought of as an integrator as well as an innovator.

Yet, as hungry as the Western world may have been for the printing press prior to
its invention, and despite the well-established technological base that existed at that time,
movable type was a surprise to many. Europe had yet to fully recover from the ensuing
political and social chaos that followed from the fall of the Roman Empire. The
environment of those times was particularly orientated to the mythic and supernatural,

1‘ ather than the scientiﬁc. European society was still rigorously stratiﬁed, which exerted a
Certain measure of inﬂuence on those who aspired to a better life. And not to be
uIlderestimated was the general feeling of anxious despair associated with each wave of
the mysterious but deadly plague that seemed to operate without rhyme or reason. It is
these unfavorable variables that make 15th century Europe a perplexing stage for

innovation. We must reconcile the contradictory nature of the medieval European

57

 

environment for technology development - on one hand, we have the many technologies
that took root in Europe from 1000-1500 A.D., and yet at the same time, we ﬁnd a
Europe struggling against the black plague, confused religious identity, stratiﬁed
societies, and controlling religious institutions. As we examine the development of the
lntemet, We will ﬁnd this same curious contradiction in its conditions for development.
The task of the next chapter is to determine how to connect the lessons learned
about technological change and the printing press to an on-going investigation of the
lntemet. It is my belief that looking back at the development of movable type will
provide insight into the future implications of the lntemet, particularly the ambiactional

relationship between technology and society.

58

 

CHAPTER 3
A GENEALOGY OF REPRESENTATIONAL MEDIA

The previous chapter introduces important themes for the development of
technologies, and two of these themes — ambiactivity and constructure —- will continue to
be emphasized in this chapter. In Chapter 2, I attempted to show through the
development of print media, how forces work through spheres of ambient inﬂuence in
such a way as to create a complex environment for innovation and development. Print
media was both highly probable and a great surprise. In this chapter, I will argue that this
same pattern holds true for the lntemet. As the development of technology is as much
about its effects as it is its origins, I will continue to trace the impact of the printing press
through the centuries that led up to the lntemet. The collection of print media effects I
will present and how these effects form the basis of the ﬁeld of inﬂuences from which the
Internet emerged will represent my modest attempt to describe the genealogy of
representational media from the printing press to the lntemet.

Changes Associated with Standard Print

Typically, what follows in the story of technology after the Gutenberg press is a
discussion about the dawning of the Scientific Revolution and the Renaissance. The
Period following the Reformation is truly a remarkable one in many ways. Within one
generation of Gutenberg, we ﬁnd the works of the great Italian masters (Leonardo,
Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael), Columbus lands in the New World, Luther
initiates the Protestant Reformation, and Copernicus shatters worldviews with his
heliocentric universe (Tamas, 1991). It offers a broad expansion of the scientiﬁc toolbox

With development of observational technologies including the telescope, the microscope,

59

the ﬁrst precision clock, the thermometer, barometer, and vacuum pressure (Westfall,
1977)

Yet, to offer a general survey of the technological and scientiﬁc accomplishments
following the close of the Middle Ages is only to tell part of the story. Missing from
such a review are the less tangible but equally inﬂuential changes to the scientiﬁc
landscape. Coupled with the groundbreaking works of many scientists was a dramatic
transformation in the nature and work of science. A new model for scholarship and
research established itself in the years that follow the printing revolution, one that
increasingly emphasized scientiﬁc community over the activity of the lone scholar. With
developing scientiﬁc communities came new ways of operating as scientists, including a
scientiﬁc classiﬁcation schema, scientiﬁc discourse, and scientiﬁc method. “Scientiﬁc
thinking” emerged, diminishing the inﬂuence of mystical, ancient, or animistic
approaches of explaining natural phenomena in favor of a mechanistic perspective. Such
changes required centuries to unfold and ﬁnd maturity; however, even in the work of
those luminaries immediately following the development of the printing press show
evidence of an emerging scientiﬁc mindset.

Depersonalizing the Universe: From “Motive Soul” to “Force ”

One of the most visible effects of the printing press was the expanded possibilities
for academic inquiry. By the rnid-ﬁfteenth century, the diffusion of the Greek originals
and the discovering of lost sources, such as Archimedes, promoted the reconnection with
antiquity’s efforts to discover the mysteries of the physical world. Not only did ancient
works enjoy increased circulation, but scientiﬁc literature was also being printed in

English, French, Italian, and Spanish rather than only in academic Latin. “Science

60

became public like never before,” writes Boorstin (1983, p. 517). With new tools and
rediscovered scientiﬁc treatises in hand, scholars resumed old problems as well as
explored new ones. For example, Copernicus proposed a heliocentric model of the
universe as a solution to the inaccuracies of Julian Calendar. Up until this point, the
acceptable model was the infamous Ptolemic universe, which found the earth at the
universe’s center, surrounded by various spheres that moved the stars westward around
the earth and the planets and Sun eastward. In De revolutionibus, Copernicus posited but
did not prove a new model for the universe that placed the Sun at its center. His work
was only conceptual in that it was not based on new data, and in many ways paid homage
to ancient astronomy. This has prompted some to suggest the Copernicus was a
conservative revolutionary whose work should not mark the beginning of modern
astronomy. “The key to understanding Copemicus’s life and his work,” write McClellan
and Dom (1999), “comes with the recognition that he was the last of the ancient
astronomers, not the ﬁrst of the modems” (p. 208). But in those that followed, such as
Johann Kepler, we see the evidence of the dramatic shift of scientiﬁc culture.

Kepler’s scholarly endeavors embody many of the subtle shifts in scientiﬁc work.
In his ﬁrst great work Mysterium Cosmographicum in 1596, Kepler sought to conﬁrmed
Copernican astronomy through the rhetoric of the ancients. He observed that the
Coperincian model for the universe offered one less planet (ﬁve instead of six) because
the moon would no longer qualify as a planet if the Sun were the universe’s center.
Kepler argued that this change is harmonious with God’s fundamental order of the
universe. Because there existed only ﬁve regular geometric solids, these solids must

deﬁne the space between the six planets. “Like Copernicus before him, Kepler had drunk

61

deeply at the spring of Renaissance neoplatonism, and imbibed its principle that he
universe is constructed according to geometric principles,” writes Westfall (1977, p. 4).
As a young scientist, Kepler relied on geometric symmertry and platonic solids to guide
to inform his scientiﬁc belief. Writing to Galielo, Kepler drew inspiration from “Plato
and Pythagoras, our true preceptors” (Tamas, 1991, p. 256). However, his later works
indicate a change in position about the source of scientiﬁc knowledge and scholarly
inspiration.

In Astrononmia Nova (1609), Kepler moved away from the perfect circles and
geometric modeling of neoplatonism, and instead proposed a more machine-like model of
the universe. He revised Mysterium Cosmographicum in 1621 to reﬂect a less animistic
explanation of the universe by modifying his terminology for the power that drew large
planets into orbit. Originally, he referred to the Sun’s power as anima matrix,” a “motive
soul” which compelled the order of the universe. In his second edition, he replaced
anima matrix with vis or “force” (Westfall, 1977).

In the seventeenth century, the machine model became popular in the thinking
because of devices like the clocks affected the way in which scholars and scientist viewed
the world. The machines began to function symbolically as models for human behavior,
organization, and life (Pacey, 1990). Pacey argues that “[The Machine] had become a
model of the good organization, and in addition, was being used as a tool for the
regulation of organizations, as working hours were increasingly deﬁned by the clock.
Even an army’s drill in marching or ﬁring might be done to time” (p. 100). Tamas

(1991) reminds us that the modern view of the universe is one of a machine, “a self-

62

contained mechanism of force and matter, devoid of goals or purpose, bereft of
intelligence or consciousness, its character fundamentally alien to that of man” (p. 326).

The machine as a model for understanding our world certainly has currency
today, as evidenced through popular phrases: effective entities run like clockwork; we
want our organizations to work like a well-oiled machine; we put the wheels in motion;
when things get messed up, something threw a wrench in the monkey-works. These
modern colloquialisms reﬂect an understanding of the universe that ﬁnds its roots during
the Scientiﬁc Revolution. They also reﬂect the cultural dependence humans developed
for machines. Associated with the rise of printing was the broadening of academic
inquiry, creating a new scientiﬁc mindset that encouraged human beings to place their
faith in tools rather than mystic forces. Scientiﬁc thinking saturated the market of ideas,
affecting a wide-range of disciplines. In continue tracing the genealogy of
representational media by discussing the methods of science and the science of sorting.
A Method for Science

Kepler’s scholarship signiﬁes the shift in scientiﬁc work. Gradually, scientists
looked less to the observations of the ancients for insight, and more to the natural world.
“The progressive forces of the seventeenth century came to see as mistaken the
preoccupation of medieval natural philosophers with the works of the ancients, especially
Aristotle, and also with the Bible, as the sources of scientiﬁc knowledge,” notes
Chalmers (1978, p. 1). In the place of the sacred texts of the Bible or the prestigious
Writings of Aristotle was a revered process, what we commonly call the scientiﬁc

method. Bacon’s Novum Organum gave the emerging scientiﬁc community a

Standardized method to conduct their work. Rather observing nature as it presents itself,

63

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science was seen as the active, highly political, and power driven control of the natural
environment by the experimenter. Science found its new root in data: rather than ﬁtting
observational data into a world view, as many medieval scholars had done, the new guard
like Galileo practiced an early form of grounded theory in which they developed
scientiﬁc principles which ﬁt the data. As Foucault (1973) explains in The Order of
Things, this was not always the case:

Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in

the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided

exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play
of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible, and controlled the art of

representing them (p. 17).

Less often did scientists and scholars engage in analogous thinking, in which they
searched for meaningful relationships in nature with “plants holding within their stems
the secrets that were of use to man” (Foucault, 1973, p. 17). Rather, the attention of the
broader scientiﬁc community turned away from ﬁnding connections to the past to
building a framework for scholarship in the future.

Sorting, Organizing, Naming, and Arranging

As many have noted, advancements in representational technology (the printing
press), instruments of investigation (microscope, telescope, thermometer, barometer), and
method of research (scientiﬁc method) did fuel a broad increase in scientiﬁc research and
activity. Observational data ﬁ'om the natural world grew rapidly, yet new information
did not directly mean an increase in knowledge. What science initially lacked were
effective methods to organize information, though it was not from a lack of effort.

Konrad Gesner (1516-1565) produced seventy volumes over the course of thirty years,

detailing every conceivable subject. Yet, such efforts were reliant on an alphabetic

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arrangement, which would understandably vary, depending on the language of the
catalogue. Thus, naturalists needed a means by which they could name plants and
animals independent of the vernacular. Without a new organizational scheme, it would
be difﬁcult for scientists scattered around Europe and elsewhere to collaborate and build
off each other’s ideas. The solution to this dilemma was provided by two great
systematizers — Ray and Linnaeus.

The combinatory effects of Ray and Linnaeus’ work would be the production of a
comprehensive systema naturae, an organizational scheme for the botany and zoology.
Ray’s contribution was his development of the concept of species, “a set of individuals
who give rise through reproduction to a new individuals similar to themselves” (Boorstin,
1983, p. 434). Linnaeus added to Ray’s species the category of genus to form a universal
binomial system for naming plants and animals. Recognizing the inherent problems in
grounding his work in any of the national European languages, Linnaeus revived the use
of Latin for an international naming system moving on to provide labels for all ﬁfty-nine
hundred known species during his time. Now, scientists could name the parts of the
natural “machine.” On this surface this may appear to be a rather mundane
accomplishment, but Linnaeus created a robust framework to classify and organize the
ever growing body of scientiﬁc knowledge. This prompted some to declare, “Deus
creavit, Linnaeus disposui ” or “God created, Linnaeus classiﬁed” (Boorstin, 1983).

Linnaeus and Ray served as early organizers of scientiﬁc information. What

followed their work was centuries of effort in providing structure and order to the
gr OWing body of scientiﬁc work. As Pickston (2001) explains, the early modern period is

characterized by 'natural history' (description, classiﬁcation, display), the nineteenth

65

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century is characterized by 'analysis' (mechanical abstraction, measurement, reduction to
elements), which is the again succeeded by systematically innovative ’ experimentalism ’
(more and more laboratories, synthesis). Sorting, organizing, and classifying extend to
human subjects as well. Through his work, Foucault develops a vocabulary to describe
the categorization of human subjects. For Foucault, dividing practices were instrumental
in the creation of human subjects. Dividing practices form subjects by division,
separating one classiﬁed group from another, such as the sane and the mentally ill, the
sick and healthy, and the criminal and the law abiding. More than creating a sorting
mechanism for the classiﬁcation of human subjects, dividing practices establish dominant
discourses or norms by which human behavior is judged. Through time and scientiﬁc
authority, such discourses are taken for granted as “natural” divisions within human
behavior, and internalized in human perspective (for more detail, see Chapter 4). The
utility of dividing practices are no more evident than in the activities of doctors and
scientists in the eighteenth century.

In the development of modern medicine in the eighteenth century, doctors
“hierarchized” disease into families, genera, and species. Rather than relying on old
myths and the language of fantasy, the emerging modern medical community described
human health with “qualitative precision.” Through the similarity of diseases, doctors
leveraged an expanding medical vocabulary to provide a rational order to the study and
treatment of illness. Employing what Foucault (1994a) described as a medical “gaze,”

physicians were encouraged to “abstract” the patient; that is, to separate those symptoms
Of a disease that necessarily accompanied it from those that were “accidental,”

“fortuitous,” or “depend on the temperament and age of the patient” (p. 8). The

66

 

 

 

 

 

organization of medicine and disease indicated that not only would lower animals and
plants be classiﬁed, sorted, and made subjects of scientiﬁc inquiry (as in the work of Ray
and Linnaeus), but the human beings as well. Modern medical discourse created a
“Western man [who] could constitute himself in his own eyes as an object of science, he
grasped himself within his own language, and gave himself, in himself and by himself, a
discursive existence, only in the opening created by his own elimination...” writes
Foucault (1994a, p. 197) in The Birth of the Clinic. The birth of the medical clinic
marked the settlement of the human subject as the ﬁnal frontier for scientiﬁc, mechanistic
thinking. For Foucault, “it is understandable, then, that medicine should have had such
importance in the constitution of the sciences of man — an importance that is not only
methodological, but ontological, in that it concerns man’s being as an object of positive
knowledge” (p. 197).

Foucault’s work reveals that scientiﬁc classiﬁcation, subjectiﬁcation, and
objectiﬁcation applied to not only plants, animals, elements, but also to human beings as
well. We all have become data. Through systems of scientiﬁc knowledge, individuals
have been deﬁned and divided, and the long term accumulation of the organization of
humanity has produced enduring existing social structures. Humans are active
participants in their own categorization. These structures develop social expectations
through which people deﬁne themselves through a process of normalization, the
categorization of humans “in ﬁnely graded and measurable intervals around a norm.”
Categorical thinking was created by humans for humans. Those that deviate from norms

are classiﬁed as “anomalies” to the “social body” and are subject to “corrective

technologies” such as schools, prisons, and mental hospitals (Schillo & Thompson, 2003,

67

p. 2991). As the modern era matured, humanity had categorized much of the life on
planet earth, and even turned its scientiﬁc gaze inward, categorizing the thoughts,
feelings, and emotions of the soul.
From Classification to Industrialization

In several ways, the new emphasis on the classiﬁcation of knowledge is not
surprising. As mentioned in the preceding section, there was a practical necessity for
taxonomical thinking. The intensity of scientiﬁc research had increased through the
Scientiﬁc Revolution, and one of the results of this sustained increase in scientiﬁc
activity was the birth of the “scientist.” Before this time, those interested in science were
the same scholars who held passions in a variety of ﬁelds. The Scientiﬁc Revolution
offered the whole groups of men who would assume the label of “scientist.” Not content
to work in isolation, these scientists organized themselves socially forming broad
scientiﬁc organizations. “On the ground once trod by prophets an organized church now
stood,” writes Westfall (1977, p. 105). In order for international scientiﬁc communities
to ﬂourish, knowledge needed some organization. Standardized cataloguing and labeling
was a “natural” taxonomy for the knowledge in the centuries that followed Gutenberg.
The book itself was well inclined to this organizing principle, as the development of the
index accompanied the development of standardized print. Hierarchical thinking seemed
congruent with scientiﬁc thinking organized by Bacon. Cataloguing also draws
inspiration from mechanistic thinking. With increasing regularity, scientists began to
think of the world as a system of machines. By describing “life” by its parts was

harmonious with the machine thinking that took root in the sixteenth century.

68

 

 

 

Yet Foucault argues that sorting, organizing, and classifying are always acts of
power, never a neutral or “natural” enterprise. So while the book (and the tide of
scientism associated with the rise of print) might have been well-adapted to the hierarchy
of the index, these organizational schema are not without power or politics. No
organizational scheme escapes the grid of power relations, even the relative absence of
organization. Freeman (1973) ampliﬁes this position in her classic text on “The Tyranny
of Structurelessness.” Set in the context of the women’s liberation movement, Freeman
shows that “structurelessness” is “organizationally impossible” and that while structures
may be “ﬂexible. . .varying over time. . . [and] unevenly distribute tasks, power and
resources over the members of the group,” they are not absent. There is no politically
neutral organizational structure just as there is no “‘objective’ news story, ‘value-free’
social science, or a ‘free’ economy.” Power pulses through every part the mesh of
people, information, ideas, and institutions. In other words, factors of techo-scientiﬁc
development are ambiactional, acting as environing spheres.

This perspective on power, structure, and network relations was far from the
dominant view as the world pondered the rise of scientiﬁc culture; rather, at the dawn of
the Industrial Revolution, science and society had grown to accept a “systems” approach
to organizing and arranging knowledge, one that viewed knowledge as neutral non-power
laden pieces that could be assembled into a working natural machine. What started in the
scientiﬁc community spread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to all of society
through the Industrial Revolution. Unlike the Scientiﬁc Revolution, which transformed
ways of thinking about the world but not the lived experience of most people, the

Industrial Revolution radically transformed the lives of many people — both the poor and

69

the elite. The Industrial Revolution offers four deﬁning features (McCellan & Dom,
1999): (1) New energy sources that fueled industrial development (coal powered smelting
of iron; solved timber famine) (2) New organization of labor in the factory system (wage
labor, rigid hierarchies of supervisors governing workers, the clock as a management
devise) (3) New means of ﬁnancing industrial development (private banks emerged to
fund industrialization) (4) Ideological changes commonly associated with
industrialization (the grth of urban areas and a non-agrarian working class, class
conﬂict). The Industrial Revolution represents a shift in economic, social, and political
activity, not only in what was produced, but perhaps more importantly, how it was
produced.

The mechanization and industrialization common to the period from 1750-1900
changed the face of Europe and some of its colonies. It is difﬁcult to ﬁnd a segment of
this new “modern” life that was not affected by the industrialization. This era brought
railroad transportation, steel buildings and ships, affordable and available clothing, the
telegraph, electricity, photography and Kodak’s camera, sewing machines, Bell’s
telephones, Edison’s carbon-ﬁlament lamp, the gas engine, the typewriter, electric power,
hydroelectric power, the automobile, radio, and human ﬂight — all before 1900. Unlike
the academic advances of the Renaissance and Scientiﬁc Revolution, the Industrial
Revolution produced effects that were felt by each person in modern countries. Science
and technology clearly were at the core of modern life, but the glory of technological
living was due a difﬁcult twist.

From the Ashes: A New Problem of Representation

70

 

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By providing a moderately detailed review of some of the developments
following the birth of print media in the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, I am
neither suggesting that (1) these conditions were singularly determined by movable type
and standard print, nor that (2) these events inextricably led to the lntemet, on whose
threshold we now stand. I only intend to suggest that the inﬂuence of print media was
felt in the centuries that follow, and quite necessarily, this comes to play in the story of
the Intemet’s development. A genealogy is the story of a family’s history, and a
genealogy of representational media should trace the bloodlines of the lntemet to its
predecessor, the printing press. This connection is described presently.

The political and moral failings that contributed to World War I and II seeded a
wide-spread pessimism in some philosophical and creative communities. Many scholars
and popular writers became disenchanted with the problems of modernity, particularly
the effects of industrialization and technology. For many, the promise of science to bring
progress was largely hollow. By the summer of 1945, the world had suffered through its
second horriﬁc global war in less than thirty years, culminating in the grim realization of
atomic weaponry. It is no wonder that critics such as Adomo, Horkheimer, Ellul, and
Marcuse found so much so troubling in the dawning technological condition. How could
anyone be optimistic toward technology when so many had suffered at its hands?

The inhumane events of the two great wars were similar to those of the great
plague in that both were difﬁcult to explain, caused a tremendous loss of life, and created
an atmosphere of regret, despair, and angst. Yet, the atrocities of the great wars were
vastly different because they were a deliberate disaster created by humans for humans;

Whereas the Plague was a random, accidental, biological epidemic. Not surprisingly, the

71

 

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World Wars’ misapplication of technology created a general distrust and pessimism
toward technology which was reﬂected in much of the media from the 19303-19503
(though one can point to Mary Shelly’s (1818) Frankenstein as an early example of a
story warning of the problems of industrialization and modernity). Austrian director Fritz
Lang’s silent ﬁlm Metropolis (1927) is a futuristic science-ﬁction story set in the year
2026. In Lang’s future, residents of a large city state (Metropolis) live in a segregated
modern dytopia, one in which the mass of workers toil for the elite of the city, the
planners and thinkers who enjoy prosperity and material privilege. Literary works such
as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953),
and George Orwell’s 1984 (1948) offered vivid dystopias depicting the dangers of
modernization that still capture our attention today. Even fantasy literature contained
more subtle, but ﬁrm rebukes of man’s machines. J .R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the
Rings contains strong admonitions against the failings of modernity, technology, and
science through his characterization of evil. In Tolkien’s tale, the enemies of the human
race, the Orc, destroy the natural beauty of Middle Earth in their pursuit of weapon
development. Tolkien’s friend and fellow fantasy author, CS. Lewis (1956), also frames
his most inﬂuential work, The Chronicles of Narnia, around a struggle against evil that
would subjugate Narnia through a technological industrialization. In the ﬁnal book of the
series, The Last Battle, an unlikable, greedy ape named Shift sells his fellow Namian
animals into forced labor. In his explanation to the newly enslaved talking beasts, Shift
delivers a cold, paternalistic vision for a new Narnia:
“There! You see!” said the Ape. “It’s all arranged. And all for your own good.

We’ll be able, with the money you earn, to make Narnia a country worth living in.
There’ll be oranges and bananas pouring in — and roads and big cities and schools

72

 

and offices and whips and muzzles and saddles and cages and prisons — oh

everything” (p. 685).

Shift exchanged the animal’s freedom for an industrial makeover of Narnia, a
type of “progress” for which Lewis held particular disdain. The cantankerous Ape’s
cruel vision for Narnia’s industrial reshaping led to the downfall of this bucolic world,
and also served as Lewis’ warning against the dangers of modern alienation and
mechanization in post-WWII industrial development. If we take the examples shared
here as representative of the post-War zeitgeist, then greatly diminished is humanity’s
faith in itself, the notion of progress, and hope for the future. These were also causalities
of the great Wars. Pessimism toward technology and science permeated post-war
academic sensibilities, deﬂating the longstanding optimism toward the sciences,
exempliﬁed by Alexander Pope’s trope: “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God
said, ‘Let Newton be,’ and all was light.”

Given the atrocities that many of these thinkers observed or experienced during
this time, they were certainly justiﬁed in their moral outrage and provided ﬁtting
commentary about the dangers of technology. Yet, the magnitude of suffering that World
War I and II introduced to the world overshadowed another problem, much more benign
and subtle. While the World Wars stand as enduring illustrations of modernity’s failings,
these events also accelerated the growth of scientiﬁc knowledge in the world. With
extensive research being performed by so many across this country and the rest of the
World, a rising sea of information grew. Few during this time recognized the challenge of

the new tide of information; yet, one commentator, Vannevar Bush, not only recognized
the problem, but also anticipated a solution ﬁfty years in the making.

Bush ’3 Problem

73

 

Vannevar Bush was the director of the Office of Scientiﬁc Research and
Development for the United States and was responsible for coordinating the research
activities of over 6,000 scientists across the United States during World War 11. At the
conclusion of WWII, Bush (1945) published a prescient article entitled, “What We May
Think” in which Bush gives his answer to the question: what lies next for American
scientists? For years, the American scientiﬁc community had been solely focused on
using science to develop technologies, such as radar, equipment, and weaponry to win the
War. The War gave clear priorities and direction to research, and with the War won,
many of these scientists would be able to take up a new direction in research. What
would be next? Bush’s answer is surprising, for he recognized a growing problem in the
scientiﬁc community was how to manage, or more accurately leverage, the ever-growing
body of knowledge:

But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as

specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the ﬁndings and

conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot ﬁnd
time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes
increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is
correspondingly superﬁcial.
Bush recognized that the next great challenge for science was how to reinvent its
intellectual infrastructure. Since the Scientiﬁc Revolution, humankind had steadily
expanded its understanding of the natural world and cosmos. With each passing century,
science improved its methods, scope of research, and results. And while knowledge
about the world had rapidly changed since the days of Descartes, our method for storing
and organizing the information did not. As Bush (1945) laments:
Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research

are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their
purpose. . . .Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a

74

 

generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of
grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being
repeated all about us, as truly signiﬁcant attainments become lost in the mass of
the inconsequential. . .The summation of human experience is being expanded at a
prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze
to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-
rigged ships.
For Bush, the scientiﬁc community had to address this troubling bottle neck.
World War II had accelerated the pace and direction of research, and galvanized the
scientiﬁc community into a more cohesive form. Yet, the rapid growth of knowledge
production was limited by the lack of infrastructure in knowledge distribution. For
almost ﬁve-hundred years, humanity had relied on the Gutenberg’s movable type and
cheap costs of production to distribute knowledge and research through books. But the
world had grown immensely since the days of Gutenberg in almost every imaginable
way. The world which Gutenberg occupied was far different than the industrialized one
Bush experienced. Man’s (2002) description of Mainz, Germany — the town in which
Gutenberg lived for part of his life — illustrates how different the world was in 1400 A.D.:
“. .. horses vie with cows for street space, pigs and sheep mix with carts and people. The
drains are sewage ditches running beside main streets roughly paved with planks: there
would be no true paving-stones in Mainz for a century. Alleys are all mud and dung. For
a new arrival, it seems chaos” (p. 10). It seems peculiar to read this description of the
state of Europe at the time of Gutenberg. So much had changed from Gutenberg’s
Germany in 1400 to Bush’s America of 1945; yet, one thing that remained constant was
the means by which humans distributed information. Print media via movable type still

dominated the economy of ideas, as it had done for almost ﬁve-hundred years. Sure,

Other media formats had already captured the attention of the public (radio, television,

75

movies), but print media — in the form of books, newspapers, and journals — still deﬁned
academic and scientiﬁc discourse in 1945, as they had for hundreds of years. Cheap
production of the codex book “tilled” the ground for the Scientiﬁc Revolution, and
continued to meet the needs of a changing academic landscape for hundreds of years.
Over the centuries, the form of presentation of text remained basically idle, while the rate
of information expansion and the global capacity to grow ideas steadily grew. The
demands of the scientiﬁc community taxed this current system of distribution.
Apparently, humanity had ﬁnally surpassed the capacity of Gutenberg’s galaxy (to
borrow a phrase from Marshall McLuhan). Put another way, the problem with the book
was that it was too successful.
Constructure

The problem the world faced was not simply a technological one; otherwise some
innovator would have created better books. Rather, at the heart of Bush’s dilemma was a
constructural problem: print media had difficulty supporting the kind of interactions
with knowledge that the scientiﬁc community required. What Bush was struggling
against was the limitations of periodicals and books to fully support how scientists would
need to think and work in the future. The title of his work, “How We May Think,”
suggests that he recognized a difference between human being’s associative approach to
thought and the linear organization of print (Bolter, 2001). As Bush writes, “With one
item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of
thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain”
(emphasis added). Bush realized that they were knowledge workers with inadequate

tools.

76

Bush was not the only scholar to lament the inadequacies of modem means of
organizing information, nor was he the ﬁrst. Several years prior to World War II, British
science-ﬁction writer H.G. Wells (193 7) expressed a similar frustration with the lag
between the production of knowledge and its organization in “World Brain: The Idea of
a Permanent World Encyclopaedia.” Appealing to an underlying faith and technology,
Wells described that though the amount of “knowledge” produced in the world had
increased dramatically since the eighteenth century, “contemporary encyclopaedias are
still in the coach-and-horses phase of development, rather than in the phase of the
automobile and the aeroplane.” In Wells’ view, “both the assembling and the distribution
of knowledge in the world at present are extremely ineffective” and what a civilized
world would need was “a new world organ for the collection, indexing, summarizing and
release of knowledge. . .” The similarities between Wells and Bush are striking, but the
reason why Wells is a subplot to the story of Vannevar Bush and not the other way
around (even though Wells came ﬁrst) lies in how these intellectuals framed their
solutions. For Wells, the production of information overwhelmed current efforts to
maintain encyclopedias. His solution was to leverage new microﬁlm technology to
create a “Permanent World Encyclopaedia, so compact in its material form and so
gigantic in its scope and possible inﬂuence.” Because microﬁlm was small and easily
reproduced, copies of Wells’ encyclopedia could be housed anywhere and thus
maintained by multiple experts around the world. Wells’ dreamed of a global index of
information, a superstructure of information, one that “few people as yet, outside the
world of expert librarians and museum curators and so forth, know how manageable

well-ordered facts can be made, however multitudinous, and how swiftly and completely

77

even the rarest visions and the most recondite matters can be recalled, once they have
been put in place in a well-ordered scheme of reference and reproduction.” The
Permanent World Encylopaedia was an encyclopedia on steroids, large yet nimble. Wells
dreamed in the language of his present reality like those who would describe ﬁlm as
pictures in motion (motion picture) or television as cinema on the small screen
(McLuhan, 2003). His vision reminds me of similar missteps in technology forecasting,
such as the pronouncement in the St. Louis Globe Democrat (1888) about how electricity
would be supplied:

The time is not far distant when we will have wagons driving around with casks

and jars of stored electricity, just as we have milk and bread wagons at present.

The arrangement will be of such a character that houses can be supplied with

enough stored electricity to last twenty-four hours. (Galston, 2004, p. 60).

This newpaper and Wells suffered from similar ailments; neither could describe
the future world outside the language of their present context. Wells could not imagine a
textual network that broke the mold of topical organization, and it is here where Bush’s
forecast takes a radical departure. Like Wells, Bush also saw an information network of
a global scale; however, the fundamental organizing principle for Bush’s system was not
the index (a concept familiar to since the Middle Ages), but the what he called memex.

Bush’s (1945) answer to the problem was to forecast a technology called memex,
“a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and
which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and ﬂexibility.”
He argued that by storing information on microﬁlm, scientists could devise a system in
which users could easily look up information by typing queries on a keyboard, and then

create a “trail” of information which builds connections between multiple sources of

information. Writing in 1945, Bush anticipates the need for what Ted Nelson

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(1965/2003) eventually termed as “hypertext,” a set of relations between symbols and
ideas, one that is more associative than hierarchical. The world of information had
become increasingly detailed, comprehensive, and complex, but the means by which
humans represented information remained static and unable to fully meet the demands of
scientiﬁc discovery. Print media could only parrot the interconnected nature of
knowledge, and television and radio were built on information templates that were far too
reductive (Gitlin, 2002). Bush’s call should not be read as one for a particular
technology, but for a particular medium with a particular relationship between
representation and epistemology. While Wells sought to “store, classify, and index,”
Bush’s solution was to “store, recall, and recombine” (Carr, 1999).

Bush described the need for a new mode of representing knowledge, one not as
easily supported in print literature. With advancements in how humans preserve
information — from clay tablets, to continuous scrolls, to the codex book — came various
epistemological templates. How we record information inﬂuences not only what
information is preserved, how much, and how it can be accessed, but also how we
construct and think about knowledge. As Derry and Williams (1961) describe, “The
development of writing has at all times been greatly inﬂuenced by the nature of the
material available and the means of marking it: even today blackboard and chalk present
different problems of calligraphy from those of paper and pen” (p. 216). I prefer to
describe the relationship between representation and epistemology as one of
constructure, a portmanteau combing “construction” and “representation.” Constructure
can be deﬁned as the inﬂuence of representational structure (consisting of both medium

type and the informational taxonomy) on the construction of knowledge.

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Constructure and Print

Looking back at the story of Gutenberg’s development of movable type, we see a
number of examples of the varying degrees of constructure. For example, when
exploring those factors that inﬂuenced the revolutionary success of movable type in
Europe, historians generally agree that Europe’s alphabetic language systems were
instrumental in creating an efﬁcient, scalable model of print reproduction. Because of its
technological advantage for printing, the alphabetic form of representation of language
created epistemic differences — those that supported new forms of print literature (essays,
novels) and diversiﬁed the kinds of knowledge that were reproduced. Because it became
signiﬁcantly less expensive to print text, the barrier for particular knowledge to ﬁnd their
way into the public domain lessened. Thus, the differences in pictorial versus
alphabetical systems of representation affected the degree of knowledge proliferation.
They demonstrate the inexorable link between how we represent and what we represent.

The informational taxonomy of particular media reveal a different dimension of
the constructure connection. Movable type allowed for the standardization of texts. No
longer was each copy of a text unique in the format and layout of its contents; rather, the
printing press made it possible to precisely reproduce a text page-for-page.
Consequently, authors and master printers created the index to organize a text, something
that the irregularities associated with scribal reproduction did not allow (Man, 2002).
The index provided a template for structuring knowledge — one that is hierarchical, linear,
and well-deﬁned. As Bolter describes, print media’s hierarchy is found “in the form of
paragraph, sections, and chapters” and can be thought of as “an attempt to impose order

on verbal ideas that are always prone to subvert that order” (p. 33). This form of

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representation has been the standard-bearer for categorical organization for ﬁve-hundred
years; however, its limitations have been apparent for some time now. As Poole.
commented in the nineteenth century, “The fatal defect of every classiﬁed arrangement is
that nobody understands it except the person who made it and he is often in doubt”
(Wheatley, 1878, p. 55)
A Growing Need for Hypertext

What makes Bush’s presentation for the need of a hypertext-like system so unique
is that he wrote it decades before the lntemet could even partially fulﬁll his vision. Yet,
Bush was far from the only voice calling for a different relationship between medium and
knowledge. There exists evidence beyond Bush’s work that a transformation in
humanity’s relationship with information was underway for much of the later half of the
20th century. In fact, one can ﬁnd evidence for hypertext in a variety of sources, both in
and outside academics. In 1950, The New York Times describes a technology called
“Doken,” one that is similar to an lntemet search engine. Doken was a theoretical
machine that could speed read contents of printed text, scanning the entire contents of the
Library of Congress in less than ten seconds (O'Donnell, 1998). Ted Nelson and his
colleagues began discussing hypertext in the 19603, far earlier than most users of the
lntemet likely imagine. But perhaps the most surprising location for hypertext evidence
is not in the discussion of academics and technology visionaries but in print literature.
Imitating hypertext, ﬁctional works containing examples of discursive, non-linear stories
began to emerge with greater frequency in the twentieth century. Julio Cortazar’s (1966)
novel Hopscotch features 155 short chapters that can be read non-linearly, as do works by

Umberto Eco, Milan Kundera and others. For children, a series of books ﬁrst published

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in the late 19703 called Choose Your Own Adventure offered young readers open-ended
stories in which they are cast as the protagonist of the stories. Readers decide what
action a main character should take from a set of choices, and then the story changes
based on those decisions. For example, the ﬁrst book in this long-nmning series was The
Cave of Time (1979). In this book, the reader is cast into the text through the second
person:

You are hiking in Snake Canyon when you ﬁnd yourself lost in the strange, dimly

lit Cave of Time. Gradually you can make out two passageways. One curves

downward to the right; the other leads upward to the left. It occurs to you that the
one leading down may go to the past and the one leading up may go to the future.

Which way will you choose? If you take the left branch, turn to page 20. If you

take the right branch, turn to page 61. If you walk outside the cave, turn to page

21. Be careful! In the Cave of Time you might meet up with a hungry

Tyrannosaurus Rex, or be lured aboard an alien spaceship!

Thus, a child could read the book many times, but never read the same story
twice. In many ways, the child co-authors the story, “no longer a consumer, but producer
of the text,” an experience in which reading is not merely a referendum (Barthes, 1974, p.
4). A few original drinkers like Barthes and Foucault anticipate the dissolution of the
reader/author divide in literature. In a particularly prescient work, Foucault’s (1976) The
Archeology of Knowledge describes the organization and structure of traditional text as
hypertextual: “frontiers of a book are never clear-cut,” because “it is caught up in a
system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a
network. . .”(p. 23, as cited in Landow (1997)). Landow’s use of Foucault gives
recognition to the fact that within forms of representation, alternative informational
relationships can be supported. Foucault’s description of a book as a node in a network is

but one example. When we consider Wheatly’s conceptual understanding of an index,

we may ﬁnd another. For Wheatly (1878) recognized that the index is not merely a

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organizing principle of a book, but “an indicator or pointer out of the position of required
information, such as the ﬁnger-post on a high road, or the index ﬁnger on the human
hand” (p. 7). An index and hypertext point to other resources (though they do so in
different ways). Wheatly’s description could lead to a new deﬁnition for hypertext — an
in-text index.

The artists creating these works of literature targeted different audiences, but
demonstrated the artiﬁciality of the author and the presented text. They may have
composed hypertext-like works for a variety of reasons, but in doing so, they also
documented the rising attention the academic and literary community gave to decentered,
multlinear forms of representation. Undoubtedly, hypertext as a form of representation
presents a different relationship with knowledge. As Burbules and Callister (2000)
comment, “. . .hypertext is more than just a new way of inﬂuencing existing information;
it inﬂuences the kinds of information it organizes” (p. 43). However, it would appear that
the process is also reversible; that is, new ways of thinking of information and knowledge
can precede changes in how we represent it. From the work of Bush to the hypertext-
ﬁction writers of the late 19808, our world has slowly awoken to the possibilities of
another form of representation.

Actors of in the Drama of the Intemet’s Development

Evidence from the previous section indicates that the “hypertext way of thinking”
has been with society since well before the lntemet became the ubiquitous system it is
today. This shift in how we relate to information may have been brought about by the
rapid proliferation of information, at least according to Bush (1945) who states of

humankind: “He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his

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records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely
become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory.” Perhaps the
problem with the Gutenberg revolution was that it was too successful. By the mid-
twentieth century, Bush and others felt overwhelmed by the vast informational resources
published in print each year, and this created an anxious need for another revolutionary
step in representation. Humans needed to adapt to a new informational environment, just
as they had done in the Middle Ages.

This leads to a ﬁnal question for this chapter: what factors necessitated the
development of the lntemet? (This is different than asking which factors necessitated the
invention of the lntemet.) There is no simple formula for explaining technological
development, as illustrated by the extended case found in Gutenberg’s metal movable
type printing press. The Middle Ages were a divided age — a time period that offered
contradictory inﬂuences on innovation. In many ways, the Middle Ages were well-suited
for the development of movable type. The technological foundation for this innovation
were already ﬁrmly in place — screw-based presses, metal punches, alphabetic writing
systems, and so forth. But as the Gutenberg example demonstrates, sole technical
readiness is not the only requirement for a revolution in representation. The Middle Ages
were a time of representational crisis, in which the demands for a better form of
knowledge distribution than hand-copied books was mounting. Europe was ﬁnally
emerging from the challenges that beset the continent after the fall of the Roman Empire,
and was posed to advance their understanding of the world through a renewed
commitment to the sciences and the exploration of the world through the seas. With the

birth and development of the university, needs of the Roman Catholic Church for

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standard print resources, and basic caloric needs being met after the European
Agricultural Revolution from 1000-1500 A.D., one might very well expect the
development of the printing press. Yet, just prior to Gutenberg’s press in 1455, Europe’s
printed books would have ﬁt in a single wagon from that era (Man, 2002).

There seemed to be a market for printing, the need for printing, and the
opportunity for printing; yet, as I argued in the Chapter 2, medieval Europe was a curious
atmosphere for innovation. For most Europeans, the Agricultural Revolution that began
around 1000 was quite conservative in its social effects. The heavy plow and other
agricultural technologies reinforced the stratiﬁed feudal society, ensuring that the
majority of the European population remained in the peasantry. Though the Middle Ages
marked the development of seminaries and universities, a great majority of people of
Europe remained illiterate. Also, European society of the Middle Ages was still a largely
non-scientiﬁc culture. Mythic and mystic paradigms were prevalent, and the Church
exerted enormous inﬂuence on matters of science and state. Fear gripped the Europeans
of the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth century due to the mysterious movement of the Black
Plague. Such strife makes medieval Europe a curious ground for innovation.

These same patterns are visible in the rise of the lntemet. Like its predecessor
movable type, the lntemet could not have been created unless humans had already
developed the necessary technical foundation by manipulating silicon to make
processors, developed the personal computer, and connected the world through phone
lines. Often, “ofﬁcial” histories of the lntemet are little more than the history of

technical innovation in networking technology from the 19603 to the 19903. Yet,

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technological readiness alone is not the sole force behind the development of this
technology.

As in Gutenberg’s time, 20th century humanity was struggling with a signiﬁcant
gap between knowledge and representation, a constructural gap. The 20th century can
be characterized as one of immense change to the political, social, economic and cultural
landscape of our world. It has seen radical political transformation, sweeping social
movements, world wars, and now more recently, globalization. Writing at the end of the
century, Peter Drucker (1994) aptly captures the immense torrent of change as a force
that affects “work and work force, society and polity, are all, in the last decade of this
century, qualitatively and quantitatively different not only from what they were in the
ﬁrst years of this century but also form what has existed at any other time in history...”
(emphasis in original, p. 53). Due to the new-found economic, political, social, and
informational complexities, it is not surprising that a new relationship with knowledge by
way of a qualitative change in representation occurred.

So, one of the catalysts for the development of the printing press and the lntemet
is the signiﬁcant gap between new knowledge needs and the representational sensibilities
of the codex book. It is a constructural gap. Constructure is an important qualiﬁer to
this gap because it reminds us not to confuse a new method of representing knowledge as
only a new distribution system. In other words, the printing press did not merely
automate the jobs of the scribes, making the job of print reproduction easier but leaving
society unaffected. Rather, the act of mechanizing printing gave rise to new forms of
organizing information, such as the index, which in turn imposed a more hierarchical

understanding of knowledge for humanity. The lntemet embodies a new stage in

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representation not only because it makes information digital, but also that it allows for a
knowledge taxonomy that is far different from previous representational media.

The lntemet is a form of knowledge network that resists the imperative of a single
taxonomy such as the index; rather, the web favors a multiplicity of organizational
information schema, some of which are unique to the medium. For example, folksonomy
represents the small efforts of many to add organization to knowledge on the lntemet.
Unlike the taxonomy of an index, which is author centered and is necessarily centralized,
folksonomy is supported by many users “who are encouraged to assign freely chosen
keywords, typically referred to as ‘tags,’ to pieces of information or data...” (Wikipedia,
2006). Folksonomy is an open-source taxonomy, the reader’s taxonomy, the anti-
taxonomy. In the atmosphere of the Scientiﬁc Revolution and the modern era, only the
experts, the academic elite, could impose order on knowledge. It was the scientists and
researchers who categorized and classiﬁed. How ironic that in the most important
knowledge network in the world’s history, such standards are left open.

The popularity of folksonomy demonstrates that the index is an invented form of
categorizing knowledge that should not be considered as inevitable, irreplaceable, or
prestigious. Taxonomical characteristics are often particular to media, and inﬂuence how
we interact with the knowledge and information contained in the media. Thus, these
characteristics are an important component of constructure.

Other Factors of Development for the Internet

Both the printing press and the lntemet embody changes in the relationship

between knowledge and representation, and redeﬁned the epistemic possibilities. These

technologies arose at a time in which the gap between humanity’s knowledge needs and

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its current form of representation was widening. But like the printing press, the drama of
the Intemet’s development involves forces beyond those involving knowledge and
representation. The Internet did not burst upon a barren world, but rather a complex
ecology of political, economic, social, technological “scapes.” Appadurai (1993) deﬁnes
scapes as “dimensions of global cultural ﬂow,” each being ﬂuid, irregular, and
intertwined. Examples offered by Appadurai include the ethnoscape (landscape of
people), technoscape (global technology), ﬁnanscape (global capital), mediascape
(distribution of media), and ideoscape (distribution of ideology). It is through these
planes that Appadurai understands the complex social, political, and economic
interactions of a globalized world. For Appadurai, global ﬂows occur “in and through the
growing disjunctures” between these scapes (p. 224). Such a framework is useful to
understand the development of global phenomenon including the lntemet. Building on
Appadurai, I will conclude this chapter by exploring the inﬂuence of the ﬁananscape, or
ﬁnancial landscape, and what I call politicoscape, or political landscape. I begin with
former.

In many ways, the rapid expansion of the lntemet has been fueled by the interests
and activities of the market. From the mid-19903 to the turn of the century, the economic
enthusiasm toward the lntemet was unmatched. “During the dramatic lntemet-driven
boom of the 19903, Silicon Valley was described as the home of ‘the greatest-ever legal
creation of wealth in the history of the world,”’ writes Benner (2004, p. 174). Though
this enthusiasm would fade once the dot-com “bubble” burst in 2001, the Intemet’s
growth is certainly accelerated by its use by businesses around the world. Recent

statistics support this conclusion. In a recent US. Census Bureau report, we are told that

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almost a trillion dollars of manufacturing shipments in 2004 were initiated on the
lntemet; the lntemet sales of US merchant wholesalers massed to over 800 billion
dollars; and US. retail sales on the lntemet were over 70 billion dollars in 2004 ("US
Census Bureau Estats", 2006). Some early studies have also found that the lntemet has
increased “business productivity” through the reduction of transaction costs, increased
management efﬁciency, and increased competition from price transparency and
broadening markets for buyers and sellers take on productivity (Litan & Rivlin, 2001). It
should be noted that some economists have tempered such proclamations by arguing that
the world’s economic geography may be inﬂuenced by the lntemet, but not
revolutionized by it (Learner & Storper, 2001). Van Alstyne and Buckley (2004) recount
that while productivity stagnated throughout the 19803 and early 19903, it soared after the
rise of the lntemet, from 1993-2003. What recent economic studies reveal is that while
corporations did not call for the creation of a new global network for economic activity
like some in the scientiﬁc community did (Bush, Nelson, and others), the market mobbed
the lntemet once it became publicly visible in the early 19903. And as this chapter is
interested in technological development versus technological invention, origins do not tell
the whole story anyway. Since the release of Mosaic Web browser in 1994, the Intemet’s
economic importance has rapidly increased ("US Census Bureau Estats", 2006). And
like the printing press, the lntemet found a comfortable market in its early years. There is
little indication that this will change in the near future.

National governments, the principle members of the politicoscape, have been
particularly inﬂuential in shaping what the development of the lntemet. In their recent

book Who Controls the Internet?, Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith (2006) argue for the

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realization of a “bordered” lntemet. The lntemet has often been lauded as a
decentralized, libertarian paradise which would eventually undermine the heavy hand of
national governments, the “weary giants of ﬂesh and steel” (Barlow, 1996). Armed with
recent examples of China’s domestication of Google and France’s humbling of Yahoo,
Goldsmith and Wu argue that because users of the lntemet have a physical address in
addition to their IP address, governments have little trouble exacting control over
lntemet. What is surprising about Goldsmith and Wu’s claims is not that the lntemet is
bordered, but that the two law professors see advantage in this development. Goldsmith
and Wu argue that the Net should not be governed by one rule of law. As in the Yahoo
case, the French see a Nazi auction site as indefensible, while Americans view it as free-
speech. Neither proud nation will acquiesce to the other; however, recent lntemet
technologies that ﬁlter content by geographic region allow for many national Internets as
opposed to one global lntemet. For Wu and Goldsmith, it would appear that because of a
bordered lntemet, more people can have their Net and surf it too.

The take-away point for this chapter is the ample evidence that Goldsmith and
Wu provide of a legislatable lntemet erodes the commonly accepted position of
Rheinhold (2003), Reynolds (2006) and others who suggest that the lntemet is still very
much a network beyond the reach of government. It may be that as the lntemet continues
to mature, the extent of governmental control on the lntemet increases. A forthcoming
study produced by the free-lntemet advocacy group OpenNet Initative (ONI) details the
sophistication with which countries like Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Iran, Vietnam, Saudi
Arabia, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, and censorship pioneer China restrict access to the lntemet.

Techniques may range ﬁ'om the overt restriction of political and religious websites to

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cloak-and-dagger subterfuge in which governments sponsor “denial of service” attacks on
opposition party websites or replace “page blocked” with “page not found” warnings to
trick their citizens into believing that they are not being ﬁltered or monitored in their
usage (M. Anderson, 2006). It is hard to imagine the virtue in this, but such hegemony
only conﬁrms the enormous inﬂuence of governments in virtual spaces.

For some, governmental inﬂuence on the deve10pment of the lntemet can be seen
most explicitly in early predecessors of the lntemet, such as the United States' Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency's "ARPAnet," the ﬁrst packet-switching network.
Designed during the height of the Cold War in the 19603, some historians of the lntemet
argue that ARPAnet’s creation reﬂected the desire of the United States government for a
decentralized communication network that could withstand nuclear attack (Hafner &
Lyon, 1996; Poole, Schuyler, Senft, & Moschovitis, 1999; Sherman, 2003). Researchers
at the RAND Institute and DARPA recognized the problem with centralized military
"command and control" centers to coordinate national defense and nuclear arsenals is that
if eliminated, the national defense systems will be made inoperable. This created a
troubling incentive for cold war to escalate into hot war. The nation willing to strike ﬁrst
in a nuclear war could eliminate its adversary's potential for retaliation with its initial
strike. This scenario — one that was certainly hung over military and political officials in
the United States and the Soviet Union — gave rise to what one RAND researcher
described as "a dangerous temptation for either party to misunderstand the actions of the
other and ﬁre ﬁrst" (Hafner & Lyon, 1996, p. 55). Ironically, it was argued that the best
way to ensure peace would be to enhance military preparedness by decentralizing control

over national weapon systems across a broad, robust network of computers. Thus, many

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who have written about the history of the lntemet have concluded that the lntemet grew
out of such a need.

However intuitive this narrative about the relationship between the lntemet and
Cold War governments may be, there are many lntemet insiders who challenge the notion
that the lntemet was developed as a fail-safe network in a nuclear world. Those often
attributed for many of the early technical achievements making the lntemet possible,
including Bob Kahn, Bob Taylor, David Clark, and others, have contested the
relationship between their work and the military motivation for a decentralized electronic
network. In their account "A Brief History of the Internet," a large collection of lntemet
pioneers noted:

It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the

ARPAN ET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war.

This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure

voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Intemetting did

emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand

losses of large portions of the underlying networks. (Leiner etal., 2003)

When asked in an interview about the relationship of the lntemet to nuclear war,
lntemet pioneer Vinton Cerf also remarked, "The ﬁrst project that ARPA funded in wide
area computer networking was the ARPANET. It was often mistakenly given this
attribute of nuclear resilience. The fact is it was designed for resource sharing; it was
really to solve a problem that ARPA had when it was supporting computer science
research" (N EWs.com). Perhaps as we look at the development of the lntemet in the
context of the Cold War, we'cannot resist making the lntemet a solution to a military
problem. This activity may be best described through the language of narrative

psychologists — that of Bruner's (1991) “coherence by contemporaneity.” However,

tenuous the conceptualization of the lntemet as a fail-safe information network in a

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nuclear age may be, Cerfs words do reveal the desire of the government to form a robust
network for resource sharing, if only to make computer scientists more effective. If this
is the case, then the government has been involved in shaping the development of the
lntemet — Cold War or no Cold War.
Ambiactivity Revisited

Chapters 2 and 3 combine to offer a complicated story of technological
development through the examples of the printing press and the lntemet. Gutenberg’s
press offers an opportunity to explore the forces inﬂuencing the development of a
revolution in representation and the effects of this technology of the word on human life.
At this stage, the Internet only allows a discussion of the early forces of development and
its immediate effects. Both accounts, though separated by almost ﬁve-hundred years,
serve as examples of a non-linear conceptualization of the network of forces involved in
development — what I termed in Chapter 2 as “ambiactional,” or relations encircling,
encompassing, and environing elements. Ambiactivity is a reaction against the
visualization of inﬂuence vectors, one-directional, ﬁxed, forces of inﬂuence on
technology. Such thinking often leads to technological determinism, the idea that a
technology is the inevitable result of certain causal forces and through the logic of the
market, the best technology prevails. For example, common knowledge suggests that
consumers of nineteenth century America needed a more robust transportation system,
which necessitated the development of the automobile. Use of the automobile in turn
impacted human life in signiﬁcant ways. Many scholars have recognized the hollow
promise of technological determinism. “There is no natural law that the best standard

shall win -— QWERTY, Lotus 123, DOS, and VHS are often cited as examples in this

93

context,” writes Bowker and Leigh-Star (1999), “The standards that do win may do so for
a variety of other reasons; they build on an installed base, they had better marketing at the
outset, or they were used by a community of gatekeepers who favored their use” (p. 14).

Even if the trap of determinism is side-stepped, the linear conceptualization of
technological invention and development, which so heavily emphasizes vectors of
inﬂuence, is bound to several problems. Inﬂuence as vectors implies a geometry of
relationship in the form of A—B // B—A and with it, a symmetry of inﬂuence, chronology
of impact, and a host of other incompatible characteristics for exploring technological
development. Drawing back on the familiar example of the development of the
automobile, the would be: [past] human needs—cars // cars—human needs [future].

If understood properly, ambiactivity changes the nature of the conversation of
technology in three ways. First, it shifts the locus of attention of a technology from one
of invention to development. If forces affecting technological development are more like
orbs of inﬂuence than vectors, then it only makes sense that the inﬂuence of those forces
do not immediately disappear or drastically diminish upon the moment of invention.
Second, forces of inﬂuence are temporal, meaning their existence and impact are not
eternal. What may drive a technology into existence is not necessarily the same set of
forces that maintain it, shape it, or discard it. These ﬁrst two attributes necessitate the
third characteristic of ambiactivity, one that situates technological development in a
complex matrix of environing forces, impersonal, and yet, persistent.

Looking at the example of the printing press, there were a range of inﬂuences that
were instrumental to its birth, particularly religious, political, economic, and

constructural. These forces, as overlapping scapes, did not simply stop interacting

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together the moment Gutenberg ﬁnalized his metal-based, movable-type printing press.
Rather, they continued to push and pull with the technology as it developed from a single
press in a small European town to a form of media with global impact. Like Foucault’s
sense of power, these ambiactive forces are impersonal, dispersed, outside the control of
individuals, and omnipresent. They lack constancy and uniformity. Church, state, and
science did not conspire together to create a new medium of information that could
further the hierarchization of society; rather, through their use of print, the meaning of
print media was deﬁned. At some levels, the development of print media did extend
categorical thinking, making even the human being a point of data in scientiﬁc study. At
others, it reduced thick religious bureaucracy to the eventual priesthood of believers. In
the process, print media was instrumental in the reconﬁguration of not only the political
landscape of Europe, but also the relationship between Church and State. The orbs of
inﬂuence work on and through a technology, each other, and themselves.

In the Intemet’s case, ambiactional forces are even more environing than in the
case of print media. The sphere of commerce affects the Intemet’s growth, moving it in
one dirction, but at the same time, we ﬁnd other scopes such as the politicoscape that
push back against the free-commerce of the lntemet, as in the France versus Yahoo case.
The result of these orbs of inﬂuence is a confused, but dynamic entity in the lntemet.
And this says nothing about the inﬂuence of the people that use it the most, the
ethnoscape. A divided lntemet, one that offers a range of applications from ecommerce
to edemocracy, is the result of the interaction effects of these scapes. Just as the printing
press began as a technical accomplishment and grew into a new medium, the print

medium, the lntemet also follows a similar path, beginning as an experiment in

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engineering and now taking shape as hypermedia. The key to understanding such
developments lie in the collection of forces that shape them. These matrix of forces are

explored in more detail in the next chapter, which explores power relationships on the

lntemet.

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CHAPTER 4
THE DISCIPLINE OF KNOWLEDGE ON THE NET

Any sufﬁciently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke

Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufﬁciently advanced.
Gregory Benford

Throughout human history, it would seem that the activity of search has played an
important role. History books tell us of hunter-gathers, nomadic peoples, the age of
exploration, and the space race. We know the names of explorers, astronauts, sea
captains, and adventurers. The motivation for searching may have ranged between the
religious, the social, the economic, and even curiosity (It was reported that when a local
Indian official asked Vasco da Gama why he had traveled so far to come to India, the
Portuguese explorer replied, “Christians and spices”). While the motivations may vary
and its prominence is certainly not constant, the activity search has been an element of
importance for many human societies.

We ﬁnd that the activity of search has assumed a prominent role in the cultural
landscape once again. Rather than searching the open seas for what lies beyond the
horizon’s edge, we search the sea of information that is the lntemet. Not since the days
of an unmapped world and undiscovered continents have human beings been so involved
in searching and exploring an unfamiliar space. Once again, the human species ﬁnds
itself in the midst of a story of exploration, discovery, and global convergence. How
prominent has the search for relevant information become? Piper J affray estimates that
in 2003 the world conducted 550 million lntemet searches daily, with a growth rate of 10
to 20 percent per year (Battelle, 2005). More recently, Nielsen//NetRatings reported that

in 2005 over 55 billion lntemet searches were conducted in the United States alone

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(Bausch & Fan, 2006). While staggering, these numbers represent a small fraction of the
possible growth in the Internet search market. As of March of 2006, approximately 16%
of the world’s population has lntemet access (Stats, 2006). As more of the world’s
information ﬁnds its way into online spaces and penetration of the lntemet increases, the
centrality of the search as a regular activity of a knowledge society is a near certainty.
Clearly, such an activity is an important one and deserves the attention of the academic
community.

This chapter examines the nature of the search on the lntemet in three parts. First,
I explore the pressing need for search on the lntemet. The lntemet is the largest
information network in human history, and its size (not to mention rate of expansion)
requires search as a primary vehicle for locating unfamiliar information. Second, I
describe some of the unique problems in designing an effective search tool for the Web.
As an unbounded, vast information network, the lntemet poses many challenges to
effective searching through its size, document diversity, and rate of change. And third, I
explore the important philosophical and sociological implications of a knowledge
network driven by search. This will include a discussion of the two most popular
conceptualizations of power relations on the lntemet, the utopian-egalitarian perspective
and structural perspective. I then will offer a different account, a critical poststructural ,
perspective.

In this last section, I employ several Foucaultian ideas to describe the relationship
among Google, the information of the lntemet, and its users. Foucault saw knowledge
not as universal or ﬁxed, but as textual, situated, and culturally constructed. His

philosophical writings position truth as a product of knowledge and power in a circuit of

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exchange. I will examine the role the search engine may play in such a knowledge
circuit, but before this can happen, the necessary groundwork must be laid. I begin then
by asking: why is search so important to the lntemet?
The Need for Search

The lntemet is a system that is exceedingly efﬁcient at providing a platform for
ideas. Some estimate that in 2003 the Web contained over 167 terabytes of publicly
accessible information, with another 66,000-91,000 terabytes in information stored in
web-based databases. To put this in perspective, the print collections of the United States
Library of Congress consist of 10 terabytes ("How much information? 2003", 2003). To
be sure, the lntemet is large, and it is growing at a staggering rate due to its two basic
properties — decentralized design and open standards. For the most part, there are very
few barriers to publishing information on the Web. The lntemet lacks conventional
gatekeepers and hierarchical control common to other forms of publication. Properly,
many celebrate the lntemet as the archetype for diffuse networking, a crowning example
of a public good (Rheingold, 2003; Trippi, 2004). However, such a proliﬁc growth of
data from open publication has lead to a unique set of problems for lntemet users. The
problem with so much information from so many sources is that without some sort of
formal organization, it can become increasingly difﬁcult to connect the curious with the
answers they seek. Information and attention have a curious relationship. “What
information consumes,” wrote Herbert Simon (1971), “is rather obvious: it consumes the
attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention,
and a need to allocate that attention efﬁciently among the overabundance of information

sources that might consume it” (p. 40-41).

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Early adopters of the Web were continually frustrated with navigating the depth
and breadth of the lntemet. With so many offerings, how does one ﬁnd the information
she seeks? In those days, surﬁng the Web was similar to leaﬁng through the pieces of a
jigsaw puzzle, searching for that comer piece that always seems to elude you. These
early years revealed a hidden paradox to decentralized, open networks: their capacity for
individual publication and idea propagation was seemingly limitless, but such networks
resist the necessary organization and structuring to make their navigation manageable.
This is the paradox of decentralized networks. What good is endless data, if consumers
of information cannot ﬁnd what they seek? As Burbules & Callister (2000) describe, the
lntemet can be viewed as “the opportunity of having information from millions of
sources and points of view, and the problem of having information from millions of
sources and points of view” (p. 71). Put another way, the problem with a burgeoning
lntemet is relevance of information. Relevance is the limiting reagent of the lntemet.
Only when information is situated in a meaningful context can it become useful in
improving human understanding. As Melody (1990) has indicated, “We would be hard
put to demonstrate that the quantum leap in communication technologies, and the vast
increase in communication and information transfer that now takes place using these
technologies, have led to an increased understanding of human and social affairs...” (p.
28). A vast sea of information like the lntemet does not necessary yield a considerable
increase in knowledge. The early days of the lntemet typiﬁed this point.

Early Navigation on a New Kind of Network
A network of the magnitude, scale, and nature of the lntemet had never existed;

consequently, ﬁnding an answer to the paradox of decentralization would not be easy.

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Such a new and novel space invited the opportunity for innovation in navigation, yet
early attempts to provide assistance to Web surfers in their daily online activities often
mirrored organizational systems common to print media and other bounded systems.
Yahoo, a prevalent lntemet portal and search engine, began as a directory of links
published by two Stanford graduate students procrastinating on their dissertations.
Traditional publication houses offered lntemet directories — a “yellow-pages” for the
information age that would organize the best websites by category. Such efforts were
met with mixed success as they often failed to meet the demands of a new medium. The
primary problem for both Yahoo’s human edited categories of links or lntemet yellow-
pages was one of scale. Using humans to categorize an exploding galaxy of text, images,
and sounds was admirable, but doomed to obsolescence.

The second obstacle in such endeavors was the diverse needs of those that surf the
Web. It was particularly difﬁcult for printed directories of links to classify sites in such a
way to meet the needs of teenage gamers, antique collectors, school teachers, and
political pundits. The more the lntemet grew, the wider the range of users’ needs and
expectations. An open system would require a more robust navigation solution, one that
could scale with the system, meet the demands of a population that ranged widely in age,
interest, occupation, and nationality, and do so at a click of a button. “Search” was about
to experience its own renaissance. The problem of endless data would require a solution
that can adapt to the ever changing landscape of the lntemet. In short, we learned that
decentralized networks needed a tool to search them, and with that seemingly obvious

revelation, the search engine wars began.

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The Origins of Search

The idea of searching digital archives was not original to the lntemet. Computer
databases, information warehouses, and even consumer operating systems offered search
capabilities. The difference between early search tools, and the lntemet search engine
was the nature of the domain they searched. Predecessors of lntemet search engines had
the advantage of searching bounded networks. With limits to the amount and type of
information, developing an effective search algorithm is a manageable task. Whether key
word searches, categorical searches, or hard-coded searches, bounded data could easily
be mapped by software. Early library databases are a good example: they are simple,
targeted, and effective. But as a ﬁeld of information, the lntemet is effectively
boundless, and its data is as complex as it is diverse. This was (and still is) a serious
difficulty. Lacking very few natural constraints, the lntemet is a frontier without
knowable borders whose most signiﬁcant limitation to growth is its users’ imagination.
Before they ever launched their now infamous company Google, Stanford graduate
students Larry Page and Sergey Brin (1997) commented on this challenge in one of their
academic papers:

The web is a vast collection of completely uncontrolled heterogeneous

documents. Documents on the web have extreme variation internal to the

documents, and also in the external meta information that might be available. For

example, documents differ internally in their language (both human and

programming), vocabulary (email addresses, links, zip codes, phone numbers,

product numbers), type or format (text, HTML, PDF, images, sounds), and may

even be machine generated (log ﬁles or output from a database) (p. 7).

With the rise of web-based publishing tools common to “Web 2.0” technologies,

anyone can create a variety of web-based content — pages, blogs, photo galleries, RSS

feeds, podcasts, video archives — with minimal technical competence. Consequently, the

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lntemet has evolved from a small collection of academic papers in the early 19903 to an
ill-structured collection of digital media of immense proportions — one that can be best
characterized by its irregularity and lack of continuity. Searching the ever-shifting data
of the lntemet would require more than a traditional software engineering mindset, which
may be why some of the most talented minds have been drawn to solving the problem of
the lntemet search.
The Challenges of Search
While there were a multitude of companies competing in the race to become the
search engine for lntemet users around the world, they all faced the same four design
challenges:
- Indexing a discursive network:
How does your engine determine what information is on the lntemet? As a
vast decentralized network, just knowing what information is available is
challenging. Effective solutions would require adept algorithms to troll the
lntemet, as well as ﬂexible, scalable, and efﬁcient indices (databases) to store
information on each page in the search engine’s database. Early search
engines signiﬁcantly lacked in the breadth of their indexing efforts, with more
than much of the lntemet remaining dark (outside any index).
- Developing a standard for relevance:
As illustrated by Melody’s comments, information lacks value without a
meaningful context, and contextuality is a localized phenomenon. Relevance
is different for each query; consequently, effective search engines had to

develop dynamic means of determining relevance. Consequently, engineers

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had to develop quantitative variables that would compensate for users’
qualitative sensibilities. Such decisions are value-laden and are the focus of
much of this chapter.

Bridging the human-machine language barrier:

Related to the problem of relevance, perhaps the most difﬁcult challenge
facing developers is determining how they would connect users to the
information they seek. An effective search engine must allow users to frame
queries in language similar to their everyday conversations and still connect
them with the data they seek. As Batelle (2005) comments in his history of
search engines, “In a similar vein, engines must deal with local variances and
the problem of a lack of controlled vocabulary. Nearly all programming
languages employ a very strict grammar in order to communicate between
humans and machines. If one comma is out of place or one word misspelled,
the program will fail. Search can’t afford such strictures...” (p.23-24). This
requires far more than providing a comfortable, easy-to-use interface.
Designers must determine how search engines should interpret user queries in
order to deliver the desirable results. This complicated process, often referred
to as inference, requires software to do more than merely store keywords from
a web page; rather, it must know what the page means. But how can software
read?

Keeping pace with the constant change afforded by decentralization:
Decentralization allows the lntemet to adapt to its users needs, on-demand.

As a medium, the lntemet is continually in ﬂux. In trying to track and index

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data, how does a search utility manage change? With little object
permanence, how would software keep users from searching an lntemet that
no longer exists or from missing out on the newest developments on the
lntemet?

These four challenges should have been enough to deter most from ever
attempting to solve the problems of the lntemet search. However, we must remember
that the economic atmosphere of the 1990s in the United States was one of irrational
exuberance toward technology. The great “Internet bubble” grew daily, and venture
capitalists happily poured millions of dollars into this new business market on the hope
that they would get in early on the next Microsoft-type success. Through Silicon Valley
and dot com fever, it would appear that California was experiencing its second gold rush.
Dozens of companies invested signiﬁcant dollars into developing on-line search tools that
would adequately address the four basic design challenges of the Internet search. For
quite some time (at least by lntemet standards) no clear market leader emerged. In many
ways, the anatomy of early lntemet search engines developed by companies such as
Altavista, Excite, Hotbot, WebCrawler, and Lycos were all quite similar to each other
and varied little from models of search utilities developed from much smaller databases
in the 19703.

The Anatomy of Search

Most search engines, even those popular today, consist of three components: the
crawler, the index, and the interface software. A search engine web crawler’s main
purpose is to determine what information exists in the shifting-sands of the lntemet. The

lntemet is dynamic through its rate of expansion and the rate in which its content changes

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— links move, pages change, websites are deleted throughout the world, day and night.
As the lntemet morphs, crawlers must continually update the information they collect,
much like an artist who paints a subject who is always shifting positions and poses. The
name “crawler,” which implies a slow, arduous process is rather misleading: these
programs process a tremendous amount of information very rapidly, though given the
depth and breadth of the lntemet, the process may seem slow. Early versions of Google’s
crawler ran up to 4 crawl processes at once, crawling over 100 web pages per second
(Brin & Page, 1997). Certainly, more recent crawlers offer more processes and faster
scanning.

Crawlers return the information they ﬁnd to the search engine’s giant database,
called the index. The index contains information about the page contents (key words,
page names, URLs) and also metadata about the page (how often it’s updated, the links it
offers) (Battelle, 2005). Where search engines often differ is how they analyze the data
found in their index. What factors do search engines consider important to determine the
relevancy of the information in the index? This task is resolved by the interface software
which translates the user’s query into results by running it against the index through its
particular relevancy algorithm. While the quality of search results are driven by these
three components: the depth of the index, the frequency of updates, and the ﬁdelity
between what a user’s intended results and what the search engine actually returns (the
realized results), it is likely that the search engines differ most in how they analyze their
indices. This is the front-line of the search engine wars, and where two unassuming
graduate students turned the lntemet world upside down.

Along Came Google

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While early search engines captured an audience, it certainly was not because of
the quality of the search tools or the commitment of those that made them. Though some
individuals, such as those behind the 19903 search-leader Altavista, were enraptured by
the problem of the lntemet search, other saw search as competing with the dominant
business model of the day: the lntemet portal. lntemet portals are the equivalent to the
large, retail supermarkets — you can ﬁnd everything there: weather reports, games,
shopping, web links, chat groups, and even search. Some companies wondered if an
excellent search tool might hurt their status as a portal; after all, if users found what they
needed on a search tool, wouldn’t they leave the portal all together (Battelle, 2005)? One
web portal CEO is reported to have commented that, “As long as we’re 80 percent as
good as our competitors, that’s good enough. Our users really don’t care about search”
(Google.com, 2006a). Given the economic opportunity associated with today’s search
companies and popularity of lntemet searching, it is hard to believe that the business-side
of search was ever questioned. This confused and mediocre landscape of the lntemet
search was radically transformed when two unknown graduates from Stanford
University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin (1997), described in one of their ﬁrst academic
papers (“The Anatomy of a Large-Scaled Hypertextual Web Search Engine”) that the
problem with the search engines of the 19903 was in the quality of their results:

In 1994, some people believed that a complete search index would make it

possible to ﬁnd anything easily. According to Best of the Web 1994 --

Navigators, ‘The best navigation service should make it easy to ﬁnd almost

anything on the Web (once all the data is entered).’ However, the Web of 1997 is

quite different. Anyone who has used a search engine recently, can readily testify
that the completeness of the index is not the only factor in the quality of search
results. ‘Junk results’ often wash out any results that a user is interested in. In fact,

as of November 1997, only one of the top four commercial search engines ﬁnds
itself (returns its own search page in response to its name in the top ten results).

(13-3)

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Search engines of the 19903 based their algorithms primarily on page key words,
word frequency, and other metrics easily manipulated by spammers who desire to push
more trafﬁc to their websites. Given the economic value of the top spots in the top search
engines, spammers and search engine optimization consultants employed a variety of
methods to fool search engines in inﬂating the index rank of their sites (or their clients’
sites). Early search engines’ indices suffered enormously from those that would attempt
to tie innocuous queries, such as cars, with unrelated sites (most often pornography)
(Battelle, 2005). his understandable that Erin and Page (1997) felt that the limiting
factor to most search engines was their precision. They understood that while the
lntemet was growing faster than most had imagined, users needed search engines that
placed relevant websites in the top ten results of a search engine query:

One of the main causes of this problem is that the number of documents in the

indices has been increasing by many orders of magnitude, but the user's ability to

look at documents has not. People are still only willing to look at the ﬁrst few tens
of results. Because of this, as the collection size grows, we need tools that have

very high precision (number of relevant documents returned, say in the top tens of
results). (Brin & Page, 1997, p. 3)

Their solution was a search algorithm which took into consideration the “link
structure” of the lntemet as the main mechanism for determining quality of information.
The novelty of Page and Brin’s approach was that it would lean heavily on hyperlinks
between websites in addition to page contents through establish its rank of relevance.
Theirs was the ﬁrst search engine to consider the hyperlinking “architecture” of the Web
as part of the solution to search. They named their new search tool Google, based on the
mathematical term "Googol," which is a very large number (1 followed by 100 zeros).

Origins of Google

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The Google project originally began with a different name and purpose. Larry
Page, in search for a compelling doctoral thesis, worked on developing a piece of
software he named “BackRub,” which set out to solve one of the fundamental ﬂaws in
the World Wide Web’s version of hypertext: while hypertext makes it easy to link to any
page on the Web, it was difﬁcult to determine what pages linked to a site. Page’s
purpose in creating BackRub was to answer the question of who was linking to whom.
Always ambitious, Page sought to apply BackRub to the entire Web, but to do so would
require BackRub to crawl the entire Web. Such a task would require considerably
complicated mathematics, and when Page needed help parsing the variables, he turned to
fellow student Sergey Brin. Brin was a gifted mathematician at Stanford who struggled
to ﬁnd a single idea to apply his genius against. He knew Page and when he heard about
the BackRub project, he eagerly joined the research group. Page and Erin wanted to
provide web page developers not only a list of who was linked to them, but also the
relative ranking of those links (Battelle, 2005). This crucial addition is what gave
impetus to the most famous ranking algorithm in the world.

The two students developed a ranking system called PageRank that took
advantage of the “democratic” nature of the Web. Through the open architecture of the
lntemet, any site is free to link to any other, and in doing so, is casting a “vote” for that
site as a place one may want to visit. Page and Erin theorized that the more links to a
site, the better its quality. This presumption formed the core of their PageRank
technology, which calculated the number of links coming into a given site. PageRank
also determined the importance of a link to a site by weighting its value by the number of

pages that link to it. Thus, a link from a popular portal like Yahoo.com would be worth

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more than a link from some obscure blog. Mathematically, the Page and Brin (1997)

expressed these relationships in the following algorithm:
PR(A) = (I-d) + d(PR(TI)/Cﬂ‘1) + + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
Where PR(A) = gives the Page Rank (PR) of a given page, A
D is a damping factor (originally set to 0.85),
T1. . . TN are the pages linking to page A
C is the number of outbound links found on a page linking to A

While this formula seems intimidating, it is worth exploring its construction under
the auspices of understanding Google more completely. In PageRank’s original form, the
rank of a page A is the sum of the PageRank of those pages linked to it (T1, T2, T3
TN). However, the amount of donated PageRank pages T1 through TN is ﬁrst divided
by the number of outbound links on those pages. This value is then multiplied by Page
and Brin’s damping factor, d which represents the likelihood that a user, if given the link,
may not follow it. Thus, the damping factor is a probability which reduces the amount of
PageRank a site can contribute. In its original form, damping occurred in the PageRank

algorithm at 85%. Rewriting the formula in words, it reads:

According to Google, the Relevancy of Page A = 0.15 + 85% of the total rank of those
pages linked to A divided by the total number of their outbound links

Some readers may wonder, why bother with exploring the technical footnotes of
the Google story? My answer is a simple one: I believe Google to be one of the most
inﬂuential players in the new knowledge economy, and, unlike many corporations,
Google gave a glimpse into one of its seminal business secrets. Of course, at the time
that Brin and Page (1997) published “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Web Search
Engine” they could not have known that eight years later they would have successively
grown Google into one of the most inﬂuential and proﬁtable companies in the technology

sector. It is the market success of Google that makes their academic paper so insightﬁrl.

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Still unsure of leaving the academic world to launch a risky startup in a market
saturated with search engines, Page and Brin tried to license their search protocol to
established search companies — Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek, etc. (Battelle, 2005). However,
no company took the young engineers up on their offer, which eventually led both to quit
school and start a company, Google, Inc. It would be Google, Inc. who would rise to the
challenge of connecting users with relevant information, and with it, raise a number of
questions about the valuation of knowledge on the net.

Google ’3 Market Success

Google’s rapid rise beyond success to market monopolization grew from the
quality of searches produced by its PageRank technology. Rather than relying on merely
the page content of websites (a common practice with lntemet search technologies),
Google looked at the lntemet like a large but loose democratic community by treating
links between sites as votes and weighting for popularity. And while Brin and Page gave
the original formula for PageRank in a conference paper, much has seemingly changed
with the algorithm. In the company’s own words:

PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by

solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms.

Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page

B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page's importance by

the number of votes it receives. (Google.com, 2004a)

PageRank is clearly a more complicated algorithm for Google, Inc. than it was during
Page and Brin’s graduate student days. The company now boasts of over 500 million

factors involved in ranking a page, though no one outside of Google knows what these

factors are, and how important they are in comparison to its PageRank technology. Such

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information is a closely guarded company secret, one that is likely worth hundreds of
millions of dollars.

One concept that survived Google search’s transition from academic project to
corporate superstar is that of objectivity. Google prides itself for having removed human
manipulation from the process, letting its algorithm “objectively” determine relevance.
“Google search is an easy, honest and objective way to ﬁnd high-quality websites with
information relevant to your search,” claims the company website (Google.com, 2004c).
As Brin and Page (1997) originally suggested, PageRank is “an objective measure of [a
page’s] citation importance that corresponds well with people's subjective idea of
importance” (p. 4). This chapter aims at Google’s historical and present claim of
objectivity and neutrality in information sheparding. Though I do not disparage the
quality of their results or their market success, it is this notion of objectivity, particularly
as it plays in the production of knowledge that I wish to deconstruct.

Why Google?

If this chapter interrogates the positions search engines hold in knowledge
creation, then why limit the conversation to Google? Would it not be best to extend the
scope of analysis to other major players in lntemet search, particularly Yahoo, MSN, and
AOL? Is Google, Inc. that important to the present and future knowledge economy? The
short answer is yes, I believe it is, but it really should not matter. Google has come to
represent the position of the search engine in world of ideas and information. It may be
in ten years that some other search technology dominates the landscape. Some have even
predicted the death of Google (Shafer, 2005). If so, this philosophical critique should

still be relevant because it examines the position of the search engine more than the

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company itself. Still, of all the current search technology companies, Google is clearly
the most interesting case.

This chapter discusses Google in exclusion to the other search engines and
lntemet portals because of Google’s current market share and its trajectory of growth.
Although it is sometimes difﬁcult to operationalize, many market reports continue to
show that if someone searches the lntemet, it’s likely they are using Google (Fallows,
Rainie, & Mudd, 2004). For example, in December 2005, Americans conducted 5
billion online searches, with 49% of those conducted through Google, a 6 percent
increase from the year prior. Google’s closest competitor is Yahoo, which captured 21
percent of all searches (Glasner, 2006). Such market dominance has yielded signiﬁcant
proﬁts for this young company. Google's stellar economic metrics have made it the
darling of Wall Street and their investors. It is quite possible that with its current market
position, enormous economic capital, and expansive technological infrastructure Google
could achieve its ambitious corporate mission: “To organize the world's information and
make it universally accessible and useful” (Google.com, 2005). If successful, Google
would be become not just the most inﬂuential company in the world, but possibly the
most inﬂuential organization as well, surpassing prominent nation-states. While I do not
deny that this claim is radical, others have anticipated this shift in world dynamics due to
globalization. Japanese business-writer Kenichi Ohmae has effectively announced the
end of nation-states, pronouncing such entities as “ﬁctions” (Giddings, 2000).

Another reason Google makes for provocative analysis is that it has intentionally
positioned itself as the good-conscience company. The motto it has adopted to guide its

actions is an ethical one, “Don’t be evil” (Google.com, 2004b). It argues that its

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PageRank technology leverages the “democratic” nature of the Web; its founders Page
and Brin have stood ﬁrm about preserving the integrity of the search from commercial
forces, having been quite adamant about never selling placement in its organic search
results. In the conclusion of their academic paper on Google, Page and Brin opine about
the problems of a commercialized search, suggesting that the business model for search
companies (placed advertisements) complicates the relationship between user and results.
“In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view,” write the Brin and Page
(1997), “that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for
the consumer to ﬁnd what they want” (p. 25). The obvious conclusion here is that if
users ﬁnd what they need through the organic results, why would a potential business
need to incur the expense of paying for a placed advertisement? Since its founding,
Google has tried to position itself between the sometimes rugged realities of the market
and the needs of its users, with varying success. Consequently, it makes good sense to
discuss the implications of Google’s position in the world of ideas (a.k.a. the lntemet). I
turn to this task presently by discussing the important ways in which those that study the
lntemet cast its power relations.
Asking Questions of a Query

There are several ways scholars and informed observers have come to consider
the role of popular search engines on the lntemet. These perspectives can be organized
into three broad divisions, what I have termed the egalitarian-utopian, the structural, and
the post-structural. The three viewpoints differ in how they construct power relations on
the lntemet; that is, ways in which agents relate to each other. The ﬁrst is what I label

the “egalitarian-utopian” perspective, a viewpoint that fashions the lntemet as the highest

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public good, a commons of global reach that will allow the free exchange of information
and ultimately the salvation of society. As such, many lntemet egalitarians fashion the
lntemet as a space devoid of power relations, a utopia of relationships and resources.
The second perspective are those who frame power relations structurally, and in doing so,
often describe individuals dominated by large corporate or institutional entities.
Structuralists often view the lntemet as an extension of real-world power structures in
which large orgarrizatons extend their hegemonic control to virtual spaces. The third and
ﬁnal perspective in this schema is that of the post-structuralists, who deconstruct the
notion of the powerful and the oppressed. Post-structural commentators do not position
the lntemet as the tool for the disenfranchised as the egalitaritan-utopian may; nor do
they emphasize hegemonic control and inﬂuence over the lntemet by institutions, as the
structuralists often does. Rather from a post-structural perspective, the interactions of
searchers, content producers, and search engines create a complex set of relations that
produces knowledge. For poststructuralist and Foucault, Google does not set out to
regulate the information economy, but through a set of relations with users and web
content producers, all three work together to do this — perhaps unknowingly. The post-
structural perspective is represented in this chapter by the illuminating work of Michel

Foucault.

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Table 1 provides a brief snapshot of the similarities and differences found among
these three perspectives on the lntemet. What follows is a more extended treatment of
the egalitarian-utopian, structural, and post-structural perspectives of the lntemet. A
more extensive discussion of these viewpoints will lead to a more complete (or less

incomplete) understanding of the discipline of knowledge on the lntemet.

 

Table 1 . Summary of perspectives

 

 

Egalitarian-Utopian Structural Post-Structural
Power on the Web Absent or in the Wielded by dominant Impersonal; not
hands of individuals/institutions leveraged by
individuals individual
agents
Freedom of Total Minimal Limited by ﬁeld
actions of relations
Information Wants to be free Is censored by search A product of
engines power relations,
therefore non-
neutral
Google is... The conﬁrmation of Gatekeeper of the Agent in a
lntemet democracy lntemet complex ﬁeld
of power
relations
The lntemet is... Utopia An extension of real A ﬁeld of
world power power,
structures discursive
Theorists Morville; Reynolds Bourdieu Foucault

 

Utopian-Egalitarian Perspective of the Internet

For many informed observers, Google’s image campaign is harmonious with the
“democratic” and “egalitarian” nature of the lntemet (see Chapter 8 for a full discussion
of the division of reviews regarding the lntemet’s democratic possibilities). Those
egalitarian-utopians see power on the lntemet as either absent or in the hands of

individuals. The Web is the tool leveraged by an “army of Davids” to harness the power

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of “horizontal knowledge” — loosely coordinated knowledge across an lntemet-based
network of relations - to compete more effectively with the world’s Goliaths (big media,
big corporate, big government) (Reynolds, 2006). It is a medium for the people by the
people. Such an understanding allows for utopian underpinnings, building the lntemet to
be an ideal space

Within the discourses in technology, egalitarian-utopianism has a well-established
history. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, communication theorist
Charles Horton Cooley reﬂected back on the technological developments including the
railroads, telegraphs, daily papers, and telephones. In describing this “new epoch in
communication,” Cooley’s (1909) words embody the soul of the egalitarian-utopian
perspective: “[These technologies] make it possible for society to be organized more and
more on the higher faculties of man, on intelligence and sympathy, rather than on
authority, caste, and routine. They mean freedom, outlook, indeﬁnite possibility” (p. 81).
This perspective has penetrated a number of institutions. Cooley’s words represent the
quintessential egalitarian-utopian approach to communication technologies, a long-
standing hOpe that was revitalized with the development of the lntemet. John Seely
Brown (2000), Howard Rheingold (2003), Joe Trippi (2004), John Battelle (2005), Glenn
Reynolds (2006) and others tend to see promise and potential in the lntemet due to its
open architecture. These commentators argue that the Intemet’s open architecture creates
a platform that quite naturally supports expanded community, democratic exchange, and
free discourse. As Morville (2005) confesses in Ambient F indability, “. .. when it comes
to the lntemet and the future of ambient ﬁndability, I’m an optimist. In Marshall

McLuhan’s insight that the medium is the message, I see the power of the lntemet to

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engage people as participants in the collaborative, productive enterprise of knowledge
creation and dissemination” (p. 15). For some, the lntemet is another coordinate along
the path of scientiﬁc progress, on that will “affect the world seismically, rocking us as the
discovery of the scientiﬁc model, the invention of printing, and the arrival of the
Industrial Age did” (Gates, Myhrvold, & Rinearson, 1996).

If the lntemet is an egalitarian utopia, then Google is merely a tool to assist the
individual Web user in their journey to acquire better information, collaborate with peers,
and further the self-actualization of society. “Google is our culture’s principal way of
knowing about itself” writes Steven Johnson (emphasis in original, 2005, p. 120). It is a
“tool which [has] fulﬁlled the original dream of digital machines becoming extensions of
our memory” (p. 124). Many egalitarian-utopians see Google as an extension of the
democratic principles fundamental to the architecture of the lntemet. Peter Morville
concludes that one of Google’s “secrets of success” is the effective utilization of human
produced “metadata tags” (information describing information on the Web). He writes,
“Google’s PageRank algorithm recognizes inbound links constructed by humans to be an
excellent indicator of aboutness. Google loves metadata” (p. 53). Google helps
information that “wants to be free” (to borrow from Stewart Brand (1988)) be found.

There certainly is room to be optimistic and enthusiastic about the lntemet. The
unique characteristics of this medium have opened up a number of possibilities in terms
of information access and availability. Often, it is the techno-optimists who ﬁrst
recognize what the future may hold for us all, and as Lao-Tzu said, “To see things in the
seed, that is genius.” There is considerable value in the work of Vannevar Bush and

others featured in Chapters 3, who anticipate the importance of the lntemet. Yet, to rely

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on optimism alone, is to accept technology’s inﬂuence uncritically, as reﬂected in
Thomas Edison’s ambitious (and now infamous) proclamation for education in 1922: “I
believe the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in
a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of text books” (Monke, 2004).
The egalitarian-utopian perspective may tell too simple of a story to encompass the
complex set of relations that embody the lntemet. As I hope to demonstrate in the
coming sections, nothing that ties people together lies outside a web of power relations.
A Structural Perspective: Bourdieu

Though egalitarian-utopians can be structural in their observations, structuralists
tend to conceptualize the lntemet quite differently, framing the lntemet as a
sociotechnical entity that is, in effect, an extension of real-world power structures in
which large institutions extend their hegemonic control over individuals. As a general
approach, structuralism assumes that machine-like structures organize human experience,
and suggests that reality is composed of relationships rather than objects. The structures
that form relationships between objects are often very visible institutions (education,
economic relations, political/govemmental, religion) and more subtle forms (language,
culture). For the structuralist, individual subjects neither originate nor control their social
existence, mental life, use of language, or experience with phenomenon like technology.
Structural theories hold that power operates unidirectionally through recognizable
systems of dominance and subordination.

Structuralists often are cynical and pessimistic of the revolutionary potential of
the lntemet, arguing that the egalitarian power of the Web is primarily rhetoric rather

than reality, citing lntemet usage statistics that take the form of a “power law

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distribution.” This means that a small percentage of web sites have captured the majority
of site trafﬁc on the lntemet (Hindman, Tsioutsiouliklis, & Johnson, 2003).

Structuralists’ reservations about the egalitarian nature of the lntemet may be
conﬁrmed by Google’s success and large user base, which has changed the shape of the
lntemet. While the Web can be accurately cast as architecturally decentralized, as a
knowledge network search engines like Google have formed relative centers. Due to its
tremendous popularity, Google exercises enormous “power” over knowledge creation
and formation through the “capital” it imparts onto information. Google’s capital is not
an economic or cultural capital, but is better understood as a variant of what French
soliologist Pierre Bourdieu (1983) theorized as “symbolic capital.” Bourdieu (1983)
deﬁnes social capital as, "the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are
linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of
mutual acquaintance and recognition” (p. 248). In other words, social capital is a beneﬁt
garnered from advantageous grouping and associations. Social capital can be transferred
through a variety of mechanisms, such as family name, school, party afﬁliation, or as
Bourdieu (1983) explained “by a whole set of instituting acts designed simultaneously to
form and inform those who undergo them” (p. 249). Google is such an instituting act.
Because of and through its position as a data broker, Google gives a certain credential to
information that it lists high on its search results, a sort of relevancy capital.

The Web is a universe of billions of pages and in order to have voice on the
lntemet, to have your ideas exposed to an unfamiliar audience, ﬁnding rank with Google
is essential. A survey of popular web literature conﬁrms this, with titles like Google

Hacks Exposed: Improving Your Rank on Google, Building Your Business with Google

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For Dummies, and How to Do Everything with Google. Google is big business. There’s
real economic value to being listed among the top sites for speciﬁed queries. On-line
marketing experts and entrepreneurs understand that ﬁnding rank with Google will be
rewarded with immense exposure. Broad exposure is the economic capital of the
lntemet. It’s why companies pay seven-ﬁgure sums for recognizable domain names like
business. com. lntemet exposure is the equivalent to the three rules for conventional
businesses: location, location, location. Google’s relevancy capital has a real economic
currency, much like more traditional examples of social capital. These types of
interconnections should not be surprising, as Bourdieu (1983) argued, “social capital is
never completely independent of [economic and cultural capital] because the exchanges
instituting mutual acknowledgment presuppose the reacknowledgment of a minimum of
objective homogeneity, and because it exerts a multiplier effect on the capital he
possesses in his own right” (p. 249).

Using terms like relevancy capital to describe Google’s role in the ecology of
information on the Web is helpful and important for lntemet studies. However, such a
presentation is also incomplete. It ignores the cycle of relationships necessary for Google
to exist, and it presents power as that which can be harnessed and leveraged in a
hierarchy of relationships. Thus, Google exercises its power to control the experiences of
lntemet users by the information it presents as relevant. However, the millions of users
who use Google (or any search engine) are the ones that make it relevant. If Google lost
90% of its user base, as once popular search engines Altavista, Infoseek, and Excite have,

would it have immense relevancy capital to distribute? Google matters because lntemet

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users make it matter; it is a cyclical relationship of power that is best explained by using
the illuminating ideas of Michel Foucault.
A Post-Structural Perspective: Foucault

The third perspective on lntemet power relations is the post-structural
perspective. Post-structuralists conceptualize power quite differently than the
egalitarians-utopians who optimistically ignore it, or as the structuralists who envision it
as something obtained, used, and directed at people. For the post-structuralists, such as
Foucault, power is ever-present, but impersonal, meaning that it cannot be controlled,
wielded, or leveraged. Under such a formulation, power is understood not something to
be possessed, but as a ﬁeld of relations between agents.

For Foucault, power is not best represented by monolithic structures, easily
reduced to monocausal sources and unidirectional relationships. Foucault develops his
understanding of power through a methodology he labels genealogy, a “history of
struggles.” Genealogies are often seen as a reaction against forms of history that
emphasis continuity and the search for origins. Some forms of historiography seek to
ﬁnd fundamental “essences” or narratives that explain the course of human events, and as
such, are often termed “totalizing histories” (Prado, 2000). Marx’s perspective that the
course of human of events can be explained primarily through class struggle is one
example of a totalizing history. Foucault explains that genealogies do not seek grand
answers and are not “positivistic returns to a more careful or exact form of
science. . . [rather] they are precisely anti-sciences” (Foucault, 1980b, p. 83). Foucault
employed genealogy to determine how power is exercised through normalizing practices

of societal institutions including madness, sexuality, and the penal system. As an

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example, take Foucault’s (1995) study of the penal system in Discipline and Punish. He
begins the book describing in gruesome detail a public execution in eighteenth century
France, which he contrasts with a rigorous schedule of activities for inmates from a
prison in Paris just eighty years later. Foucault’s stark contrast reveals the dramatic
change from the spectacle of public torture to an institutionalized modern carceral
system: “We have, then, a public execution and a timetable” (p. 7). Received history
may tell us that such a dramatic transformation was the result of a more civilized, humane
society. What Foucault shows through extensive historical research is that the move from
the “gloomy festiva ” of public torture to the prison “is not a story about force and
compulsion. It is a story about the manufacture and control of souls...” (Prado, 2000, p.
66). In other words, Foucault’s genealogical method rejects a monolithic presentation of
power being welded by a dominant majority, and replaces it with a system of relations
that makes possible a different view of what is good and normal.

Foucault’s position on power differs drastically from a structural understanding of
power, such as the one offered by Marx or Bourdieu. For Marx, power was a tool or
weapon wielded in the grand conﬂict of class struggle. It is held and used by industrial
capitalists against the working class, whom they wish to suppress, limit, and exploit.

This type of structural understanding of power has a signiﬁcant footprint in Western
society. Much of the media consumed by Americans emphasizes structural
understandings of power, often involving conspiracies that extend between large
corporations, government entities, or the ﬁnancial elite. If Foucault were a movie

director, perhaps movie plots would be drastically different.

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For Foucault, power is quite a different matter. Perhaps the key difference
between a structural understanding of power and the embedded network model of power
that Foucault describes is his rejection of power as domination. “Power comes ﬁom
below,” writes Foucault (1980a), “that is, there is no binary and all encompassing
opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power-relations, and serving as a
general matrix” (p. 94). He recognized no universal machine restricting the marginalized
while empowering the elite. Power is not monopolized by a few; rather, it is the
inevitable force between different people at different times in different ways. It cannot be
held; it is impersonal; it is not universal, but contextual. In Power/Knowledge, Foucault
(1980b) details for the reader many of the complexities of power outside of a structuralist
framework:

power is not to be taken to be a phenomenon of one individual’s consolidated

and homogeneous domination over others, or that one group or class over others.

What, by contrast should always be kept in mind is that power, if we do not take

too distant a view of it, is not that which makes the difference between those who

exclusively possess and retain it, and those who do not have it and submit to it.

Power must be analyzed as something which circulates, or rather as something

which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localized here or there,
never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth.

(p. 98)

Perhaps a good working deﬁnition for Foucault’s power is that power is a
complex ﬁeld of relations; it is actions upon actions, not actions upon individuals. Prado
(2000) provides a model that may help illustrate how power functions as a set of relations
on individual actions. Prado asks his readers to imagine a number of magnets spread out
on a surface. Circulating through this ﬁeld of magnets are the “vectors” of magnetic
force. Now, suppose someone spreads iron ﬁllings throughout the ﬁeld of magnets. Due

to the force of the magnets, the ﬁllings would shift and move as to align themselves with

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the current of forces around them. And if we move the magnets around, the ﬁeld of
forces shifts, sometimes unpredictably, and as such, the ﬁllings would also move
concordantly. This is similar to how Foucault presented power as relations. “In this
model or analogy,” writes Prado, “the magnets are agents, the ﬁllings are behavioral
options, and the force vectors are power” (p. 72). As Prado’s magnets shift (agents act),
power reconﬁgures the behavioral options, making new possibilities while removing old
options. Thus, power affects the actions of individuals. Also apparent in this analogy is
the impersonality and pervasiveness of power. Because power is seen as a ﬁeld, no one
can possess even a portion of power. And just as no ﬁlling could escape the ﬁeld of
magnetism, we all ﬁnd ourselves inside power’s web. Though dynamic, power’s effects
are continually present. “There are no spaces of primal liberty between the meshes of its
networ ,” writes Foucault (1980b, p. 142).

The Central Question: How?

So if power is not simply some superstructure that acts on the marginalized, how
does it work in regard to the lntemet? I suggest that in open-access systems like the
lntemet, structural understandings of power are highly problematic; rather, the medium is
inclined to the distributed sense of power Foucault describes. Amid the architecturally
decentralized, discursive spaces of the lntemet are many agents — those that surf and
search, those that publish (professionals and hobbyists), and those that provide web
services (search engines, collaborative technologies like blogs, photo sharing). As these
agents interact, they do so through power vectors that run throughout the network.

My analysis will focus on the increasingly important role of search engines in the

world of information, though not in the structural sense employed by many in the popular

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press who vilify these technologies. Emblematic of the stubborn modern mindset from
which many writers work is Markoff and Hansell’s (2006) article “Hiding in Plain Sight,
Google Seeks an Expansion of Power.” Their opening is both forceful and explicitly
structural: “On the banks of the windswept Columbia River, Google is working on a
secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of lntemet computing. But it
is hard to keep a secret when it is a computing center as big as two football ﬁelds, with
twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky.” Notice the heavy emphasis on
domination in the authors’ description of Google — words like “secret weapon” and
“dominate” cast Google as a monolith of power on the lntemet. Yes, Google holds an
important position in the information economy; yet, our use of Google is what makes it
important. This complicated relationship between free agents on the lntemet can be best
explained through some of Foucault’s most widely discussed ideas — the relationship
between power and knowledge or power/knowledge, the process of normalization, and
gaze.
Power/Knowledge/ Truth Circuit and Google

A common theme in Google’s corporate mantra is the notion of objectivity.
Through PageRank, Google claims to serve “objective” knowledge to its users. For
example, when discussing its GoogleNews service, the company suggests that because
computer algorithms select the news stories for the service without human intervention,
then “news sources are selected without regard to political viewpoint or ideology,
enabling you to see how different organizations are reporting the same story”
(Google.com, 2006b). Whether describing their search tool or ancillary services, the

common assumption prevalent in Google’s corporate communications is that it provides

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objective, value-free, neutral information to its users. This thinking runs counter to
Foucault’s perspective, which sees knowledge not as universal, ﬁxed, or objective, but as
particular, contextual, and discursively constructed. One of Foucault’s most illuminating
ideas is that power and knowledge are inextricably related, and combine to produce
“truth,” forming a circuit of exchange. Foucault saw knowledge and power working
together, as “the formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce
one another in a circular process" (Foucault, 1995, p. 224). One of Foucault’s
contributions to the ﬁeld was situating truth (the product of knowledge) within power
relations. In other words, without clear absolutes in truth, truth is the product of power.
The production of knowledge through the application of power to produce truth is
important in the quest to understand power relations on the lntemet and to explain the
role of Google. The lntemet is a vast network of information. At its most fundamental
level, the duty of the lntemet is to move bits of data from server to browser. As
Weinberger (2002) explains, “The lntemet is designed to move bits and not to decide
which bits to move, which bits to block, what is done with bits, and whether anyone
should have to pay for receiving particular bits” (p. 148). When constraining our
understanding of the lntemet to that of substructure, Weinberger is right. Architecturally,
physically, and logically the lntemet is a faceless, detached enterprise that just passes
bits, without understanding what information those bits represent. However, such a
bounded view of the lntemet provides a shallow understanding of how information
becomes knowledge on the net. There is nothing sterile, objective, or neutral about the
lntemet and its interactions, and like the physical world, objective truth/knowledge is not

to be found on the lntemet, despite the sophistication of search engine algorithm or the

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openness of the Intemet’s design. The activity of Google to ﬁlter out billions of pages,
leaving users with a sorted list of the most “relevant” is a virtual example of the
power/knowledge circuit (one that occurs billions of times each year). The circuit begins
with the user’s need for information, and her search for knowledge in the sea of
information on the lntemet. Google, through its popularity and brand loyalty, is more
often than not the agent on the lntemet with which the user forms a relationship. By
turning to Google, the user is giving the search company the opportunity to pare down the
lntemet from a diverse set of ideas to a condensed set of “relevant” knowledge —
knowledge that should ﬁt the user’s needs and be of high quality. In this way, Google
has taken raw information and produced knowledge through a power relationship.

This circuit of exchange including the three principle parties — information
producers, information seekers, and information sorters — involves what Foucault (1995)
called in Discipline and Punish “rituals of truth.” In the penal system, the rituals of truth
are the common elements of any TV crime show — the indictment, trial, testimony,
analysis of evidence, courtroom theatrics, etc. Such rituals form the mechanics of the
process of producing knowledge — in the case of a trail, a legitimate sense of innocence or
guilt. The process of the lntemet search also includes various “rituals of truth.” It
includes those practices which “legitimizes” the validity of the lntemet results: the notion
of the lntemet crawl, searching each site for new and update information to add to its
ever growing index; the publication of optimization rules for information producers;
advance query options for information seekers; a listing on the main search interface of

the number of documents being searched; the division in results between organic hits and

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paid advertisements; suggestions for other search terms. The sum of these practices
creates an atmosphere of legitimization for the knowledge produced on the lntemet.

It is important to keep in clear view that the process of the Google search is an
enactment of power through a set of relations between free agents on the lntemet as
opposed to a coercive action of domination on the part of Google. It is the ﬁeedom of the
participants of this exchange that erode at the validity and utility of a structural
presentation of power, one that casts power as something that is wielded by some against
others. Power is “exercised over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free”
(Foucault, 1982, p. 221). Most of the enthusiasm for the democratic potential of the
lntemet is over the relative freedom of its participants including the web publisher, the
knowledge seeker, and information sorter. This triangular array of relations is
predicated on the free participation of its agents. It is the freedom implicit in web power
relations that disqualiﬁes Google as a true gatekeeper or censor of the lntemet. More
accurately, with its relationship with millions of lntemet users, Google is best viewed as a
producer, not excluder, of knowledge. As Rieder (2005) says, “Power runs through the
capillaries of this network and with reference to Foucault we have to understand power as
a productive force, not as an inhibitor. Search engines are best understood as producers,
not censors” (emphasis in original, p. 29).

This relational perspective of power has yet to fully saturate the market of ideas,
likely because structuralism offers an intuitive understanding of power relations. Rather
than emphasizing the relational aspect of power, structuralists emphasize the position of
power. For the structuralist, Google’s position is at the central of the virtual world, and

as such, it is able to wield a tremendous amount of power, controlling information.

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Given its privileged position and capitalistic objective, Google is an untrustworthy
guardian of knowledge, and we as lntemet users, must seek ways to circumvent its power
and position (or so a structuralist may argue). Trend’s (1997) comments illustrate a
structural understanding of power in technology and new media: “On one level, this
power creates hierarchical relationship between its subjects and objects, between those
who act and those who are acted upon. Often this results when novel communications
technologies simply extend the capacities of institutions like banks, utilities, and
government” (p. 108). Notice how Trend sees power acting on individuals (as opposed to
their actions) thus shaping his conception of agency: there are those who act and those
who are acted upon. Trend sees technology as a vehicle that replicates the current power
inequalities from social institutions. Later he argues that the development of new media
“rarely proceeds in the interest of democratic ideals”; rather, technology is no different
than other signiﬁcant cultural institutions, and “can only empower those who possess it
and who have access to it” (p. 108). Consequently, it is as if the values of the powerful
and elite are embedded in new technology and media. As Bowker and Star (1999)
suggest, “Values, opinions and rhetoric are frozen into code" (p. 135).

It is understandable that many have cast the lntemet as an egalitarian utopia of
power relations, a democratic technology. After all, in comparison to conventional
media outlets, the lntemet is an environment free of the usual publication gatekeepers.
But the freedom to publish can only take us so far; after all, if 1 rant about politics on my
blog, and no one reads it, what have I changed? The uneasy reality of the lntemet is
publication does not equal voice. Anyone can publish, but only those who master the

Tao of Google can avoid being the voice in the wilderness. Each time we use Google, a

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power relation is formed. Google does more than merely pass search results onto its
users. Every display of results is an enactment of power, as Google determines whose
truth becomes relevant. In effect, it is a clear example or paradigm of Foucault’s theory
about how power produces truth. “We are,” as Foucault (1980b) explained, “subjected to
the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the
production of tru ” (p. 93). Truth cannot be extricated from the power to legitimize it,
and power never ceases its registration of truth. As a result of the search engines’ sorting
role on the lntemet, knowledge, truth, and power work together as a circuit of exchange.
Normalization on the Net: Google as a Dividing Practice

The social construction of “normal” is not a new sociological, psychological, or
philosophical issue. Foucault used a variety of fundamental experiences — sexuality,
mental illness, prisons — to illustrate how power has play in normalization. He sees
normalization as a process “that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the
disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes"
(Foucault, 1995, p. 183). It is one of “the great instruments of power,” as normalization
has the capacity to “impose homogeneity” (p. 184). Essential to the process of
normalization is the “dividing practice” -— the social exercise that separates, differentiates,
homogenizes, and excludes. It is by accentuating socially constructed differences, by
making the normal and abnormal, that the power to conform is enacted through “binary
division.” Dividing practices and normalization establish homogeneity through the
creation of differences through categorizing, indexing, and the creation of taxonomies.

As Foucault (1982) restated in “Subject and Power,” “The subject is divided inside

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himself or from others. The process objectivizes him. Examples are the mad and the
sane, the sick and the healthy, the criminals and the ‘good boys’” (p. 303).

If we think of normalization as the imposition of homogeneity, then it is likely
that the lntemet is the last place one would expect to see strong normalization practices.
The lntemet appears to be an umbrella name for a unity of diversity, a wildly free and
open platform for the publication and propagation for ideas, many of which have little
currency in other media markets. Ironically, it is the success of the lntemet to provide a
robust vehicle for information exchange that has created the regular activity of
normalization on the net. In order for users to ﬁnd what they need, more often than not, a
search engine is required. In a space as information rich as the lntemet, there must be
some means to enact the common activities of normalization — to compare, differentiate,
hierarchize, homogenize, and even exclude information users want from the rest of the
lntemet. Through their complicated algorithms, search engines like Google perform
billions of sorts each year, dividing for the user relevant from irrelevant by a complex
and dynamic algorithm whose patterns are an industry secret. Thus, we see an example
of how power constrains actions by providing a “ﬁeld possibilities” (Prado, 2000). The
enactment of power through Google’s actions provides users a range of possible options
for their queries, while at the same time constraining their search behaviors by not
providing other (less relevant) sites. This example demonstrates how through Foucault’s
presentation of power, actions constrain other actions, not individuals.

As the most popular search engine in the world, Google is trusted to create a
relevancy index for any information on the lntemet, with those results most satisfying to

Google’s algorithm ﬁnding their way to the top of the list. Those “hits” on the ﬁrst ten

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pages have considerable exposure resulting in signiﬁcant opportunity in the market of
ideas. In effect, Google makes them relevant not by the content of their pages, but in the
position they hold in Google’s ranking system. Of course, Google could not do this alone
— we make Google popular through our use; it in turn remanufactures our use of its
service, producing relevant information for us. This certainly ﬂies in the face of a
conventional understanding of “relevance,” but perhaps “relevance” holds concurrent but
contradictory meanings, similar to what Gestalt psychologists refer to as “multistability.”
I would suggest that relevance on the lntemet has come to be that which is both
meaningful to the user’s interest and that which holds high ranking in Google’s search
standings. Without both meanings, relevancy on the lntemet implodes. After all, I can
create a wonderful website with fantastic information on any number of topics, but
without the relevancy that Google adds to the data on my page (no matter how targeted to
the lntemet user’s interest) my information is doomed to obscurity and irrelevance. This
position on relevancy demonstrates what Foucault established by historical archival study
of the construction of madness - that the difference between two behaviors or ideas, say
the insane and the sane, is highly contextual, changes through time, and is created
through power relations.

While Google divides, sorts, and ranks information on the lntemet, it also
inﬂuences the construction of content on the lntemet. Its activity of sorting implicitly
imposes homogeneity on the Web, as web publishers work diligently to optimize their
sites. “Search engine optimization,” SEO as it is often called, is the science and art of
leveraging the varying assets of a website to give it maximum rank on search engine’s

indices, such as Google’s. Though Google should not be seen as dictating web design, its

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activities of normalization include the homogenization of website structure. Web
designers may be fearful of what researchers from several traditions have described as
“the principle of least effort.” Thomas Mann (1993) neatly summarizes the problem of
least effort by explaining that “most researchers (even ‘serious scholars’) will tend to
choose easily available information sources, even when they are objectively of low
quality, and further, will tend to be satisﬁed with whatever can be found easily in
preference to pursuing higher-quality sources whose use would require a greater
expenditure of effort” (p. 91). This phenomenon was also captured by Zipf, who argued
that “each individual will adopt a course of action that will involve the expenditure of the
probably least average of his work (by deﬁnition, least effort)” (Chrzastowski, 1995, p.
639). According to an extensive U.S. survey of intemet users by Jupiter research group
iProspect, 62% of those surveyed click on a search result on the ﬁrst page, and almost all
(90%) did not go deeper than three pages of results for information (BBC, 2006). If web
users are unwilling typically to move past the ﬁrst set of responses of an lntemet query,
then Google’s deﬁnition of relevant becomes increasingly important as the lntemet
grows, inﬂuencing the form of “good” websites. lntemet entrepreneurs realize that they
must massage the structure and form of their website to stay at the top of the Google
rankings. Thus, web designers often experiment in ways to manipulate PageRank,
though one search engine optimization consultant commented, “PageRank can be
manipulated, but before doing that, I need to point out that a page will be included in the
Google Index o_nly if one or more pages on the web link to it. That’s according to
Google” (Craven, 2006).

An Army of Davids: A Case Study

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In one ﬁnal section of analysis, I turn to the organic search results found within
Google to consider whether a single search may help illuminate the philosophical
questions raised in this chapter. On January 1, 2007, I launched my web browser and
“googled” for [army of davids], the short title for Glenn Reynolds’ (2006) recent book,
An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat
Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths. In his book, Reynolds offers an
extensive list of examples of how individuals are outrnaneuvering large institutions,
thanks to information technology, and as such, a search for information related to his
book may make for an interesting, if not ironic, case study. Searching for a book about
the Intemet’s utility for an army of individuals is ironic because such a query appeals to
both individual web content producers (through its content) and commercial institutions
(through the virtue that the book is for sale, and is promoted on Reynolds’ popular blog,
InstaPundit.com).

The cast study, then, is a search for material related to Reynolds book, using the
most popular search tool available, Google. The top ten most “relevant” websites related
to the query [army of davids] include:

1. Amazon.com’s page featuring the sale of An Army of Davids.

2. Business Opportunities Weblog. This blog is “a moderated list of legitimate

business opportunities for entrepreneurs. It is presented like a weblog with

chronological archives and extensive outbound links.” The organizer of this blog
gives a brief blurb related to the book.

3. David Lee Roth’s “Roth Army” website, complete with a “Sammy Hagar

insult generator”.

4. Blogger Michelle Malkin’s summary of the buzz surrounding An Army of
Davids

5. Blogger Wonkeete’s review of a debate among Rhenolds, Trippi, and Barry C.

Lynn, author of End of the Line about the power of the lntemet to revolutionize

the political landscape.

6. Barnes & Noble.com’s page featuring the sale of An Army of Davids
7. Political Pundit and Blogger Arianna Hufﬁngton’s review of the book

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8. University of Texas at Austin faculty member Clay Spinuzzi’s review of the
book.

9. Blogger Andrew Sullivans comments on a FOIAed Rumsfeld memo from 9-

11, which seems to implicate a coordinated effort to pin 9-11 on Sadaam Hussein.

He uses the title, “Army of Davids” for his blog posting.

10. The limited government think-tank Cato Institute describes a book talk given

by Glenn Reynolds on An Army of Davids.

These results can be read through the lens of any one of the three perspectives
discussed in this chapter. The egalitarian-utopian would likely be pleased with these
ﬁndings, appreciating the heavy presence of Reynolds’ blogger loyalists. Six of the top
ten results are blog-style entries, though they varying in their relevancy to Reynolds’ text
(one being completely unrelated). The egalitarian-utopian may be concerned, however,
that Reynolds’ own blog does not make Google’s top ten (it was number 12 on this
particular day with this query).

The structuralist would likely not be surprised by the heavy commercial inﬂuence
in the search results. Two of the top six organic results are sites selling the book, with the
top spot held by the ultimate lntemet commercial Goliath, Amazon.com. The
structuralist would argue that when it matters, commercial institutions, through their
heavy capitalization of web technologies, are easily able to outpace hobbyists in gaining
the top position on search results. By working closely with other commercial operations
like Google, large book sellers are able to maximize the rank of their sites through the
efforts of their army of professional information architects. In this way, the lntemet
mirrors real-world dominance and control of institutions over their users.

The poststructuralist may say that the uneven results of this search query point to

the complex set of relations involved in the information economy of the lntemet. By

using Google, a user actively participates in a matrix of power, the results of which are

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best demonstrated in the search results themselves. No single entity, bloggers or
commercial vendors, were able to fully capture the coveted top ten. Bloggers held more
spots, but commercial entities held the higher rankings. Even David Lee Roth’s fan
website is an indication of the enigmatic circuit of power-knowledge exchange found on
the lntemet. The post-structuralist may also observe that different queries produce
different results. A search for [“army of davids”] is different than [army of davids]
(without quotations), making control over lntemet (by either commercial institutions or
independent-minded bloggers) impossible. Thus, structuralist hegemonic visions of
dominance or egalitarian’s utopian beliefs ring hollow when confronted with the organic
results of a Google search.
A Complicated Summary

Survey research on the lntemet has shown that the majority of lntemet users in
the United States rely on search engines to ﬁnd information that is relevant to their needs.
Search engines are more than just tools that web surfers use to ﬁnd information; rather,
they are regular components of the lntemet, shaping the experience for most users in their
daily surﬁng (Fallows, Rainie, & Mudd, 2004). This is understandable, given the
challenges of navigating an expansive space without formal hierarchy. More alarming,
however, is the trust lntemet users lay at the feet of these search engines, like Google.
Fallows (2005) has provided two ﬁndings which raise concern about how search engines
are viewed by those who use them. First, lntemet users are very positive, but
unsophisticated in how they use search engines. They feel search engines provide them
with satisfying answers, and typically settle on the use of one search engine, regardless of

how search technology may change over time. Second, many lntemet users are unaware

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of the distinction between paid and unpaid results. Often, users of the Web lack any
awareness as to the ﬁnancial incentives that affect how search engines perform.

These empirical ﬁndings support the central thesis of this essay. The lntemet is
accepted by some as a value-free knowledge network, a heteroarchical space in which
diversity of information reigns supreme. Capitalizing on the robust faith modern
societies place in technology, technopundits such as Joe Trippi (2004) have cast the
lntemet as the “last hope for democracy” (p. 5). However, a Foucaultian analytic can
problematize the notion of ‘value-free’ information. Whether in the classroom, the
printing press, or the lntemet, knowledge is a product of power relations, and as such,
remains value-laden. On the vast plains of the lntemet, it is Google that categorizes the
enormous diversity of ideas to a simple list of ten “relevant” results. It creates abstracts
of the lntemet by reducing the full panorama of ideas to a more dense, but manageable
representation. While useful, necessary, and arguably inevitable, search engines are
identiﬁable players in the truth-power-knowledge circuit. What they are not, though, are
hegemonic monsters. This chapter rejects a perspective that casts the search engines as
the central player in the attempt to control the lntemet. Such a story would not be the
best use of Foucault. As Prado (2000) writes, “What Foucault does is provide a new way
of saying something about how the vastly complex totality of human actions regulates
behavior without that totality having regulation as its objective” (emphasis in original, p.
70).

Power and the lntemet is not a simple story to tell. Absent from this tale is a
simple binary distinction between those that have all the power and those that do not. It

would appear that complexity is the cure for false dichotomies, and certainly the

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landscape of the lntemet could serve as an archetype of complexity and diversity.
Therefore, it is important, both for theoretical and pragmatic purposes, to explore how
power is exercised on and through the lntemet. As Howard Innis (1951) explained, “A
medium of communication has an important inﬂuence on the dissemination of knowledge
over space and over time and it becomes necessary to study its characteristics in order to
appraise its inﬂuence in its cultural setting” (p. 33). Understanding the hidden
assumptions of the lntemet is a worthy endeavor. The lntemet is, as Foucault (1980)
urged in Power/Knowledge, “a study of power in its external visage, at a point where it is
in direct and immediate relationship with that which we can provisionally call its object,
its target, its ﬁeld of application. . .where it installs itself and produces real effects” (p.
97). The dividing practices -— common to search engines in general and speciﬁcally to
Google — do produce real effects, but these effects are felt on actions - not individuals.
Search engines produce — not censor — by providing a ﬁeld of possibilities that both give
options and constrain action through the absence of other options. These effects can be
fairly understood as the “discursive marginalization” - the privileging of information on
websites that best conforms to the normalizing practice that is Google’s ranking
algorithm. History has taught us that an lntemet without a search engine is
unmanageable, and it is not the intent of this chapter to condemn or otherwise vilify
Google. My purpose is to acknowledge the role power plays in the selection process
found at Google. Foucault argued that the unforeseen power is the greatest power of all.
Perhaps in today’s “information age” this is most true where we tend to recognize it the

least — in the search engines that discipline knowledge on the lntemet.

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CHAPTER 5
HYPERTEXT SEMIOTICS

“When I use a word,” Humpty Durnpty said in rather a scornful tone,
“it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

What is a hyperlink? On the surface such as question seems trivial, akin to
asking, what is paperclip? Both are a means of connecting two objects together — with
paperclips tying hard-copy documents and hyperlinks tying soft-copy documents. More
accurately, paperclips can clip more than just paper together, and hyperlinks connect
more than just virtual pages and text; they bind any two web objects on the net together
(text, images, sound, video — in general “hypermedia”). As the inventors of the World
Wide Web explain, “links can point to anything that can be displayed...” (Bemers-Lee,
Calliau, Luotonen, Nielsen, & Secret, 1994, p. 907). But even in its more inclusive
forms, the concept of the hyperlink seems pretty elementary. So why have a growing
number of scholars, techno-pundits, and informed observers contemplated its nature?
What is so deep about a connection from A to B?

In recent years, many scholars have expanded the deﬁnition of the hyperlink. A
more encompassing understanding of a hyperlink is as a relationship between two
discrete pieces of hypermedia on the Web (Carr, 1999; Haas & Grams, 1998 ). Jay David
Bolter (2001) emphasizes the relational nature of hyperlinks by describing them as the
electronic equivalent of a footnote (p. 27). Instead of having to look at the end of a page,
chapter, or book for the reference, the reader needs only to click to the reference. Like
footnotes, hyperlinks are markers, road signs that point to something else. Unlike

footnotes, Bolter emphasizes that hyperlinks can be nested (like footnotes to footnotes)

and make no assumption about what which page in a sequence of interlinking is the

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primary text. Burbules and Callister (2000) expand the notion of the hyperlink beyond
that of a neutral connection between elements on the Net. These scholars argue that
“links can change the way in which material will be read and understood — partly by
virtue of the mere juxtaposition of the two related texts” (p. 84). Links are not just
associative, but also transformative. They do more than provide a pathway from A to B;
“they express meanings, they betray biases, they invite or suggest inferences, and
sometime they manipulate the reader” (p. 84). Bowker and Star (1999) offer a similar
understanding as they suggest that each hyperlink creates a category, a “judgment about
two or more objects: they are the same, or alike, or functionally linked, or linked as part
of an unfolding series” (p. 6).

Ultimately, a recognition of the qualitative sensibilities of hyperlinks leads to
classiﬁcation of different types of hyperlinks. Writing years before the launch of the
World Wide Web, Trigg and Weiser (1986) organize links found in bounded text
networks into a three-tiered classiﬁcation system. It begins with those links that foster
movement along a train of thought, in which the link is a direct extension of the narrative
found in the original text. Links may also be considered “side trips,” or asides to the
primary narrative which enhance or extend the line of thought through digression.
Lastly, links may present a fork in the line of thought, one that provides different paths
based on the user’s needs or interest. While agreement in the classiﬁcation of links is a
dim possibility, most agree that there is more to the link than meets the eye. As Battro
(2004) suggests, hyperlinks introduce the possibility of exercising a “click-option” that
will produce a “simple change of state in a system,” one that “unfolds a new dimension in

the virtual space of the digital world” (p. 79—81). In other words, a simple binary

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decision - click or don’t click — offers an exponential increase in the number of choices
for the hypermedia reader. A simple quantitative choice yields a profound qualitative
difference. It’s the virtual version of the “butterﬂy effect” (a small click can have a
profound effect on the experience of the lntemet).

My goal is this chapter is to build upon the work of those who offer a more
nuanced appreciation for the hyperlinks and hypertext. The early chapters of this
dissertation feature the tools of philosophy, psychology, and history in describing the
ecology of the lntemet. This ﬁfth chapter explores the lntemet with an additional lens —
that of semiotics and literary analysis. Primarily through Saussure and Wittengenstein’s
most inﬂuential texts, we will gain an appreciation for the implications of hypertext for
language theory. The Intemet’s hypertext represents an exciting opportunity to
reconsider fundamental notions of literature and language — the author, the reader, the
text, the construction of meaning —— in an entirely novel way. The marriage between
literary theory and hypertext is one that is well formed, drawing extensive discussion
from Nelson (1981), Landow (1997), and Bolter (2001), among others. Such scholars are
likely to view hypertext systems (including the lntemet) as a postmodern network of
textual interconnectedness featuring multiplicity, openness, and plurality. Barthes (1974)
describes such a textual system in the opening pages of S/Z:

In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any one of them

being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signiﬁers, not a structure of

signiﬁeds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several
entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the
codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterrninable; the

systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is
never closed, based as it is on the inﬁnity of language. (p. 5)

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Barthes succinctly describes for the reader many of the characteristics of change
associated with a discursive representational system such as the lntemet. His ideal
textual network is like a mobius strip having no beginning and no end, a structureless
system that can be read in any direction with no one position in the text holding privilege
or authority. Unlike Gutenberg’s galaxy, the lntemet may be a universe without center,
authority, or singularity — or so such an understanding would suggest. It is a textual
organism which offers far different possibilities than the ﬁxed relationships in print
culture. Yet in order to understand the dramatic linguistic shift that the lntemet may
represent, one must begin with the enduring but arbitrary connection between words and
the concepts they represent, the bridge between what Barthes identiﬁes as the signifier
and the signified. The relationship between words and their meanings is a question that
has been considered long before the advent of the lntemet, and is best understood through
the writings of Wittgenstein and Saussure.

The Reaction to Nomenclaturism

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein and Ferdinand-Mongin de Saussure had more
in common than not. Both men came from families of wealth, privilege, and inﬂuence in
the 19th century Europe. Each established himself early in his career with a stunning
academic publication. For Wittgenstein, it was his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
which earned praise from Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and some members of the
Vienna Circle; whereas, Saussure published his inﬂuential BOO-page monograph
“Memory on the Primitive System of Vowels in the Languages of Indo-Europeans” when
he was only 21. Both scholars studied language (though Wittgenstein was not conﬁned

to its study) — its development, nature, and philosophical signiﬁcance. Also, each is

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remembered not for his early work, but for their research published posthumously. Yet,
the most intriguing aspect of Wittgenstein and Saussure’s similarities is the
transformation each man underwent from his early thoughts on linguistics to the work he
completed near the end of his career. From the available evidence, it would seem that
these two men would qualify for what Weiland (2003) describes as an “amended
identity,” a change in viewpoint that occurs over the span of a scholar’s life.
Arbitrariness: Through Inheritance and Use

It was no accident that Saussure and Wittgenstein’s scholarship contains so many
similarities. Both men were reacting against the long-standing belief that “words
function essentially as names of objects or properties already given in advance of
language,” a movement widely-known as “nomenclaturism” (Harris, 1988, p. 7).
Nomenclaturism has held a prestigious position in Western intellectual history, due in
part to its position in the religious traditions of the West. Christianity’s account of the
creation of the world is one of the better known examples of nomenclaturism:

“Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the ﬁeld and every bird

of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and

whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name” (Genesis 2:19).
The Koran emphasizes this same relationship, “And [God] taught Adam all the names,
then presented them to the angels; then He said: Tell me the names of those if you are
right” (The Cow, 2:31).

As these accounts illustrate, nomenclaturism assumes a meaningful relationship
between words and their deﬁnitions, but even more so, religious texts were often used to

propose a perfect relationship between words and concepts. It is the idea that if the

names of things were received from some divine system, then the role of linguistics is to

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unearth this perfect, ideal system after centuries of corruption through human use.
Corruption through use is a subtle, but deﬁning quality of nomenclaturism. This
characteristic is most prominently in Plato’s dialogue Cratylus (Harris, 1988). Unlike
Christianity’s account, which seated the power to name with a human in Adam, Plato’s
language is not of human origin, but the work of a ﬁgure who is only referred to as “the
name-maker.” The narne-maker created the language that adhered to certain basic (but
unknown) principles. There was a logic, a Platonic ideal, embedded in the words that we
were to speak. However, this grand system did not hold its ideal form, for through “the
course of human history, usage exercised a corrupting inﬂuence on language, and these
original principles are no longer observed” (Harris, 1988, p. 9).

These are two of the more sensational examples of nomenclaturism. Some
examples are more subtle than what the divine order of names suggests. In The Order of
Things, Foucault (1973) provides an example of nomenclaturist thinking that lies beneath
the surface of language and is found in its very structure. He describes Claude Duret’s
theory that some ancient peoples (such as the Hebrews, Canaans, Samaritans, and
Egyptians) write from right to left, “following the ‘course and daily movement of the ﬁrst
heaven, which is most perfect, according to the opinion of the great Aristotle, tending
towards unity’” (p. 36). The Greeks, the Romans, the Maronites, the Serbians, and all
Europeans (among others) write from left to right, “following ‘the course and movement

’99

of the second heaven, home of the seven planets. The Indians, Chinese, and Japanese
structure their writing from top to bottom, “in conformity with the ‘order of nature, which
has given men heads at the tops of their bodies and feet at the bottom’. Lastly, the people

of Mexico “write either from bottom to top or else in ‘spiral lines, such as those made by

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the sun in its annual journey through the Zodiac.”’ Duret’s conclusion is one of high
symbolism and deep meaning in language representation: ‘by these ﬁve diverse sorts of
writing the secrets and mysteries of the world’s frame and the form of the cross, the unity
of the heaven’s rotundity and that of the earth, are properly denoted and expressed.’
Foucault comments that the symbolism contained in Duret’s description is “one of
analogy rather than signiﬁcation” and as such, casts language as a system of “symbolic
function... but since the disaster at Babel we must no longer seek for it — with rare
exceptions — in the words themselves but rather in the very existence of language, in its
total relation to the totality of the world, in the intersecting of its space with the loci and
forms of the cosmos” (p. 36). Thus, we ﬁnd in Foucault’s description of Duret’s work
another example of nomenclaturism, one that is less literal and more structural. It ﬁnds
meaning in the arrangement of language, even if the words themselves have lost their
“natural” connection to the objects they represent.

Saussure and Wittgenstein were both motivated to devise a theory of language
which addressed what they considered to be the serious deﬁciencies of nomenclaturism.
Where nomenclaturism required a single, explicit connection between a word and the
object or property it represents, Saussure and Wittgenstein both argued for multiplicitious
types of relationships deﬁned through human activity. In short, they embraced the
collective but arbitrary process of language development. I begin with the general
framework devised by Saussure.

Ferdinand de Saussure
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure was ﬁrst to frame his linguistic study around

the relationship between a word (sign) and its meaning. This concept formed the basis of

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Saussure’s science of signs, or what he called semiology. Despite Saussure’s early
splash in linguistics with “Memory on the Primitive System of Vowels in the Languages
of Indo-Europeans,” the majority of his academic career was surprisingly ordinary. He
held a variety of professorships around Europe, lecturing on Sanskrit and other Indo-
European languages. However, this all changed in 1907. While teaching at the
university in Geneva, Saussure took over the general course in linguistics, a class he
taught until near the end of his life. From his student’s lecture notes, editors assembled a
work of enormous scope and inﬂuence, Cours de linguistique generale (“Course in
General Linguistics”).
Cours: The Language of Linguistics

In Cours, Saussure’s (1959) primary task is to explore the nature of language
systems. He deﬁnes language [or langue] as “both a social product of the faculty of
speech and a collection of necessary convections that have been adopted by a social body
to permit individuals to exercise that faculty” (p. 9). Saussure’s notion of language as a
“social fact” points to the arbitrary nature of language. Most famously, he observed that
the connection between words and their meaning is arbitrary. He developed the
vocabulary to describe such relationships, that of the signifier and the signified. The
word (sound-image) “cactus” is a signiﬁer that signiﬁes a large, prickly plant common to
deserts. The process by which English-speakers settled on “cactus” to signify such a
special type of plant is social, communal, and arbitrary. This is not to say that language
systems develop without any rhyme or reason, as Saussure reminds us, the term arbitrary
“should not imply that the choice of the signiﬁer is left entirely to the speaker. . .I mean

that it is unmotivated, i.e., arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the

147

signiﬁed” (p. 69). Perhaps surprisingly, the arbitrary connection between signiﬁer and
signiﬁed protects language from modiﬁcation. Arbitrary connections require communal
collaboration. Language is used by everyone, a product use, and at the same time, is a
heritage of the preceding period. This makes for a complex system that is resistant to
change, and yet, as a product of culture, language is always under change and
development. As such, a speaker cannot by mere act of parole (speech) change the
language system (langue); the sign is not arbitrary in the sense that any one person can
change its connection with the signiﬁed. Rather, the connection between a sequence of
sounds and a concept is arbitrary in the sense that it “could be represented equally by just
any other sequence is proved by differences among languages: the signiﬁed ‘ox’ has as
its signiﬁer b-o-f on one side of the border and o-k—s (Ochs) on the other” (Saussure,
1959, pp. 67-68). Put another way, Lévi Strauss argues that the sign is arbitrary a priori,
but non-arbitrary a posteriori (Holdcroft, 1991).

Saussure aids his reader with this distinction by providing for a spectrum of the
arbitrary. He describes that some signs are completely arbitrary, or unmotivated, while
others may be relatively motivated, in that they are assembled with some purpose or
intent. As an example, he uses the French words vingt (twenty) and dix-neuf (nineteen).
There is no rational connection between vingt and the concept of twenty; therefore,
Saussure labels this sign as unmotivated (arbitrary). However, dix-neuf is a composite of
dix (ten) and neuf (nine), giving some motivation to the assembly of the sign. So, dix-
neuf can have some motivation even though its individual component signs, dix and neuf
are completely arbitrary. Saussure (1959) summarizes the spectrum of motivation he

sees in language:

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There is no language in which nothing is motivated, and our deﬁnition makes it
impossible to conceive of a language in which everything is motivated. Between
the two extremes — a minimum of organization and a minimum of arbitrariness —
we ﬁnd all possible varieties. Diverse languages always include elements of both
types - radically arbitrary and relatively motivated — but in proportions that vary
greatly, and this is an important characteristic that may help in classifying them

(p. 133).

Saussure’s spectrum of motivation in language is an important one, not only in
moderating his theory of linguistics, but also in serving as a reminder that monolithic
generalizations about something as complex and variegated as language can be
problematic. In this spirit, Saussure provides further clariﬁcation in Cours as to the
nature of the signiﬁer-signiﬁed connection. Speciﬁcally, Saussure identiﬁes other types
of relations between words and concepts, devising a broad scheme resembling a network
of connections. An important point to remember is that the meaning of any linguistic
sign breaks down outside its linguistic system. This is due in part to the ites signs form
with each other. For Saussure (1959) language is a system of signs bound by
“syntagmatic” and “associative” ties, which he saw as “indispensable to the life of
language” (p. 123). Syntagmatic relations are those connections within the realm of
discourse. They are the relationships of words that are “chained together,” through the
linear presentation of text. Using the phrase my house as an example, the individual signs
my and house are syntagmatically related in that they convey a different meaning together
than when they are considered individually (Harris, 1988). My house also illustrates
Saussure’s associative relations, which are links to concepts and ideas not directly
leveraged in the sentence. The individual sign my associatively relates to senses of self,
such as me, you, his or her, while the sign house is associatively related to other concepts

of dwelling, such as home, apartment, room, living space, etc. As Harris summarizes,

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“The phrase my house thus represents a syntagmatically organized selection from a large
range of associatively organized possibilities made available by the language” (p. 22).
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein also dedicates much of his scholarly writing to the connections
between words and his meanings, and like Saussure, Wittgenstein struggled to ﬁnd
professional direction after his early success with Tractatus. In what was a pattern that
remained true throughout most of his life, Wittgenstein had trouble ﬁnding his place in
this world. He was known to wander from place-to-place, holding a range of occupations
including a soldier in World War 1, teacher, house designer for his sister, and lecturer of
philosophy. Yet despite (or because of) his restless existence, Wittgenstein’s work at the
end of his career provides illuminating concepts that will prove quite valuable as we turn
our attention to the relationship between technology and language theory. Though one
could write an entire book on Wittgenstein’s contributions to language philosophy (and
many have), his best known and most inﬂuential concept lies with the position he assigns
to word meaning. A review of Wittgenstein’s work will reveal a dramatic shift in his
position on the matter. I begin with his early work.
Wittgenstein ’s Tractatus

In T ractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein proposed that language worked
as a broad collection of picture-relations. He saw language connecting to the world in a
similar fashion as pictures connect to the world. Both do so in a “determinate way.”
Wittgenstein leverages the metaphor of a picture to express what he believed to be the
ﬁmdamental properties of language. For Wittgenstein, a picture is a model of reality, and

the elements in a picture represent objects in the world outside the picture. Because the

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elements of a picture relate to each other and the objects they represent in a determinate
fashion, so too must language hold the same properties (hence “picture-relations”). To
drive his point home in Tractatus, Wittgenstein (1922) employs the use of another
metaphor, that of the different forms of musical representation:

At ﬁrst sight a proposition--one set out on the printed page, for example--does not

seem to be a picture of the reality with which it is concerned. But neither do

written notes seem at ﬁrst sight to be a picture of a piece of music, nor our
phonetic notation (the alphabet) to be a picture of our speech. And yet these sign-
languages prove to be pictures, even in the ordinary sense, of what they represent

(4.011).

Just as musical scores provide a visual display of an auditory phenomenon
(music), so too does language provide a medium transformation — it is a verbal picture of
the world. The structure of language and the structure of that which it represents, the
world of objects and properties, are the same. Just as “a grarnophone record, the musical
idea, the written notes, and the sound waves, all stand to one another in the same internal
relation of depicting that holds between language and the world. They are all constructed
according to a common logical plan” (Wittgenstein, 1922, p. 4.014). Thus, the argument
of T ractatus is that to understand the logic of language is to understand the logic of the
world. Language’s role is to properly and sensibly depict the objects it represents; the
object is the location of meaning. As Wittgenstein says, “A name means an object. The
object is its meaning. ('A' is the same sign as 'A')” (3.203).

If Wittgenstein’s position in Tractatus reminds us of the relationship between
words and their meanings offered by the nomenclaturism, it is with good cause.
Returning to philosophy years after his publication of T ractatus, Wittgenstein revisited

his work, becoming his own harshest critic. The most noticeable similarity is that

Wittgenstein still believed as he did in Tractatus, that “all philosophy is a 'critique of

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language."’ The most notable difference between young Wittgenstein and experienced
Wittgenstein is his position on the formation of meaning in language (Wittgenstein, 1922,
4.0031).

Meaning as Use

This noteworthy shift in Wittgenstein’s thinking is evident in many of his later
writings. Wittgenstein (1964) begins one of his ﬁrst publications of this second phase of
philosophy, the Blue Book, with a basic question, “What is the meaning of a word?” (p.
1). He answers his question not by relying on forms, structures, and “essential”
connections, as he did in Tractatus, but by giving an example of how he now believes
meaning is created. Wittgenstein takes his readers through a mental exercise, asking
them to imagine a man. Suppose we turn to the man and point to an object of which he
has never seen, and tell him, “This is a banjo.” What happens to the man’s understanding
of the word “banjo”? Wittgenstein (1964) wonders with his readers:

Possibly the word ‘guitar’ will then come into his mind, possibly no word at all

but the image of a similar instrument, possibly nothing at all. Supposing then I

gave him the order ‘now pick a banjo from amongst these things.’ If he picks

what we call a ‘banjo’ we might say ‘he has given the word ‘banjo’ the correct
interpretation’; if he picks some other instrument — ‘he has interpreted ‘banjo’ to

mean ‘string instrument’” (p. 2).

This example illustrates Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the activity of language.
Meaning, for Wittgenstein, puts life into signs (words). A sign that is nonsensical, such
as “wootellium,” is a dead, lifeless sign. But how is it that meaning is imparted into
words? Wittgenstein’s (1964) answer in Blue Book is harmonious with Saussure’s
framework in Cours: “But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we

should have to say that it was its use” (emphasis in original, p. 4). In his most famous

work, Philosophical Investigations, we are told that “the meaning of a word is its use in

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language” (Wittgenstein, 1997, p. 43). This represents a radical shift in Wittgenstein’s
approach to language. Rather than ﬁxed, essential meanings, in which the single logic of
language parallels the structure of reality it represents through stable picture-relations,
Wittgenstein now views meaning-making as a process — one that is social, contextual,
and ﬂuid. No longer does Wittgenstein recognize a singular logic in language, “but
many; language has no single essence, but is a vast collection of different practices each
with its own logic” (Grayling, 2001, p. 78). Wittgenstein replaces a perspective on
language that emphasized singularity with one that favors multiplicity, essence for
difference, ﬁxed for ﬂuid, and an autonomous existence of language to a system that is
fully integrated to the diverse activities of human beings around the world. This was a
major break from the intellectual tradition that made T ractatus popular.

What does it mean to deﬁne meaning through use? In analyzing Wittgenstein’s
presentation, we see a much more subdued conceptualization of “meaning as use” than a
knee-jerk analysis would allow. For Wittgenstein (1997), meaning as use implies that
linguistic understanding is a practice not a process: “To understand a sentence means to
understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique”
(199). This skill is quite visible throughout his writing, particularly when he equates
language technique with mathematical technique: “Let the use of words teach you their
meaning,” just as one can say in mathematics, “let the proof teach you what was being
proved” (p. 220). The meaning of words or phrases is a skill, one that emphasizes
understanding how the words are used across a variety of language contexts, or what
Wittgenstein calls “language games”, which consists of “language and the actions into

which it is woven” (Wittgenstein,7).

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The Language Game

Even a quick reading of Wittgenstein would reveal that he makes liberal use of a
variety of metaphors to frame his study of language. Language as a game is one of his
most effective metaphors, one that he happens to share with Saussure. By equating
language to games one plays, Wittgenstein shows that meaning is created through use,
but that use is guided by community rules, much like when someone plays chess. The
player may play the game, creatively pursuing a unique utilization of the pieces at his
disposal; yet, his actions are quite naturally constrained by the rules of the game. Like
chess, the game of language is “simultaneously purposeful and purposeless,” (Harris,
1988, p. 47). Both share a unique combination of characteristics. Games and language
are both dynamic and static, compulsory and arbitrary, unbounded and controlled. Both
Saussure and Wittgenstein recognized this strange paradox as the nature of language
games.

By associated language with use, Wittgenstein is aligning himself with Saussure
and forming an anti-nomenclaturism campaign. Both Cours and Philosophical
Investigations recognize the inherent trouble with a position which claims that the
meaning of a word is found in the object for which it stands. For these scholars, language
is not a set of simple relations, independent and singular. It is a complex network of
relations of varying degree and type. Thus, to understand words is not to examine a
single connection to an object, but to determine the signiﬁer’s position in a linguistic
system, one that is embedded in particular cultures complete with local variance. “The
reference of the sign is to the system, not directly to the world,” writes Allen (2000, p. 9).

Language is shaped through its use, but also guided by the rules of the language-game,

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giving the connection between signiﬁer and signiﬁed varying degrees of arbitrariness.
As we will see, the collective framework established by these relative contemporaries
will prove an effective platform to examine language evolution on the lntemet. Before
we begin such an examination, it is wise to consider brieﬂy how the introduction of
technology’s inﬂuence on linguistic systems would have been received by Saussure or
Wittgenstein.
The Inﬂuence of Technology in Language Theory

The provocative nature of Wittgenstein and Saussure’s work invites its use in
lntemet studies. In Saussure and Wittgenstein’s theory of language change, we ﬁnd all
the elements necessary to examine the ebb and ﬂow of linguistic evolution regardless of
context — cultural, temporal, social, political, or technological. But suppose we want to
add a second dimension to their analyses, such as technology. What inﬂuence does the
technology of transmission and representation of language -— whether auditory, visual, or
through touch —- have on the connections made between signiﬁer and signiﬁed? Adding a
second dimension increases the theoretical possibilities signiﬁcantly, allowing for
discussions of how technology inﬂuences language and how language may inﬂuence
technological development. More importantly, it provides additional avenues to a deeper
understanding of language theory itself, particularly how the signifier-signified
connection may change across technological contexts. For all these reasons, it makes
good sense to explore the linguistic-technological intersection. But what would these
scholars think of this? Of the two, Saussure writes more directly to the inﬂuence of
technology and communication media on language, though his position is surprisingly

short-sighted.

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As prescient, insightful, and lucid as Saussure’s account of semiotics is, it is not
fully comprehensive since it stops short of exploring the important role of technology in
the inﬂuence of language and its sign parts. In Cours, Saussure (1959) argues that
devices external to language, such as vocal cords or the electrical equipment used to
transmit Morse code, do not affect or impact language. His analogy of the symphony is
particularly useful in understanding his claim:

Language is comparable to a symphony in that what the symphony actually is

stands completely apart from how it is performed; the mistakes that musicians

make in playing the symphony do not compromise this fact. (p. 18)

Certainly, one can appreciate Saussure’s line of thinking, and given that he was
theorizing in the late 19th and early 20th century, his theory of linguistics has been
fundamental to the ﬁeld for the last century. Yet, Saussure’s treatment of technology as a
system useful for transmitting language, like an orchestra transmits musical
compositions, is not particularly helpful in this information age. His stance treats
technology instrumentally, as a neutral tool that does not impact the use and development
of language. This is not only philosophically problematic, but it also is inconsistent with
his theorizing elsewhere. Saussure acknowledges later in his Cours that writing systems
constrain and shape language. He passionately describes the “tyranny” of writing. “By
imposing itself upon the masses,” warns Saussure, “spelling inﬂuences and modiﬁes
language. . .visual images lead to wrong pronunciations; such mistakes are really
pathological” (p. 31). Saussure was reacting against the inﬂuence of how language is
represented on language itself — another example of “constructure” (see Chapters 2 and

3). He properly recognizes that the technology of writing has signiﬁcant inﬂuence in the

direction of development for language. While Saussure acknowledges the role of writing

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in impacting language, he neglects to extend this understanding to other technologies like
Morse code communication.

Though he ignores the effects of technology in language development, Saussure
certainly recognizes the inﬂuence of geo-political forces on language. Saussure explores
several social and political forces which pressure language systems to change. He writes,
“Great historical events like the Roman conquest have an incalculable inﬂuence on a host
of linguistic facts. Colonization, which is only one form that conquest may take, brings
about changes in an idiom by transporting it into different surroundings” (p. 20). If great
historical events can inﬂuence language, why not consider the impact of great
technological developments such as print media, alphabets, or digital information
networks? It is unfortunate that such a question was ignored by Saussure, as those
interested in semiotics could have beneﬁted from his diligent scholarship. This leaves a
Course in General Linguistics as a work of great insight, but poor foresight.

This lamentation aside, it is important to remember that when Saussure prescribed
direction for future work in linguistics, he left the door open for technological
considerations. He insisted that the proper study of language puts it “into its social
setting and frame[s] the question just as we would for any other social institution”
(Saussure, 1959, p. 72). On the conservative side, part of any social setting is a
technological condition, or more radically, technology itself is a social setting. If we are
to treat the study of language like any other social institution, then there is an impressive
precedent to include those ubiquitous technological systems — from alphabets to word

processors - in its study. That said, what questions will be considered in such an effort?

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The ﬁnal section of this chapter explores examples of how the lntemet may
change language, a sort of hypertext semiotics. By hypertext semiotics, I invoke a
connection to the past, to Saussure’s genius and inﬂuence in early linguistic studies and
at the same time aim to connect the importance of language studies with the principle
member of the information age, the lntemet. What follows is a theory of language
development, one that discusses the continued relationship between signifier and
signified in new spaces. In such a discussion, the reach of Saussure’s framework will be
tested, as the lntemet shapes and twists conventional understandings of how meaning is
made.

Hypertext Semiotics

The lntemet gives the informed observer the chance to consider language in an
entirely new fashion. As a socio-technical environment, the lntemet provides two
noticeable novelties to linguistics. First, it provides a chance for scholars to see language
change occur amongst the most diverse collection of language users, one that ignores
geographic and cultural borders. Like print text, hypertext provides a “snapshot” of

language use in a particular moment in time. Unlike print culture, hypertext is dynamic,

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ﬂuid, and impulsive. Through the matrix of network relations on the lntemet, language .

 

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use and evolution can be monitored, tracked, and even seen. Using tools like Google

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Trends, longitudinal language usage patterns are revealed. For example, the preceding
chart shows the use of term “metrosexual” (describing the cosmopolitan male archetype)
on the lntemet. Searches for that term dominated 2004, but have slowly trickeled down
since then. Through a ﬂuid, dynamic, and open system of representation, the building
blocks of Saussure’s and Wittgenstein’s language theories take on a new and different
life. Second, the lntemet provides more than just a new venue for old language theory.
Rather than merely reafﬁrming the past, the lntemet also affords new developments of
linguistical understanding, those that draw from a posstructural perspective of language. I
will begin with how the lntemet reafﬁrms, or at least recasts, Saussure and Wittgenstein’s
language theories before I turn to what new developments the lntemet may offer.

At the basis of both Wittgenstein and Saussure’s semiotics is the arbitrary but
constrained connection between sign and signiﬁer. Though each scholar uses different
vocabulary, the types of connections between words and their meanings is a subject of
importance to both. On the lntemet, the signiﬁer-signiﬁed connection is reafﬁrmed in
the most dramatic fashions. In both Cours and Philosophical Investigations, Saussure
and Wittgenstein offer a variety of examples of the different types of connections
between words and their meanings as a way to reinforce the notion that their language
ideas are not restrained to a single language and culture. The ﬁrst principle of a hypertext
semiotics is that the connection between words and their various meanings has physical
representation via the hyperlink.

The Linguistic Significance of the Hyperlink
Traditionally, the hyperlink has been seen as a navigation tool, as a means for

asynchronous arrangement of information. Certainly, this is one use of hyperlinking.

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However, the hyperlink is also a means of explicitly designating a relationship between a
word (sign) and another idea (or group of ideas). Meaning on the Web is strongly
inﬂuenced by such practices. Consider if I were to publish this chapter on the lntemet.
Because I am writing in English, I am constrained by the typical conventions of the
English language game. There are certain established practices which dictate the form
and function of my words and sentences, just as there are for the English speaker.
However, as I write, the lntemet allows for other linguistic possibilities. For example,
suppose in referencing one of my favorite philosophers of technology, Nicholas C.
Burbules, I create a hyperlink to his political blog. This would create a certain type of
meaning, a speciﬁc signiﬁed-signiﬁer connection, and a particular meaning as use.
Certainly, a different meaning would be created if I linked Professor Burbules’ name to
his academic website. As such, hypertext reinforces the pre-Intemet ideas of Saussure
and Wittgenstein by conﬁrming meaning’s deﬁnition through use and arbitrary signiﬁer-
signiﬁed connection. But it does more than this. When I write for print or speak to an
audience, I impart syntagmatic relationships on my words through their order. This is
roughly the extent of my control over the network of relations for my words. I cannot
suggest explicit signiﬁer associations for my audience. But through hyperlinking, I can
explicitly express what Saussure called associative relationships. I can dictate how
words are associated with other dimensions of meaning. Am I referring to Nicholas
Burbules the academic philosopher or progressive political commentator? Hypertext
allows me to explicitly deﬁne such a connection. Put another way, the language game on
the lntemet is multidimensional.

The Linguistic Significance of Search Engines

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Hypertext is not the sole means in a hypertext semiotics to expresses sign-sound
connections. Search engines also serve as mechanisms for linking ideas with words.
Billions of times each year, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines take signs
that lntemet users provide in the form of queries and connect those words with concepts
and ideas, in the form of “hits” (websites). The relationship between search query and
search results illuminates a number of the subtleties of linguistics described in this
chapter. First, we see that the signiﬁer-signiﬁed connection in search is arbitrary. The
results provided by the engine are those sites that best meet their relevancy algorithms,
which change often. Another search engine will likely offer different sites arranged in a
different order to the same query.

Second, there are many possible connections between the sign (query phrase) and
the signified (hits). In this environment, meaning is enacted through use when the user
exercises the “click option” and selects a result, thus associating the subject of the site
with her original query. Suppose someone is investigating me by googling for “Nick
Sheltrown.” What deﬁnes my meaning on the lntemet will depend on which top ranking
link they click on — my employer’s website, my personal website, or my academic site
(all different urls). The meaning of “Nick Sheltrown” is partially created when the user
follows a link, and this meaning may differ from other meanings created in other
contexts.

Third, today’s search engine algorithms typically follow Google’s emphasis on
the use of hyperlinks as “votes” to determine their ranking. Thus, lntemet searches may
best reveal how the community of web publishers associate meaning with words. If

search engines count hyperlinks as weighted votes (See Chapter 4), then they offer a tool

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of incredible power for reﬂecting language use as it happens. If site A is the top of query
B, then this may be an indication that for the lntemet community, “A” means “B”. This
is particularly apparent in the practice of “Google bombing”: the manipulation of
Google’s search results by a coalition of web publishers to make a political statement. In
the typical Google bomb scenario, web publishers band together to link a key phrase to a
desired website. For example, in early 2004 when searching on the phrase “miserable
failure” on Google, the ﬁrst result listed was a link to George W. Bush’s presidential
biography. As a well-publicized Google bomb, competition grew for the ﬁrst slot on
Google’s results between the biographies of President Bush, President Carter, and
Michael Moore. Google has since adjusted the mechanics of their relevancy algorithm to
limit the effectiveness of Google bombers, but the game of Google bombing illustrates
that importance of search engines in measuring the linguistic pulse of the lntemet
(Moulton & Carattini, 2007).

Finally, the linguistic role of search engines also tempers the autonomy of
hypertext. As enthusiastic as we may be for the ability to expand linguistics into
multiple dimensions, the reality of hypertext semiotics is best realized through its use,
and use is most often determined through the query-search result connection described in
the previous paragraph. Given the breadth and depth of the lntemet, it is difficult to
overestimate the importance of search engines in creating linguistic connections, and
unless there is a dramatic shift in the organization of the lntemet, search engines will
continue to be integral meaning-making machines. Their algorithms will distill for

millions of lntemet users the range of possibilities for linguistic meaning.

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As we have seen, the lntemet provides a rich, new canvas against which we can
apply the linguistic philosophy of Saussure and Wittgenstein. It neatly supports these
scholars’ stance against the nomenclaturist view that a single relationship, being the
“name relationship” provides the “semantic basis for the whole of language” (Harris,
1988, p. 14). With varying types of links between words and concepts, the lntemet
conﬁrms the diversity of word relations with which Wittgenstein opens Philosophical
Investigations. As he observes, the connection between the name “Julius Ceasar” and the
Roman leader, the word “red” and the color “red,” the word “ﬁve” and ﬁve the quantity
are all different types of relationships (Wittgenstein, 1997, 1). This is demonstrated no
better than on the lntemet. But to stop our analysis here is to tell only half the story. The
lntemet is also well positioned to inﬂuence language theory in ways that are wholly
unique to this new medium. Though I appreciate the clarity with which Saussure wrote,
it is here where my discussion of linguistics of hyperspace will break with his
structuralist linguistic tradition.

Linguistic Change

Though Saussure recognized the inﬂuence of external forces on language, he
insisted that language could be studied solely from an internal perspective if one so
pleased. As Saussure (1959) explained, “I believe that the study of external linguistic
phenomena is most fruitful; but to say that we cannot understand the internal linguistic
organism without studying external phenomena is wrong” (p. 22). Clearly, he recognized
the inﬂuence of external forces on linguistics, such as geographical and political
inﬂuences, though he argued that such forces were not of the kind that could change the

architecture of a language.

163

To explain his position, Saussure relies on his favorite metaphor of a game of
chess. He suggests that language is much like a game of chess, “if I use ivory chessmen
instead of wooden ones, the change has no effect on the system; but if I decrease or
increase the number of chessmen, this change has a profound effect on the ‘grammar’ of
the game” (p. 22-23). Thus, Saussure is distinguishing for his readers the difference
between internal and external forces on language. External forces, for Saussure, are
cosmetic changes at best -— they are the words that are imported when two cultures mix,
the changes in language when political alliance brings linguistic alliance. These are
noticeable changes, as is the change from wood to ivory chess pieces, but they are also
superﬁcial in that they leave the architecture of the language intact. On the other hand,
internal forces of change are those ﬁrndamental to the nature of the linguistic system.
Though Saussure does not provide any direct examples, one can imagine that internal
factors are those that come from within the community of use, are more than just a
change in word preference or meaning, and alter the fundamental grammar (structure) of
the language. For Saussure, internal forces create change to the “inner organism of an
idiom” (p.21). Perhaps the development of gendered pronouns in languages like French
and Spanish are examples of internal changes. Saussure deﬁnes for his readers the
difference between the internal and external change through a circular reference: “One
must always distinguish between what is internal and what is external. In each instance
one can determine everything that changes the system in any way is internal” (p. 23).

Another way to think about linguistic change in a Saussurean system is to divide
language between langue and parole. Recall that langue embodies the abstract

principles, the rules of the language game. It is the structure of language, a “self-

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contained whole and a principle of classiﬁcation” — something that is not easily changed
(Saussure, 1959, p. 9). Far less stable are parole, or individual speech-acts. Parole is the
individual enactment of language, something that “always implies an established system
and an evolution...” (p.8). Speech-acts both afﬁrm the langue and in varying degrees,
break from it. Thus, when Saussure speaks of linguistic study, he quite naturally
bifurcates his linguistic analysis between the system (langue) and enactment of the
system (parole). For Saussure, the division between langue and parole is parallel to the
division between internal and external forces of change on language: changes in parole
are those due to external forces; changes to langage are attributed to internal forces.

The division Saussure has created is a difﬁcult one —- it is difﬁcult to deﬁne the
level at which change is occurring; it is difﬁcult to differentiate between internal and
external forces; it is difﬁcult to categorize the change in language we see on the lntemet
into one of these categories. So through the use of hypertext semiotics, we may
problematize the division of views that Saussure has created, and in doing so may have
discovered the limits to his structuralist perspective on linguistics.

Superficial Language Change through Technology

Certainly, many of the superﬁcial changes to languages are results of external
forces. As language groups mix, there is a certain inﬂuence that each will exact on the
other. Words are imported and exported over time with few tariffs to block this trade.
This is particularly true of the lntemet. As a new form of representation, the lntemet
circumvents several of the barriers of language development discussed by Saussure, his
emphasis on geography and time are less relevant. Recall that Saussure uses the Roman

Empire as an illustration demonstrating how political changes create changes in language.

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Like a political empire such as Rome, the lntemet has colonized much of the world, and
with each year increases its level of penetration and the extent of its reach. But it is more
than a mere cultural/political empire — in fact, it holds very few properties typically
associated with empires (hegemony, autocracy, repression). Rather, the lntemet makes
political empires less relevant by increasing the linguistic interactions of individuals
around the world, collapsing the differences between local and standardized versions of
language. It is a people-centered technology, and as such, it has opened up the range of
linguistic possibility for people. The open means of communication that the lntemet
offers is like a liberal nation-state, which Saussure recognized as “no less important to the
life of languages; certain governments (like the Swiss) allow the coexistence of several
idioms; others (like the French) strive for linguistic unity” (p.20). Language in practice
takes on a new understanding, where local language evolution is loosed from the
constraints of the physical properties (distance, time) and social properties (civic,
communal, cultural).

On the lntemet, the differences between local dialect and received speech
disintegrate, primarily due to the unique effects of the medium: The lntemet is the
synthesis of narrowcasting and broadcasting. Linguistically, this has enormous
implications. Rather than a small group of producers controlling the spoken or written
word in mass media — as we see in print media, television, ﬁlm, and radio — the lntemet
circumvents such control, allowing local language variations to be broadcasted at an
unforeseen scale. Television reinforces cultural norms of language; it uniﬁes by creating

a common, national linguistic culture. The lntemet has the opposite effect: it blurs the

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producer/consumer role of its users, diversifying linguistic culture through its open
architecture.

Yet, as we begin to look at linguistic evolution on the lntemet, we ﬁnd evidence
that more than mere cosmetic changes to language can occur through external forces. It
appears that dramatic shifts in how we represent the langue can exact an inﬂuence on the
langue ’3 core properties. On the lntemet, there is certainly plenty of superﬁcial language
evolution. Through the Web, we ﬁnd a new vocabulary — blog, im, folksonomy, mouse
potato, pod cast, etc. Two high school students chatting over instant messenger (im) may
type “pos” if either of their parents comes in view of the computer, alerting their chat-
mate that a parent is QVCI‘ her shoulder observing her communications. But the linguistic
signiﬁcance of the lntemet extends well beyond hyper-slang. Through the interactions in
virtual space, we ﬁnd that one of the most enduring assumptions about how language is
enacted is continually challenged — that is linearity.

Changing the Nature of the Idiom through Technology

In most conceivable representations of language, there is a certain rhythm,
pattern, or perhaps — protocol — to how words are delivered. Whether we are speaking in
person, through written text, or consuming media through radio or TV, linearity is
fundamental to the grammar of many languages. The ﬂow of communication is often
sequential, orderly, and hierarchical. Yet, on the lntemet, such attributes are not a
universal condition for communication. Early on in lntemet studies, some scholars
pointed to the staccato interactions of lntemet chatrooms as examples of nonlinear
utterances (parole) in which the members’ conversations weave in and out, competing for

the attention of the group (Wallace, 1999, p. 10). Others have found that interactions of

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instant messenger and texting are becoming some of the most ubiquitous aspects of the
Intemet(Carneva1e, 2006; “Poll shows IM gap between teens, adults”, 2006). Millions of
users, particularly adolescents, use these technologies because they offer the necessary
social bandwidth to support dense interactions with an extended social network. Users of
instant messaging can manage multiple conversations currently, moving in and out of
conversations as their interests dictate. In this way, the lntemet provides for physical
representation for impulsive talk and allows for concurrent speech.

Let’s not also forget that the basic unit of architecture on the lntemet, the
hyperlink, is an ever-present exercise in non-linearity. Within a convention presentation
of text, a link can disrupt the text, subvert its primacy, and send the user to secondary
sources (which in fact may be treated more like primary sources). No technology of the
lntemet is more common than the link, and no technology challenges the primacy of
linearity than this form of information architecture. According to the OED, the preﬁx
“hyper” means “over, beyond, over much, above measure”; hypertext takes the reader
“beyond” text’s core properties of linearity and hierarchy to associative,
multidimensional linguistic connections.

These examples illustrate that on the lntemet, linearity can lose its hold on
language. In its stead, we ﬁnd a form of linguistic expression that is asynchronous,
truncated, and informal. Instead of presenting ideas like a line that reads from left to
right, language on the lntemet may be better understood as a “labyrinth of paths. You
approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from
another side and no longer know your way about” (Wittgenstein, 1997, 203).

The Need for a Poststructural Perspective

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The lntemet does more than provide examples of cosmetic and architectural
change. It also erodes at the structural divisions that Saussure developed in Cours. The
Saussurean framework of the signiﬁer and the signiﬁed presents a useful starting point in
developing a hypertext semiotics. Saussure is responsible for many of the basic
properties of this relationship: the arbitrary nature of the sign, the collective development
of the signiﬁer-signiﬁed relationship, and the resistance of the sign to change. While
Saussure (1959) suggested that subject matter of linguistics includes “all manifestations
of human speech,” language as speech captures more of his attention than other
manifestations (p. 6). For Saussure, “language is speech less speaking” (p.77). As such,
Saussurean semiology underemphasizes the importance of textual representation of
language, particularly the importance differences between the writer and the reader. In
developing a hypertext semiotics, the perspective of the reader/writer is important to
consider, particularly as we compare such relationships in conventional print and
hypertext. The words of Jay David Bolter (2001) summarize this change in the language
game:

Where printed genres are linear or hierarchical, hypertext is multiple and associative.

Where a printed text is static, a hypertext responds to the reader’s touch. The reader

can move through a hypertext document in a variety of reading orders. Whether

multilinearity and interactivity really do render hypertext better than print, is a

cultural determination. (p. 42)

Bolter’s summary emphasizes three important aspects of the effects of
representation on the rules of a language game. First, he conﬁrms the conclusions of this
section: that hypertext has a different structural sensibility than print media. Second, he
properly emphasizes that though hypertext is very fashionable these days, it is a matter of

“cultural determination” whether hypertext is superior to print media. Consumers of

information should be wary of a fallacy of presentism, where the latest is always the

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greatest. New developments in representing language should not imply “progress” or the
dawning of some linguistic utopia. Third, Bolter emphasizes the reader’s role in creating
meaning in hypertext. One of the limitations of the work of Saussure and Wittgenstein is
the attention they give to the speaker/author in exclusion to the listener/reader. More
recent work in semiotics can be viewed as a reaction against the emphasis common to
early semiotics. Inﬂuential semoticians such as Barthes, Bakhtin, and Kristeva are
“poststructural” in that they challenge the position of the author as one who engineers the
meaning of a collection of words, the sign as a “sealed unit” (“whose closure arrests
meaning, prevents it from trembling or becoming double, or wandering” (Barthes, 1981,
p. 32)), and “Cartesian” character of the sign common to structural semiotics (signiﬁer
maps to signiﬁed as x maps to y). For poststructuralists, there is no single aithpritative or
“theological” meaning to a text; rather, the text is a “multidimensional space in which a
variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (Barthes, 1977, p. 146). Such
scholars deemphasize the role of the author (or in Barthes’ case, declare the “death” of
the author) and elevate the role of the reader of the text. The connection between the
signiﬁer and signiﬁed is one that is determined by the reader’s understanding, not the
author’s intent. Thus, many poststructuralist semiotic theorists prefer Kristeva’s
signifiance over Saussure’s signification: “Signification implies the creation of meaning
before the act of reading; signifiance implies that meaning is only ever produced in the
act of reading” (Allen, 2000, p. 18).

Even in the nature of the text itself, the poststructuralists ﬁnd evidence that the
author’s role is a limited one. In “Theory of the Text,” Barthes (1981) draws back

etymologically to deﬁne “text” as “tissue,” an interweaving of “past citations” and “bits

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of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social language...” (p. 39). What we
often think of as the text, is by Barthes’ deﬁnition the “work.” As Barthes (1977)
explains “. . .the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in
the movement of a discourse” (p. 157). Though the hypermedia writer has the
opportunity to explicitly declare the semiotic connections in multiple axes, her role is still
subordinate to the history of the utterances and connections she chooses to employ. All
linguistics instances are what Bakhtin called “dialogic” in that they are dependent upon
prior usage. “The word in language is half someone else’s,” wrote Bakhtin (1981, p.
293). Language becomes one’s own when the speaker “populates it with his own
intentions”; yet, the word is never fully his, even after he appropriates it. It will continue
to lie “on the borderline between oneself and the other” (p. 293). No matter the format,
media type, language, the meaning of a text lies with what the reader/listener makes of it
through its dialogic relations with other text. Perhaps this is why Bolter (2001) argues
that hypertext reconstitutes or remediates print; ultimately, all utterances are a
remediation of the past use.

Saussure’s linguistic system of signiﬁcation buckles under the weight of the
lntemet. The lntemet erodes at the durability of some Sassurean positions. The Web
excuses some of the basic barriers of language change discussed by Saussure, and also
blurs the division he made between external and internal forces of change. The lntemet
represents ways in which external forces can change the way language works, the
fundamental rules of Saussure’s game. This should be of no surprise, as we saw in
Chapter 2 the rise of print media changed the dynamics of language, creating the new

forms in the essay and novel. The Web is giving rise to new forms of linguistic

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expression, ones that take full advantage of the multidimensionality of hypertext.

Weaved in and out of the linear presentation of text on the lntemet are branches to ideas
that enrich the underlying thought the writer is seeking to convey. More ﬂexible than the
footnotes of print media, the lntemet allows producers to connect to an array of media
types, or different ways of representing thought through language. Though initiated in a
virtual realm, these effects are felt by both the producers and consumers on the lntemet in
the “real world.” As is often the case, the virtual world turns out to be not so virtual
(Burbules, 2004; Turkle, 1995; Wallace, 1999). Though it is experienced in a digital
plane, the Intemet’s effects are felt outside the mesh of its network.

More importantly, however, to Saussure’s legacy is the readerly nature of the
lntemet. Even more so than in print, radio, TV, and other “texts,” the reader constructs
meaning on the lntemet through active reading and participation. Though the hypermedia
writer may create a text, it will be read many ways, with variation in order, purpose, and
experience. As Wittgenstein argued, meaning is found in use, and use is dependent on
the participation of the reader. Thus, the text is always plural, “which is not to say it has
several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible
(and not merely an acceptable) plur ” (Barthes, 1977, p. 159). Thus, any account that
emphasizes the sanctity of signiﬁcation tells only part of the story, and at that, a small
part.

City of Language

The lntemet is linguistically conﬁrsing for many reasons. It both conﬁrms and

challenges the conclusions of semiology as outlined by Saussure and Wittgenstein. On

one hand, it provides rich new examples of syntagmatic and associative relations,

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signiﬁer-signiﬁed connections, and meaning as use, but at the same time, it fosters the
collapse of the physical properties (geography, time) that make language change a
supposedly stable process and supports a reader-centered approach to signiﬁcation, one
more akin to Kristeva’s signifiance. It challenges Saussure’s premise that external forces
cannot change the fundamental properties of language by fostering new developments of
linguistic expression that follow different rules. They are non-linear, multifaceted,
multidimensional, complex, asynchronous, and evolving. It globalizes local linguistic
phenomena, and localizes global phenomena. Loosing language from the chains of
geography and time may do enough to erode at the very concept of a “language.” Such
an understanding contributes to Bakhtin’s (1981) perspective that languages intersect,
and in the process lose all meaning, “for apparently there is no single plane on which all
these ‘languages’ might be juxtaposed to one another” (p. 291).

This difﬁculty may be resolved if we view language not as a single block, but as a
collection of parts. Complete language may not consist of a uniﬁed, structural, hierarchal
whole, but wide collection of parts situated in differing contexts. In one of his most
impressive metaphors, Wittgenstein (1997) describes this understanding of language,
which he identiﬁes as the “city of language”:

...ask yourself whether our language is complete; — whether it was before the

symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the inﬁnitesimal calculus were

incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how
many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our
language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old
and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this
surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and

uniform houses.” (18)

As Wittgenstein describes, our language is an ancient city, one that was built over

thousands of years. It would be naive to assume that in a little over a decade, a single

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technology could transform the entire linguistic system. Yet, as I have tried to persuade
in this chapter, the change induced by the lntemet is not virtual, but real. It represents
new possibilities in linguistic expression and challenges fundamental notions of
presentation that have stood for thousands of years. Taking a page from Wittgenstein, I
am suggesting that we could view language on the lntemet as a “subur ” of language as a
whole. This new suburb is not the same architecture with cosmetic changes; rather, it is a
different type of construction altogether. In the center of our city of language, I see the
oldest of all forms of linguistic representation — the spoken word. The abilities and
limitations of human beings to develop verbal language systems laid the road map of the
original city. Extending out from our center are many layers of suburbs, representing
different epochs in language evolution. The changes in language were often engendered
by their forms of representation - from the pictorial nature of language in hieroglyphics to
the linear logic of codex books. Now, we ﬁnd a new suburb, not with the straight roads
and uniform houses as Wittgenstein imagines, but a winding maze of foot paths and
alleyways, a network of subways and elevated trains, tunnels and bridges, all connecting
houses that reﬂect the architectural differences of a diverse world. This is a hypertext

semiotics.

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CHAPTER 6
THE STORIED NATURE OF THE NET

To say that all human thinking is essentially of two kinds — reasoning on the one

hand,
and narrative, descriptive, contemplative thinking on the other — is to say only

what every reader’s experience will corroborate.

William James

Every human being is interested in two kinds of worlds: the Primary, everyday

world which he knows through his senses, and a Secondary world or worlds

which he not only can create in his imagination, but which he cannot stop himself

creating.

W.H. Auden, Secondary Worlds

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that a city is “a town or other inhabited
place,” and assuming the broadest possible understanding, the occupants of the 3-D
virtual world found in Second Life would constitute a city, an inhabited place. Though
conducted completely online, the activities of those who enjoy a Second Life are not
uncommon to a ﬁrst life found in many nonvirtual cities. “Residents” of Second Life
create personal avatars and then participate in complex economies though the purchase,
production, and sale of virtual goods. Members build ﬁiendships, date, attend art fairs,
go to concerts, and work on home improvement projects. They form neighborhood
associations and special interest clubs (such as Sci-Fi fans), commit crimes
(cyberterrorism, racketeering) and perform charity. In many ways, the actions of Second
Life are a lot like a ﬁrst life.

Most of all, Second Life draws favorable comparisons to nonvirtual, “real” cities
by the staggering number of people currently “residing” there. The company website

boasts that Second Life includes over four million residents, and if accurate, makes it

larger than most major US. cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and

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Philadelphia (Censusgov, 2005). In fact, New York is the only city in the United States
with a population larger than Second Life.

The popularity of Second Life illustrates the importance of identity on the
lntemet, a chance for users to clarify, amplify, confuse, extend, solidify, destablize, and
explore their sense of self. Second Life allows its residents to ask and answer questions
about themselves that they are either unable or unwilling to resolve in their ﬁrst life (the
one outside the lntemet). The psychological distance and anonymity found in Second
Life coupled with the unusual opportunity to explicitly deﬁne a new “you” makes
environments like Second Life a fascinating extension of personal introspection. It is
similar to moving to a new town in which no one knows you, your name, who you are, or
what you do, and ampliﬁed by the fact that you can manipulate your physical appearance
— your size, weight, gender, skin color, dress, and even your species. As the site explains,
it is “your world; your imagination.”

The existence of immersive environments like Second Life (it is not the only
example, but it is the best) only conﬁrm Sherry Turkle’s (1995) early prophecy about “a
rapdily expanding system of networks, collectively known as the lntemet, link millions of
people in new spaces that are changing the way we think, the nature of our sexuality, the
form of our communities, our very identities” (p. 9). In the mid-19803, Turkle (1984)
described the solitary computer as its user’s “second self.” How much more powerﬁrl is
this relationship when computers connect people and all that they bring with them (ethics,
values, beliefs, ideologies, politics, biases, prejudices)? Turkle’s study of MUDs (Multi-
User Domains) - role playing games in which users assume an alternative identity — seem

underwhelming by today’s standards because technology has advanced past text-based

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command line interactions to fairly impressive, interactive 3-D environments. Second
Life escalates the issues Turkle described and in doing 30, allows its residents to modify
the elements of identity that are typically held constant. Consequently, Second Life
provides a platform to change one’s story in previously unforeseen and unimagined ways.
It highlights the importance narrative in creating identity development and world making.

A number of scholars have argued that humans use the stories they actively
construct about themselves, their lives, and their experiences to deﬁne themselves and
understand the world in which they live. Story telling is a way of unifying past and
present experiences, as well as forecasting the emergence of a future self. As Dan
McAdams (1996) explains, narrative is a framework for the construction of “more or less
coherent, followable, and vivifying stories that integrate the person into society in a
productive and generative way and provide the person with a purposeful self-history that
explains how the Me of yesterday became the Me of today and will become the
anticipated me of tomorrow” (p. 306). Narrative and identity have received increasing
attention in recent years in the ﬁelds of psychology, philosophy, and sociology. As such,
to understand how users leverage a technology like the lntemet is to understand how this
sociotechnical entity ﬁts into our efforts to build and rebuild a coherent sense of self and
our own private worlds. More so than other forms of media, I believe the lntemet helps
users answer important questions including, “Who am I, who have I been, and who shall I
be?” and “What is my world like?”

The goal of this chapter is to not only explain what I mean by a “narrative
construction of reality” and its impact on “selﬁng,” but to show how these processes are

part of the regular experience of lntemet users. This chapter argues that the nature of the

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Web is highly narrative in a way far different than television and other forms of media. I
begin the chapter with a theoretical orientation. What follows is a short summary of the
principle scholars contributing to the ﬁelds of narrative psychology, philosophy, and
sociology. Following this orientation will be a more detailed exploration of the storied
nature of the Net.

A Narrative for Narrative

A number of theorists, particularly psychologists and a few philosophers, argue
that stories are a ﬁrndamental tool, a “root metaphor” (Sarbin, 1986), for how human
beings organize their life experiences and establish their sense of self. They suggest that
a longitudinal perspective of humankind’s narrative leanings from prewritten history to
present day yields a bifurcated understanding of the human being, biologically as Homo
sapiens and psychologically as Homo narrans. Schrag (1997) provides a concise
description of the Home narran as “a storyteller who both ﬁnds herself in stories already
told and strives for a self-constitution by emplotting herself in stories in the making” (p.
26). Homo narran implies that stories are a key identifying feature of human beings and
are used to understand others, our world, and ourselves.

As McAdams reminds us, perhaps the most important characteristic of narratives
is that they are generative: they help produce a coherent sense of self (what he calls the
“storied self”) and they create worlds or realities for which the self will occupy. Stories,
exaggerations, myths, parables, tragedies, comedies, epic tales, and so on abound in the
human experience, so much so, that these forms of narrative expression constitute reality
as much as the elements which comprise them. Stories are not mere representations of

reality but are reality to those that live and tell them. Such a reality is necessarily

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personal, individual, and non-generalizable. Thus, a narrative reality is a personal
enterprise inextricably tied to the story-teller’s sense of self. Through stories, we come to
a particular view of the world and ourselves. Yet, the exploration of a narrative reality
and self is an undervalued activity, perhaps because of the ubiquity of the activity: “Its
form is so familiar and ubiquitous that it is likely to be overlooked,” wrote Bruner, “in
much of the same way as we suppose that the ﬁsh will be the last to discover water” (p.
4).

The belief that narrative can constitute reality and is instrumental in the
production of self is an important claim for this chapter and narrative psychology as a
whole. These conclusions are not necessarily intuitive, and as such, require some
explanation. How is it that words constitute their own psychological reality? After all,
don’t we merely use words to describe the “real” world? And how is it that stories
inform our sense of identity? The answers to these questions come in two phases. First, I
discuss the importance of words, and more generally language itself, to the human
psyche. Through the inﬂuential Russian Psychologist V.S. Vygotsky and narrative
pioneer Jerome Brunet, the central role of language will be established. Vygotsky argued
that language constitutes reality and Bruner described reason/logic and narrative as the
“two hands” of human sense-making. Second, using the illuminating work of Nelson
Goodman, the mechanics of the narrative construction of reality and self will be explored.
Goodman’s work provides a provisionary framework for how humans may come to
construct their worlds.

The Importance of Language

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L.S. Vygotsky was an amazingly proliﬁc psychologist whose work is still highly
inﬂuential today, an impressive feat given that his research career spanned only ten years
due to a premature death from tuberculosis. One of the deﬁning characteristics of
Vygotsky’s writing and research is his belief that learning and development must be
understood through their social environment, a perspective often labeled as
“sociocultural.” The most important cultural tool in a Vygotskyian sociocultural
perspective is language, a fact reﬂected by Vygotsky’s extensive attention to its
deve10pment and role in human cognition.

The link between language and thought for the socioculturalist is a critical
connection that warrants discussion. Vygotsky describes that as a child works to solve a
problem, she will rely on speech to extend and even transform her thinking. For
Vygotsky (1978), this convergence of language and activity is “the most signiﬁcant
moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human
forms of practical and abstract intelligence” (p. 24). Language frees us from our
immediate perceptual experience, and allows us to extend knowing to the unseen, the
unexperienced, and the unknown. When children use language, they ascribe to a system
presented by their culture in an effort to construct a coherent representation of the world.
It is more than merely a means of communicating; rather, it is the means by which social
interaction and higher psychological functions are internalized (Miller, 2002). More than
anything, language is a tool used to make sense of the world (Bruner, 1986, p. 72).

Vygotsky argued that the cognitive and communicative functions inherent to
language give children new mental facilities by which to develop. Language ﬁlters into

the child’s subterranean mental processes, giving structure to experience. As Bruner

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(1991) concisely stated, “The structure of language and the structure of thought
eventually become inextricable” (p. 5). Language is thought; thought is language. This
relationship is the basis for a narrative construction of reality. The nature of language
constrains and extends the child’s construction of the world around her. It does more
than just color our experiences; it makes our worlds. If language structures her thinking,
then words are the best suited building blocks for her conceptualization of reality.

As a cultural system, language empowers reality construction. This pluralistic
sense of the universe is centuries old. Beginning with Immanuel Kant, philosophy has
gradually retreated from a single ﬁxed world to the existence of many worlds (Heim,
1993). Recently, philosophers such as Nelson Goodman recognize language’s central
role in the creation of our worlds. Goodman contends that the activity of world-making
is complex, but above all it involves “making not with hands but with minds, or rather
with languages or other symbolic systems” (Goodman, 1978, p. 42). Language, it would
appear, shall serve as the bedrock of any narrative reality we hope to ﬁnd —- not just
because language is the mode of narrative, but because it is the mode of reality. Not
surprisingly, Bruner’s (1991) words capture the essence of the matter: “. . .cultural
products, like language and other symbolic systems, mediate thought and place their
stamp on our representations of reality” (p. 3).

Vygotsky (1978) made a convincing argument for the role of language in a
narrative construction of reality. He placed the complexity of human development within
a social context through the use of language, “a development process deeply rooted in the
links between individual and society” (p. 30). As the tool in our cultural toolkit, language

forms our thinking, as well as shapes our reality. Yet, to argue that language and

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narrative are used to structure our experiences is not to exclude reason, logic, and
rationalism; rather, it is more likely that our psychological organization of reality relies
on multiple methods. Jerome Bruner is sensitive to this relationship, offering one reality
divided into two branches.

Bruner (1986) argued that the human psychological reality is bifurcated into two
spheres: the structured realm of the paradigmatic mode of logic and science and the mode
of story and narrative. Essentially, this is a dichotomy between the world of nature and
the interaction of human affairs. These two modes of thinking, irreducible to yet
complementary of each other, are illustrated in the Western world’s approach to
explaining the origins of the universe. Some lean on the story of creation, while others
rely on the theory of evolution (Bruner, 1986, p. 88).

Some in psychology, such as Sarbin (1986), argue that Bruner’s narrative mode of
thinking is not a method of psychology but the method of psychology. For Sarbin,
narrative has replaced the mechanistic and organic metaphors that have so heavily shaped
the practice of psychology over the last century. Danger abounds in such a position.
Through several of his writings, Bruner cautions against any monogamous approach to
knowing. In On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand (1963), Bruner employs the analogy
of a two-handed person to describe a balanced approach to knowing. A “one-handed”
approach to developing a psychological reality forms a myopic perspective, whether it be
the right-handed universe of logic and science or the left-handed perspective of narrative,
myth, and discourse. And although many (including myself) are fascinated by the power
of narrative, it is erroneous to become enamored with any sphere of thought to the

exclusion of all others. Bruner (1986) echoes this position in Actual Minds, Possible

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Worlds, as he argues that “efforts to reduce one mode to the other or to ignore one at the
expense of the other inevitably fail to capture the rich diversity of thought” (p. 11). In
fact, to do so is asking the wrong question. “The question is not whether two sets of
processes produce two different worlds,” writes Bruner (1986), “but how any processes
could produce the world constructions we ﬁnd” (p. 89). It is not a matter of
understanding how separate realities are deﬁned: the paradigmatic universe and narrative
universe; the right-handed world and left-handed world. Rather, the appropriate task
involves employing our psychological sensibilities to understand how the two dance
together. That dance, it would seem, is the reality we seek.
Goodman ’s Worlds

Vygotsky and Bruner revealed the important connection between how we think
and the properties of our language. To be sure, the characteristics of language inﬂuence
how humans construct their worlds; yet, many scholars stop short of describing how
construction occurs. Are there general processes that can be identiﬁed? In Ways of
World Making, Nelson Goodman (1978) does just this. Goodman provides convincing
philosophical arguments for the necessity of narrative reality (actually many realities, or
worlds, none more real than the other) and a self deﬁned through narrative. Though his
rich description could be used to inform most discussions on narrative, it is Goodman’s
conceptualization of the processes of narrative construction that are particularly important
for this discussion. As his title suggests, Goodman describes for his readers ways in
which worlds are built. Early in his book, Goodman outlines ﬁve components of world
making: composition and decomposition, weighting, ordering, deletion and

supplementation, and deformation. Though this list is not inclusive, it does provide an

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excellent framework to understand the general nature of a narrative reality. Each process
will brieﬂy summarized.

Composition and decomposition is the process of “taking apart and putting
together, often conjointly” (Goodman, 1978, p. 7). These two process work as
opposites; through composition we combine members and subclasses and form general
connections, but through decomposition we divide wholes into their parts. Though they
work in different directions, composition and decomposition are complementary
processes which form the basis for labeling. For Goodman, human beings often bring '
“temporally diverse events” together under the umbrella of a label (composition), and
also decompose other received labels in their world making activity.

Goodman argues that individuals encounter worlds consisting of common
components, but due to different categorical schema, they emphasize different “relevant
kinds” creating different worlds. This is the process of weighting. Given his appreciation
of art, it is not surprising that Goodman uses artistic works in many of his examples.
Artists may choose similar subjects, but create drastically different paintings due to their
unique points of emphasis. Humans do not, or perhaps cannot, stress all “kinds” equally
because to make everything meaningful is to make nothing meaningful. “Just as to stress
all syllables is to stress none, so to take all classes as relevant kinds is to take none as
such,” wrote Goodman (1978, p. 11).

A related process to weighting is what Goodman identiﬁes as ordering. In
organizing our experiences and encounters with the world, human beings ascribe to
collectively accepted ordering systems that aid in providing order to the world. Examples

include how we measure weight, distance, and time, the organization of music (scales and

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notes), the structure of information (text on a page read from right to left, top to bottom),
and the measurement of time (decades, centuries, minutes). Ordering inﬂuences how we
perceive the world around us, and it differs based on context and culture. These are not
“natur ” kinds, but are imposed culturally on the world. As Goodman (1978) explains,
“Whatever else may be said of these modes of organization, they are not ‘found in the
world’ but built into a world” (p. 14).

Making a world often “involves some extensive weeding out and ﬁlling — actual
excision of some old and supply of some new material” (Goodman, 1978, p. 14). This is
the process of deletion and supplementation. Goodman explains that as humans
encounter a world rich in parts, process, and proprieties, humans delete the details and
supplement their own perspective into the remaining fragments of perception. For
Goodman, the human “capacity for overlooking is virtually unlimited” (p. 14). Again, he
uses artists as an example of ﬁltering out and adding to a perspective. To his familiar
examples in art, Goodman adds the work of scientists, are “no less drastic, rejecting or
purifying most of the entities and events of the world of ordinary things... (p. 15). Such
examples emphasize the intentionality of this method of world making, but in most
instances, deletion and massive supplementation are better understood as a subconscious
processes. For example, the notorious unreliability of eye-witness testimony is a long-
standing testament to deletion and supplementation. In describing “what happened” at a
crime scene or accident, witnesses frequently and ruthlessly edit details, overlooking
some and adding others.

The ﬁnal member of Goodman’s list of world making processes is that of

deformation. Changes to perceived events and elements may include their reshaping or

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deformation. Like deletion and supplementation, deformation changes the nature of the
experience. It is best understood as a distortion of life experiences, such as a physicists
who “smooths out” data to make it conﬁrm to her theoretical curve. In world making, we
may bend the properities of events, objects, or experiences that reside in our memory to
create a world more congruent with the one we expect. As examples, Goodman raises
the results of perception studies, which conclude that humans extend the length of a line
ending with an arrowhead point in and shrink a physically equal line which offers
arrowheads pointing out. It is the mind distorting a physical reality.

Goodman was sure to emphasize that these ﬁve processes were not the only ways
of world making, or even the right ways for all people. Others in narrative psychology
employ a slightly different vocabulary to describe some of the same processes as
Goodman. Shrag (1997) describes how an individual “emplots” herself in stories-in-the-
making as an act of self-constitution. This is one way of describing the process of
narrative. As Shrag’s use of the word “emplotting” indicates, it is not the world acting
upon the person, but the person who acts upon the world through narrative. We cast
ourselves as the protagonist during the chapters of our life story, and the need for
cohesion is paramount. Emplotrnent can effect how we respond to social interaction as
well as how we construct a story. Bruner (1991) explains emplotrnent as “coherence by
contemporaneity,” and provides an example from his own experience of writing the story
of his autobiography:

I made the wry discovery, writing my own intellectual autobiography several

years ago, that once I had discovered in the New York Times Index what else had

been happening at the time of some personal event, I could scarcely resist

connecting the lot into one coherent whole — connecting, not subsuming, not
creating historical-causal entailments, but winding it into story. (p. 19)

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Brtmer continues to explain that through this same process, humankind has
continually worked to organize our common experiences by imposing well-structured
stories. This is how we came to “invent” the Dark Ages, “making everything all of a
piece until, ﬁnally, the diversity becomes too great and then we invent the Renaissance”
(Bruner, 1991, p. 19). Repeating this process has created a uniﬁed, well-structured
theory of world history. Bruner’s observations draw parallels back to Spiro’s belief that
most knowledge systems fail to recognize the inherent complexity of most knowledge
domains, such as history. Demonstrating their “reductive bias,” many instructional
perspectives reduce knowledge to unrealistically simpliﬁed, well-structured domains
(R.J. Spiro, F eltovich, Jacobson, & Coulson, 1992). Although Spiro’s work is grounded
in a different context, I still believe it fair to extend the label “reductive bias” to each of
us, as Homo narrans, for creating well-structured, narrative accounts of the world. By
ﬁltering our life experiences through our narrative sensibilities, it is possible that we
consistently maintain certain inaccuracies in an effort to retain intellectual coherence.

We Are Stories in the Making

The preceding overview should give some indication as to the theoretical
momentum that has given us a narrative construction of reality. Through a variety of
mechanism, a number of sharp thinkers have revealed a fairly intuitive conclusion:
human beings tell stories, those stories are an act of construction, and such stories
constitute a psychological reality, a “world” in Nelson Goodman’s (1978) vocabulary.
Later in the chapter, I will depict world-making behaviors on the lntemet, but before I do,
I must elaborate the development of identity. For many scholars, stories not only make

worlds, but also deﬁne “the self.” It is this “storied self” that I will explore presently.

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If we accept the notion that realities can be created through stories alone, it is a
short distance to the conclusion that they also inform the development our own identities.
There is a substantial body of research on personal identity, involving the likes of Erik
Erickson (1963, 1968), among others. The most diligent researcher of the storied self is
Dan McAdams (1996), who argues that stories are the building blocks of identity. They
are used to organize a potentially chaotic experience, providing the mind with parameters
and direction. Stores are like “psychological glue” which hold the identity in-tact from
the deconstructive forces of modernity (Thorne & Latzke, 1996). The storied self is
different from the other selfs, such as the rational self. As Heilman (2005) explains, “The
storied self differs from the rational and staged self in that we have plot to go with storied
self. It is not a label, afﬁliation, set of beliefs, a stage or a category, but rather a
narrative” (p. 125). As a narrative, the storied self provides a plotline with which to
organize one’s self psychologically. In its organizing activities, it is both reductive and
generative.

Even as we discuss narrative, reality, and the self, it is difﬁcult to separate the
three, for they seem to work together. Narrative is the tie that binds, forming a reality
built on the identity of a storied self. This activity has been documented and described by
psychologists for many years studying humans across the span of life. Leveraging stories
as a sense-making activity is particularly important for those that use the lntemet the
most — children, adolescents, and emerging young adults. Narrative begins early as an
organizing principle, as “children often spill out the events of the day to caretakers as
they are going to sleep, seeking meanings for the jumbled happenings of the day”

(Thorne & Latzke, 1996, p. 372). More evidence of a storied self emerges as children

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become adolescents. Dan McAdams (1996) suggests that adolescence is the beginning of
the narrative era, a time in which human actors begin to construct their own story.
Fundamental to this narrative era are questions of identity. Adolescents in their teenage
years struggle to deﬁne who they are and what they will become. “Modern adolescents
are expected to struggle with the ambiguities of their new ontological status,” writes
McAdams (1996, p. 311).

In his exploration of egocentrism in adolescence, Elkind (1967) describes two
mechanism, the “imaginary audience” and “the personal fable,” that aid youth in
organizing their experiences through the construction of stories. Elkind argues that
adolescents tend to believe that in any social situation, they are the center of attention.
Young people anticipate the reaction of others as admiring or as critical, depending on
how they feel about themselves. Through their daily activities, adolescents are
“continually constructing an imaginary audience” (Elkind, 1967, p. 1030).

The imaginary audience is complimented by another psychological construction
described by Elkind —- what he calls the personal fable. As each adolescent prepares
herself for her imaginary audience, she comes to feel that her place in the world is
unique. Because she is important to so many people (including her imaginary audience),
she comes to regard herself as set apart, special, or different. Internally, she begins to
construct a story, a personal fable, about the drama around her life.

Narrative, through personal fables and imaginary audience, is an important
mechanism for teenagers to ﬁnd their sense of being, and the technologies that form the
lntemet are often accessible, convenient, and conducive to narrative identity construction.

Sharing through and surﬁng on the lntemet helps teens and young adults ﬁnd identity

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closure through its various narrative technologies, tools used to technologically construct
the storied self and make sense of their evolving sets of experience.

To summarize, implicit in the creation of a narrative reality is a storied self. Both
mechanisms are employed to order the universe and build psychological coherence, even
at the expense of contradictory events (Garﬁnkel, 1967). Stories help “people deﬁne
what is salient about their lives, what differentiates them from others, and how they might
make choices” (Heilman, 2005, p. 125). I hope to illustrate in the remainder of the
chapter how the lntemet is a medium of social exchange uniquely positioned to
strengthen personal narratives. Put another way, I will argue that the structure and
experience of the lntemet is uniquely narrative.

The lntemet’s Narrative: Surf, Share and Submerge

This survey of scholarship is meant to have provided some clarity in the
development and meaning of narrative realities and the storied self. As a mechanism for
ordering experience, narrative is an instrumental element of the human mind, even as we
cross cultural borders. Yet, scholars have yet to extend this understanding to
technologically mediated spaces, such as the lntemet. I wish to cross a new border
bringing the world of narratology and the world of hypertext together.

When I refer to the narrative sensibilities of the lntemet, I believe that such
activity can be divided into three separate, but related activities: surfing, sharing and
submerging. Surﬁng includes those actions that generally do not add information to the
Web for those to stumble across. Surﬁng is the root metaphor for the activity of the
lntemet, and includes general web browsing and searching the lntemet. The unique

properties of the lntemet amplify our narrative sensibilities, gifting us with a form of

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media that promotes agency for the individual. This agency is rooted in hypertext and
forms an instrumental component of the Intemet’s narrative backbone. The second, and
equally important category, is that of sharing. Sharing through the lntemet embodies
those Web-based activities in which users leave personal records, prose, artifacts, and
ideas for others to ﬁnd. More often than not, sharing is conducted through Web-based
social networking technologies such as MySpace, F acebook, F riendster, YouTube, and of
course, blogs. Through these platforms for self-publication, lntemet users actively
construct their lives through the words and images that they publish. The third and ﬁnal
category is that of submerging. Some lntemet websites, applications, and environments
offer immersive opportunities for users to (re)deﬁne self and change the building blocks
of their life narrative. Second Life, World of WarCraft, habbo hotel, avatar-oriented
chat, and to a lesser extent text-based chatrooms and dating sites are technologies which
may submerge the user in opportunities to explore identity. All three dimensions of a
narrative lntemet — surﬁng, sharing, and submerging — work together to make for the
storied nature of the Net, one in which users reconstruct their life stories, their sense of
self, and their worlds.
Surfing: The Narrative Structure of the Internet

Surfing the lntemet is a phrased coined by Jean Armour Polly in 1992 to describe
the regular activity of the lntemet. It implies that the lntemet is a sea of information that
the savvy user skillful rides, seeking the edge of the “wave” where her interests meet the
available sources. Such a description often implies a research agenda for most lntemet
users. In her article “Surﬁng the INTERNET,” Polly (1992) provides such a description.

She downloads antivirus software, scans databases for information, reads news and

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weather reports, and forwards information to ﬁiends. This leads to the assumption that
users approach their lntemet activities like objective scientists, performing research
characteristic of the paradigmatic form of thinking. While research represents an
important part of surﬁng the lntemet, it is not exclusive to paradigmatic thinking. Often,
surﬁng the lntemet provides material for the stories of our lives.

As users surf the Web, they often experience it as a story, one in which they co-
author as they surf. The structure of the lntemet is one of agency, and allows users to not
only receive stories (as in conventional media), but to product them through the
combination of their own imaginations and the hyperlinked structure of the lntemet. As
John Seely Brown (2000) observes, “A key understanding is that on the Web there is
seldom such a thing as just a producer or just a consmner; on the Web, each of us is part
consumer and part producer. We read and we write, we absorb and we critique, we listen
and we tell stories, we help and we seek help. This is life on the Web” (p. 20). This is
primarily where the experience of the lntemet is fundamentally different than other forms
of media, particularly television and movies.

As we watch television, we view a broadcast, a single story intended for a large
audience. As we watch the program, we take in the facts, events, and characters as they
are presented and draw conclusions based on the available information — did he commit
the murder? Will my favorite TV couple get back together? Was that funny? No matter
the genre of broadcast media, a user’s experience is one of receiving information and
making decisions based on the presented information. It is broadcast — one storyline,
same characters, same sequence — no matter who is watching, how old they are, how they

feel that day, or what they preferences happen to be.

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Television has a single organizing principle, what pioneering media critic
Raymond Williams (1992) calls “ﬂow.” In order to retain viewers and limit channel
surﬁng, TV networks engineer their programming around preserving the ﬂuidity of the
experience, or ﬂow. Consequently, it is important for transitions from program to
commercial to program to be smooth, subtle, and harmonious. The irony of ﬂow is that
television studios have found that the best way to achieve the highest levels of viewer
engagement is by chopping a plot "into short sequential bursts, each with their own
simulacrum of a microplot. .. the goal is to create an unending series of reversals,
moments of ecstasy and anticipation, which then may be usurped by the commercial”
(Bemdt Ostendorf cited in (Gitlin, 2002, p. 109)). When ﬂow is achieved, viewers lose
themselves in the moment and are absorb in the program's plot. For TV, it’s about their
story — not yours.

The Intemet’s open structure presents a far different experience. If the
experience of television is ﬂow, the experience of the Web is one of agency. In TV,
programming is pushed onto the viewer. Though you can change stations, channel surf,
and TiVO, your choices are limited. Hence, in order to make the experience compelling,
ﬂow is needed. Viewership must be continually distracted as a way to compensate for
television’s passive form of narrative. The lntemet, however, introduces agency into the
experience. With the user at the controls (at least experientially), ﬂow is replaced with
ﬂood — a glut of possibilities, a tangled mess of plotlines. Rather than receiving static
programming as in television, when we sru'f the lntemet, we make our own program
through our interests and whims. Each experience is individualized, surﬁng through the

pages of the lntemet as we construct a cohesive narrative. For a student, this may be

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researching a project; for a retiree, this may be constructing a trip itinerary. Even in daily
surﬁng, the interconnections and criss-crossing landscape of the lntemet structures an
experience that is narrative in its orientation — we scroll through possible news stories, we
follow links inside the stories, we “google” for more information, we email the unusual
or the interesting to a ﬁiend. Click-after-click this is how we come to experience the
lntemet.

The lntemet is a unique medium because we both bring our narrative to the
lntemet and we form our narrative with the lntemet. Consider a list of queries from the
recently released AOL database of search activity. This database provides a glimpse into
the search behaviors of over 650,000 AOL users from March 2006 to May 2006. As we
examine part of the search trail of one AOL user, we see that he is struggling with the

realities of divorce, ﬁnding housing, gaining custody of his children, and resuming single
life:

Charlton ma apartments
gourmet condiments
cheer up plaques
mass custody deﬁnitions
kids health
wastewater jobs mass
visitation schedule
kids gym places in worcester
mass wastewater certiﬁcation exam forums
counter surveilance products
sample visitation schedules

how are fat girlﬁiends
salem probate court decisions
revenge for a cheating spouse

civil war a fathers guide to wining custody
mass licensed daycare providers
ﬁsh chowder recipes
win your child custody war books for sale
martindale hubbell
first date dos and donts... (McCullagh, 2006)

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One can see that this man brings his own story to his Internet experience. Rather
than drowning his troubles, sorrows, and vengeful feelings in television, he seeks a
different experience through the web — one in which he constructs, a place where he can
ﬁnd answers, improve his condition, and move forward. Notice that his narrative is
multifaceted, and complex; his search ranges from queries on kids’ gyms, to career
information, to counter-surveillance technologies. In the same search trail, he seeks both
revenge on his cheating spouse and a good ﬁsh chowder recipe. Only the lntemet would
allow the freedom to pursue such a disjointed story. As such, our lntemet narratives
resist what Bruner (1991) called “automatized interpretations,” which are “comparable to
the default settings of a computer: an economical, time- and effort-saving way of dealing
with knowledge” (p. 10). Rather, the open architecture of hypertext offers a build-as-
you-go plotline. The lntemet surfer determines the direction of the story — custody
battles or dinner recipes. Thus, the Intemet’s narrative quality is a function of the Web’s
architecture.

In Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Weinberger (2002) argues that developing an
appropriate understanding of the lntemet includes differentiating the role of time on-line
versus time outside the lntemet. In creating a theory of time for the lntemet, he makes
the following observation:

The Web, on the other hand, reminds us that the fundamental unit of time isn’t a

moment, it’s a story, and the string that holds time together isn’t the mere

proximity of moments but our interest in the story. (p. 59)

Weinberger arrived at what I have taken much longer to develop, that surﬁng the

Web is at its core, a story. This story is constructed differently for everyone who uses the

lntemet. For some, the story is a nightmare, a terrifying adventure into the unknown.

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Unable to place their experience in a physical context, or associate a name with a face,
surﬁng the Web is like walking blind-folded through a foreign country. I think of the
analogue generation, the digital immigrants who approach their lntemet journeys with
caution. The stories they tell are seeded with uneasiness and uncertainty. Along their
trip to buy a book at amazon.com, strangers may approach them through the form of pop-
up ads, offering them products or telling them they’ve won a prize. Like visitors in a
foreign land, they are disoriented to their surroundings, fearful that with each click they
may “crash” their computer or have their personal information stolen. The inﬂux of
spam complicates matters for such novice users. “Who are these messages from, and
how did they get my email address?” they may ask. What the web savvy may consider
an annoyance, the analogue generation understands as a threat. Not surprisingly, the
convenience of the lntemet to purchase products, locate important information, or
research problems is often not enough to keep the digital immigrant. They may prefer to
drive across town to shop at the bookstore at the mall, stay up until 11:00 pm. to see the
next day’s weather forecast on the local news, or thumb methodically through the yellow
pages for the phone number they can’t seem to remember. In short, they trade
convenience for familiarity.

Fearful stories of the uncertainties of the lntemet, like those of many digital
immigrants, form a stark contrast with the experience of adolescents and young adults,
who generally embrace the lntemet technologies (over 80 percent of 18-29 year olds use
the lntemet ("Demographics of lntemet Users", 2006)). Rather than being cautious about
the unknown, adolescents revel in the ambiguity of on-line domains. It would seem that

the lntemet has the necessary bandwidth to maximize the social capacity of adolescents.

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Rather than restricting their conversations and stories, the lntemet allows for multiple
conversations, organized asymmetrically, centered on the whim of the user. It does not
force what Bruner (1991) characterized as “narrative necessity,” a single interpretation of
a story (much like a logical necessity) (p. 7). It is probably no coincidence, then, that
young users of the lntemet have made sharing websites including MySpace, Facebook,
and YouTube some of the most heavily trafﬁcked sites on all the lntemet.

Sharing: Narrative Technologies on the Net

Sharing through the lntemet is one of the most popular activities in the online
realm. MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube — three popular ways to share on the lntemet —
are all estimated to be in the top ten most popular sites in the United States ("Top Sites
United States", 2007). Sharing technologies represent opportunities not only for lntemet
users to share information or connect with other like-minded individuals, but they also
represent the practice of the narrative construction of self. Through sharing, lntemet
enthusiasts (often adolescents and young adults) actively compose a life story to presents
to others whom they may be friends with or do not know. In describing this
phenomenon, I begin with one of the most popular ways to share on the lntemet — the
blog.

The term “blog” is short for a web log. Like mathematicians, lntemet enthusiasts
often seek for concise terms of description. Blogs can be a lot of things - opportunities
for political advocacy, online personal diaries, sources for news and topical information,
and even reviews of the activities of other blogs (blogs about blogs, or metablogs).
Although the purposes of blogs may vary, in most cases, their use is distinctly narrative.

Frank Paynter (2004) posed the question to the general blogging community, “Why do

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you blog?” The answers ranged from the sarcastic (“to make money and meet women”)

to the philosophical (with references to Socrates and William of Occam). Moving past

the intellectual bravado embodied in many of the responses, several stood out in their

acknowledgement of the narrative possibilities of blogs. In particular, one blogger

reﬂected back to her childhood, and in doing so, captures the storied nature of the Net:
I remember sitting in the hallway ﬂoor as a kid, listening to my mother and her
ﬁiends talk in this 1940’s kitchen. They would connect about everything over tea
and sometimes a martini -- their children, their husbands, Vietnam, politics,
whether they should get a part time job. They would chat about the neighbors,
community support programs, family get togethers, the church where they
volunteered or the annoying woman in town who just joined their Bridge Club.
I'd listen eagerly and later, go ﬁnd where the men were hiding out, only to

discover that they were watching a sporting event on TV....and barely talking at
all.

I think of my blog like I do my mother’s kitchen, which was warm and inviting. I
vividly remember the colors, the smells, the texture of the carpet, the soft yellow
walls, the faces and personalities who passed through over the years, the left out
pie on the counter after a gathering.

We all had a favorite room we retreated to as a child and today, as an adult...you
know, the room where we go to disappear and just be ourselves. When I log on,

I’m entering one of my favorite rooms, a place where I can think, express, be
myself just like the women in my mother’s kitchen (Paynter, 2004).

Blogs and other “sharing” technologies of the lntemet provide their users unique
narrative opportunities to express and construct the storied self. The blog is a place of
self-expression and self-deﬁnition, and more often than not, bloggers leverage
hypermedia to form their stories in novel ways. While bloggers blog for many reasons, at
its core, blogging is about expression of voice and self. A software engineer named Dave
Winer, who keeps what he claims as the longest running blog on the lntemet (started in
1997), has argued that at its essence, blogging is about “the unedited voice of a single
person.” Bloggers use their blogs as a regular opportunity to deﬁne the boundaries of the

self. They commonly seek to create a strong blogging personality. Blogger “Vaspers the

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Grate” (a.k.a. Steven Streight (2007)) advises those that blog to look to their activity as
an opportunity of self-deﬁnition:

You’re ‘the _ that ___”. Fill in the ﬁrst blank with who you are, what

you do, what type of person you seem to be. Fill in the second blank with

something special about you. Something that might even seem incongruent or
absurd, when connected with the ﬁrst fact about you.

Streight gives examples including: you are “the math teacher who’s also a
mountain climber and an author of children’s stories” or “the marketing director who is
also an amateur astronomer.” Streight’s musings on his blog implore bloggers to ﬁnd
what is special and unique to them and build their web personas around this idea. Like
Peter Steiner’s now infamous cartoon in The New Yorker (“On the lntemet, nobody
knows you’re a dog”), blogs present the opportunity to deﬁne your self through the story
of your choosing. Streight’s advice for his readers is simple: of all the stories you could
tell, be sure to pick an interesting one. Fail to do so and your online persona will drown
in the sea of ﬁfty-million other blogs.

As Streight’s post reveals, blogging is the virtual representation of the
psychological you. You are publishing more than just your ideas, your opinions, or what
you ﬁnd interesting, compelling, and provocative. You are publishing yourself —- your
story, written and acted by you. The process is fairly intuitive: imagine your self and
your story (the collection of attributes and events that make you who you are) and
develop a web-enabled version of them. The beauty of this activity, as it is for all
opportunities to deﬁne self through publishing stories, is that you can be intentional about
who you are and what your story is. As Streight (2007) concludes, “What makes you

‘you’?...Whatever it is that makes you special, sprinkle it into your blog more often. This

is how you develop and display a strong blog personality, or blog persona.”

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Blogs are certainly not the only publication technology that has broad
implications for a narrative construction of reality and identity. Some of the fastest
growing technologies on the lntemet — the highly lauded “Web 2.0” social networking
sites — are story-making machines that amplify the narrative-orientation of human
psychology. Through the power of the lntemet to reach an audience —— real or imagined —
users leverage the Web to deﬁne themselves and their world.

Consider some of the most popular sites on the lntemet today, such as MySpace
and F aceBook. Such “social networking” sites provide users with tools by which they
can stay connected with friends, ﬁnd old acquaintances, and meet new people. In the
process of creating their online proﬁles, MySpace and FaceBook users actively deﬁne
themselves in a way rarely done in the real world. In creating a social networking
presence, MySpace and Facebook users must consider a number of questions that deﬁne
the boundaries of their online self: “What are interests, my favorite music, books, tv
programs; who are my heroes, what are my religious and political views, what phrase
deﬁnes me, where I am headed, where have I been?” Such questions may be reduced to a
single question, “Who am I and what is my story?” Am I fun loving, serious,
cosmopolitan, uniquely parochial, mysterious, candid, reserved, introspective, or out
going?

Creating an account at one of the many social networking sites on the lntemet is
an act of self-deﬁnition in which the member must actively construct their life story. To
aid in this act of narrative construction, F aceBook offers “story tools” to accompany their
members’ online proﬁles. These include relationship stories, group stories, event stories,

photo stories, friend stories, status stories, discussion stories, and more. Such tools may

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be used to chronicle life events, changes in perspective, and the evolving image of self.
Most importantly, they predispose the Facebook member to ﬁnd a sense of self through
stories.

The use of the publishing potential of the lntemet to express personal identity did
not originate with the Web 2.0 tools like blogs and social networking sites. Certainly, the
very activity of creating a personal website (a mainstay of lntemet activity since the dawn
of the Web) is a form of identity expression through hypemarrative. However, the new
publishing options available via social networking sites have made sharing on the lntemet
more popular than ever — and with it story making. As I have already argued, even if
those who frequent the lntemet never publish, the experience of using the Net for
research and personal interest is inherently narrative. The substructure of the lntemet
evokes a narrative paradigm. The very activity of surﬁng is story construction, one in
which the lntemet user combines plot points from her life with the elements of the
lntemet. In the next section, I explore the third and ﬁnal narrative form common to the
lntemet, that of submersion.

Submersion: Where the Virtual Is Pretty Real

Of the three “dimensions” of a narrative lntemet I have proposed (surﬁng,
sharing, and submerging), the obvious choice was to begin with surﬁng. After all, it is
the most basic of the three, and may likely allow for the possibility of the other two. Yet,
I was tempted to lead with the analysis of submerging because it has been the most
thoroughly discussed and most explicitly narrative of the three. Submerging technologies
are those I described in the chapter introduction. They are the virtual worlds in which

participants build avatars and personas to surround them and engage a persistent alternate

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reality. In some ways, their popularity with researchers makes them less interesting for
academic study; yet, given submerging technologies explicit connection to narrative,
world making, and identity, the topic cannot be ignored.

There is a growing body of intensive research of psychological and social
submersion common to these virtual worlds including Sherry Turkle’s (1984, 1995)
groundbreaking work The Second Self and Life on the Screen, Julian Dibbell’s My Tiny
Life (1998), Patricia Wallace’s (1999) The Psychology of the Internet, Eileen Green and
Alison Adam’s (2001) collection Virtual Gender: Identity, Consumption, and
Technology, and more recent works such as Edward Castronova’s (2005) Synthetic
Worlds. These volumes explore in detail the psychological, social, and economic
signiﬁcance virtual worlds may have for their users. For the uninitiated, I will describe
some of the more important features of submerging technologies by joining those abuzz
about Second Life, the most popular and authentic of the virtual worlds.

Apparently, academic types enjoy observing the mix of self exploration and
fantasy that the anonymity of the lntemet allows, particularly what is found in persistent
alternate worlds like Second Life. This enthusiasm is not unwarranted. I introduced the
chapter with statistics about the popularity and features of Second Life because this
application represents the most recent and successful of a series of virtual worlds
including World of WarCraft, Ultima Online, EverQuest, Mu, and Legends of Mir. Many
of these are “games” in that there is a quest, objective or goal that serves as a master
narrative for its participants. With a plot imposed on the environment, there is generally
less experimentation with identity and narrative, though players still build characters,

form clans, collaborate with others, and developing unique online identities.

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More important to this chapter are environments like Second Life or There which
offer no identiﬁable plot, storyline, or game objective; rather, the goal of these “games”
is to create an alternate universe, an online world where residents are free to experience it
in whatever way one chooses. Such ﬂexibility makes for an enormous amount of
diversity in activity and expanded possibilities for narrative and identity. As the CEO of
the company that created Second Life (Linden Labs), Philip Rosedale, said of his work,
“I'm not building a game. I'm building a new country” (Sussman, 2006).

What allows environments like Second Life to submerge their “citizens” into an
enthralling experience is the replication for an alternative world for residents to
participate in. As its title describes, Second Life is a robust, lively, and very real
existence for users. On Second Life, you can do just about anything (as long as you
respect others): purchase or build a house, make friends, attend events, get a job, have
sex, attend debates, shop, enter contests, or just sit and “people” watch. Perhaps this is
what I ﬁnd so surprising about Second Life. It’s not that you can do everyday tasks; it’s
that the residents would want to.

The reason for employment in Second Life is to earn currency, called Linden
Dollars, which are tied to real world currencies. The economy of Second Life is complex,
but in short, there are certain things that many residents try to acquire to enhance their
Second Life experience: enhancements for their avatars (custom clothes, skins, body
parts, animations), nice homes and good land, furnishings, vehicles, and other luxury
items. To acquire these goods, one can buy them with Linden dollars they purchased
using their credit card (a income stream for Linden Labs), buy them with Linden dollars

they earned by working (from professional dancers to professional builders), or learn how

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to make the items themselves. In rare cases, residents of Second Life have supported
themselves in real life solely on the money they make in that world.

At the center of the Second Life experience is socialization. Second Life is
supposed to be a party, complete with casinos, dances, clubs, mixers, and “mature”
events. The cornerstone of all social activity is the avatar. Each resident manages at least
one (but often more) avatars or “AV” which carry a name and custom-designed physical
attributes. The design of the avatar and the behavior of the resident represent the richest
source of data for the cyberpsychologists. Both in how residents design their avatar and
how they act in this virtual world is the basis of much discussion and debate. For
example, do people who enter Second Life build an experience that is an extension of
their “primary” (the term to describe the “you” in real life)? Or is Second Life an
environment of exploration of the self, a world of fantasy and imagination?

With a collection of residents as large as Second Life (SL), it should not surprise
us that identity in this virtual world is a blend of the extension and adaptation of the self.
Some residents use Second Life to construct a different story about themselves and their
life. It is a narrative experience that is intentionally separated from their real lives (RL) —
though, residents may identify more closely with their avatar than their primary. As one
Second Life resident reﬂected in the Second Life Herold (an online newspaper that covers
events in Second Life):

In RL, [I’m] quiet, shy, unassuming, never the center of attention. A total

contrast to my SL self. In SL I can let my inner self go and be the person I’ve

always wanted to be, funny, outgoing, the center of attention. SL is my fantasy
world where I can be anything...

As these comments reﬂect, Second Life can be a place of social experimentation

as personal and social risk are much lower (Giles, 2006). The anonymity of Second Life

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plus the creative freedom to customize your physical self (in the form of your avatar)
allows Second Life residents to create an alternative world, an experience that is not
reﬂective of their real life. This is not unlike the participants in Sherry Turkle’s (1995)
study of MUDs (early text-based virtual worlds on the lntemet), one of which responded
that “RL is just one more window, and it’s not usually my best one” (p. 13). So
submerging technologies can allow stories and identities far different than those we ﬁnd
in the users’ real lives. However, recent research has indicated that it is not so easy for
Second Life residents to shed their real-world attitudes, dispositions, beliefs, and
attitudes. A research group from Stanford concluded that “social interactions in the
online virtual environments such as Second Life are governed by the same social norms
as social interactions in the physical world” (Giles, 2006). Linden Labs also recently
announced that it will sell residents the right to use their real last names (before this
development, one had to choose a ﬁctitious last name from a long list of possibilities).
When asked in an interview why the company is beginning to offer this service, CEO
Philip Rosendale replied in part, “. . .sometimes people may want to be their real selves”
(Terdiman, 2006). Selling the ability to use real names in Second Life is evidence of the
growing market of individuals for whom their “second life” is a supplement to their ﬁrst.
Second Life resident “Gwyneth Llewelyn” summarizes the difﬁculty shedding our
narrative norms in virtual spaces. I quote from her blog at length:
The question begs asking, and many will dismiss it saying that “I can look like I
want in Second Life”. Sure you do. But why do 7-feet-tall ogres run for elections
and talk like professors? Why does the blonde bombshell patiently train new users
in scripting or building? Why does the lady dressed in a Victorian dress organise
large groups of volunteers? Why does the guy dressed like Prince Charming ﬂame
the world with his bluntness and strong words, acting as a hero of the nation

bringing righteousness to SL? The answer, of course, is that we can shed our
physical aspect, but it’s way harder to shed our mental processes. You’ll behave

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in SL more likely like you behave in real life — unless you’re a very talented

actor or role-player (and sure, these exist as well!). At the end of the day, you’ll

be stripped off all physical attributes, and will commune with your fellow
residents mind-to-mind. So, where is your sense of identity then? (Llewelyn,

2006)

This difﬁculty of total freedom tainted by the conﬁnes of the real world may be
summarized by dividing the approaches of Second Life residents take to the virtual world
into two categories: augmentation versus separation. This categorization is a
modiﬁcation of Henrik Linden’s (a handle for a Linden Labs insider) distinction between
augmentation versus immersion, which do not quite capture the differences I see. Some
Second Life resident’s augment their real life with their SL persona. These are the users
that enjoy Second Life because it provides for the opportunity to enhance their ﬁrst life.
For them, the emphasis of Second Life is on the ﬁrst word — “second,” meaning
secondary, subordinate, and supplementary. It is they who design avatars that mimic
their reali-life physical appearance and operate in Second Life under their real names.
The other group includes those that seek separation from their real lives through Second
Life. They pour their energies into creating an avatar that is who they really would like to
be in real life, but cannot because of personal inhibition, an immutable sense of self, and
social expectation. Their activities on Second Life constitute a separate identity — a
different name, perhaps gender, personality, attitude, race, appearance, and even species
(Second Life includes animal avatars and mythical creatures). They may not be able to
always keep the two worlds, but there are distinct differences between the two. For the

separatists, Second Life is a form of escape. For them, the emphasis of Second Life is on

the second word — “life,” meaning a separate existence, identity, and being.

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Of course, what is relevant for this chapter is that no matter if residents of Second
Life can be classiﬁed as those who augment, separate, or something between the two, all
these forms of interaction only further validate the storied nature of the Net. Second Life
and applications like it are virtual dramas, and as such, involve unfolding storylines
written by the characters who take part in the production. Such an example richly
illustrates the connection between narrative, identity, and world making. I end the
chapter by proposing how the three dimensions of a narrative lntemet — surﬁng, sharing,

and submerging — may work together as world making activities.

Ways of World Making Revisited

In this chapter, I have argued that three activities of the lntemet — surﬁng,
sharing, and submerging — combine to form the narrative backbone of the lntemet. Their
individual effects can be described separately, as I have done, or they can be evaluated as
a collection, as I will do. In this ﬁnal section of analysis, I evaluate combinatory effects
of these three narrative dimensions of the lntemet through Nelson Goodman’s (1978) ﬁve
components of world making reviewed earlier in the chapter. How well do the activities
that comprise surfing, sharing, and submerging satisfy Goodman’s ﬁve criteria for world
making (composition and decomposition, weighting, ordering, deletion and separation,
deformation)?

Recall that composition and decomposition is the process of “taking apart and
putting together, often conjointly” (Goodman, 1978, p. 7). They are two sides of the

same coin: one the hand, we divide the complex into the simple as to lighten the

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cognitive load, but on the other hand, simple events, moments, and impressions coalesce
into complex wholes. Weighting admits that we cannot stress all relevant “kinds”
equally. To make all elements of life relevant is to make none relevant, thus humans
selectively elevate some themes above others. Related to weighting is ordering, or the
modes of organization that pervade a world. Goodman argues that how societies judge
weight, distance, time, and structure information are unnatural and arbitrary. Deletion
and separation form the process by which humans ﬁlter out elements of an expiring
world as they form new ones, and ﬁnally, deformation admits that humans bend and
distort life elements to make them conform into a cohesive world.

Goodman’s list can be summarized by saying that humans subtract and add,
emphasize and minimize, order and reorder, and ignore or deform the elements of life
that comprise their world. To illustrate this activity empirically, I introduce the engaging
work of sociologist Harold Garﬁnkel. While some sociological traditions suggest that
patterns of behavior and interaction in society are regular, systematic, and orderly, for
Garﬁnkel, social order is illusionary. He argues society is essentially ill-structured,
messy, and complicated, and provides little in the way of universals. In his seminal
work, Studies in Ethnomethodology, Garﬁnkel (1967) argues that individuals construct an
orderly social world through a “documentary method.” People function as social actors,
selecting certain facts from a social situation over others, bending presented truths,
ignoring inconsistencies in an effort to build a cohesive world view. In one study,
Garﬁnkel examined the documentary method of university students. Presenting his
experiment as a new form of psychotherapy, Garﬁnkel invited students to talk with a

“counselor” in a separate room via intercom. Unable to see the counselor, the students

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were allowed to ask questions about their personal problems, to which the advisor would
only reply “yes” or “no.” Unbeknownst to the students, the answers provided by the
counselor were completely unrelated to their line of questioning; each answer was
generated from a random number table.

Rather than dismissing the therapy session from the inconsistency in the answers
provided, Garﬁnkel found that the students discerned underlying patterns in the advice
they received. In short, they constructed a social reality that was consistent with their
prior experience and the social context of the conversation and provided the students a
sense of coherence and order to the interaction. It would appear that when no order
existed in these nonsensical interactions, the students created order and meaning rather
than doubt the sincerity of the advice they were given (Poore, 2003). Such is the way of
world making. It is taking sometimes contradictory life elements, scattered facts,
fragments of perspective, and assembling a coherent world via composition and
decomposition, weighting, ordering, deletion and separation, and deformation.

World Making and the Internet

Turning to the lntemet, it could be argued that the lntemet I have described
satisﬁes Goodman’s world making criteria solely on the virtue of the experiences
common to submerging technologies. Certainly, all of these processes are evident in a
persistent alternate world such as Second Life and its growing list of competitors. After
all, residents of Second Life are continually creating worlds through the design of their
avatars, houses, shops, and their many social and economic activities. During such
intense acts of construction, residents undoubtedly take part in the processes described by

Goodman and Garﬁnkel by merging elements of their own life with the opportunities

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found in their Second Life to create strange, new real life/second life hybrid. Many of the
residents who have written about their experiences in Second Life conﬁrm this in their
accounts.

World making in submerging technologies like Second Life is very explicit, but as
popular as these online virtual worlds may be, the most generous estimation of their user
base still only represents a small segment of all lntemet users. As such, the world-
making possibilities of the lntemet cannot rest solely on submerging technologies. If I
am to make an argument for world making on the lntemet, I must do so by demonstrating
how surﬁng and sharing also satisfy Goodman’s criteria. I turn to this task presently.

When we surf or share on the lntemet, our approach mirrors that of Garkﬁnkel’s
students as we utilize some combination of Goodman’s world making activities in our
efforts. When we surf, we are making worlds through the lntemet. This implies that we
subtract and add, emphasize and minimize, order and reorder, and ignore and deform the
information and experiences we have on the Web. lntemet users come to the Web not as
empty slates, but with distinct life elements in hand — personal histories, calciﬁed beliefs,
misconceptions, and relationships. As we encounter a sea of opportunities on the
lntemet, out of necessity, we discount some and elevate others in accordance with our
world-making biases. The human mind cannot stress all information equally and its
capacity to overlook is unlimited, which is best illustrated in our use of search engines
and the hyperlinked structure of the lntemet. Through search engines and hyperlinks,
surﬁng the lntemet is an act of selection. It may be that we come to the lntemet seeking
relationship advice, and in the process, we negotiate our way through search results,

picking out some information, discarding others, collecting fragments of perspectives, all

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in an effort to build a cohesive whole. Through the structure of the lntemet, we augment
our perspectives and modify our private worlds.

There is also world making with the lntemet through shoring technologies.
Consider the enormous opportunities to reconstitute one’s life and one’s world as we go
online to build a blog site, a MySpace account, or upload videos to YouTube and pictures
to F lickr. Each sharing opportunity is a chance to change the story of the user’s world, to
bend memories and make things ﬁt in a new way. Remember the advice of Vaspers the
Grate: when sharing on the lntemet, complete the statement, “I am the __ that
__.” MySpace, Facebook, and blogging not only represent fresh opportunities to
deﬁne a sense of self (answering the question, who am 1?), but they also represent the
opportunity to reshape one’s world. Such an act not only reconstitutes the self; it
refrarnes the world in which the blogger lives through weighting, composition,
deformation, and separation. Like surﬁng, the sharing lntemet user brings her world to
the lntemet to remake it, but unlike surﬁng, the sharing lntemet user leaves a record of
her world making activities. Just scroll through a F ocebook member account and you
will see the member’s friends, her ﬁiend’s friends, her goals, life history, adventures,
trips, failures, relationships — basically, her world.

The Autonomy of the Web

The world making possibilities of the lntemet become clear as contrast the
lntemet with the other dominant media of our day, television. The method of experience
of the lntemet is one of agency: few things happen without user intervention. Without a
click, the whole technology sits idle, like an engine warming up on a cold winter

morning. Contrast this with television, whose root metaphor is one of passivity. Turn on

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a computer and it will sit there awaiting further input; turn on a TV and it is off to the
races, ﬂooding your perception with images, sounds, events — all the things of world
making, but the difference is that they are not of your choosing. Unlike television and
other forms of broadcast media, the lntemet sits waiting for users to make, remake,
compose and depose stories, events, and actions. It leaves the agency with the individual,
and more than anything, that is what makes the lntemet narrative and positions it as an
important tool in world making. When we use the lntemet, we bring our off-line life
elements — our problems, opportunities, relationships, beliefs, attitudes, and outlooks — to
the medium to continue composing our world online.
End of the Story

The lntemet is a technology known by many names. Some of the most popular
include “information superhighway,” “global network,” and core technology of the
“Information Age.” There is not anything inherently inaccurate with these descriptions.
They properly remind us of the enormity of the lntemet, and its importance to emerging
knowledge societies and economies. However, as with any description, these names do
narrow our understanding of all that the lntemet is. A description of the lntemet as a
body of information shelters us from the storied nature of the lntemet.

The lntemet is more than a stream of cold, rational facts in the form of 1’s and
0’s; it is also a collection of social practices. These practices often take a narrative form
because of the sensibilities of the lntemet — what I have termed its “narrative backbone”
of surﬁng, sharing, and submerging technologies. Even at its most basic level — that of
the hyperlink — the lntemet is enacted as narrative because of the agency it affords the

users. Records of AOL user search histories reveal this. Forms of broadcast media

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including television, radio, and books are only narrative in that they provide stories. It is
far more difﬁcult for consumers of mass media to make their stories through use of that
media.

Throughout human history, from oral storytelling to hypertext tales, human beings
have organized their experiences through narrative. As Roland Barthes wrote,
“narrative... is translatable without fundamental damage” in a way that philosophy or the
natural sciences are not (Barthes, 1977, p. 79). And with each development in
technology, from written language systems to the Gutenberg press, narrative has
remained an important sense making strategy, one that humans employ to construct their
worlds. In this light, the lntemet represents a new opportunity, or in Vygotsky’s (1987)
words “qualitative change,” in our quest to make stories out of life elements. It is what
Dan McAdams (1996) describes as “narrative opportunity,” when he wrote: “Within
modernity, furthermore, different groups are given different narrative opportunities and
face different narrative constraints. . .People offer different stories about themselves in
different contexts” (p. 307). If anything, the lntemet provides a medium for people to
offer different stories about themselves in a context very removed from their physical
world and local context.

It should be reemphasized that a narrative lntemet does not preclude the
paradigmatic lntemet. Bruner warned against such thinking, and it is fairly obvious that
each time we encounter the Web, we do so for a variety of reasons. Sometimes when we
surf, we are not trying to modify our life story. Instead, we may just need to check a
stock ticker, ﬁnd movie times and weather reports, or research how to remove moles

from our yards. The lntemet is a massive information network, and often are interactions

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with the lntemet are about locating and using this information. This is an exciting
prospect for the Web, but it is also a common understanding of the lntemet.
Consequently, this chapter has emphasized the storied nature of the Net and its
importance for identity and world making, so that our appreciation of what the lntemet
includes is not limited to the retrieval of information.
Jerome Bruner (1991) said of his work on narrative:
It is only a beginning. My objective has been merely to lay out the ground plan of
narrative realities. The daunting task that remains now is to show in detail how,
in particular instances, narrative organizes the structure of human experiences —
how, in a word, ‘life’ comes to imitate ‘art’ and vice versa. (p. 21)
This chapter was written in response to Bruner’s call, and though there is still much more
that can and should be said about the narrative quality of lntemet experiences, I hope to
have provided a modest starting point for that conversation — or story. We cannot know
where these new lntemet narratives make take us, just as those in the Middle Ages could

not have possibly predicted the impact the Gutenberg press would have on Western

civilization. But like any good story, it is no fun knowing the ending before you begin.

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CHAPTER 7
CREDIBILITY AT A CLICK: INFORMATION
EVALUATION IN OPEN NETWORKS
Edmund, who had been looking more and more uncomfortable for the last

few minutes, now spoke. “Look here,” he said, “I hope I’m not a coward — about

eating this food, I mean — and I’m sure I don’t mean to be rude. But we have had

a lot of queer adventures on this voyage of ours and things aren’t always as they

seem. When I look in your face I can’t help believing all you say: but then that’s

just what might happen with a witch too. How are we to know you’re a friend?”

“You can’t know,” said the girl. “You can only believe — or not.”
C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

As both a social and technical phenomenon, the lntemet has garnered an
incredible amount of attention for its potential to transform basic patterns of the human
experience. Often, the fanfare for the Web stems around its decentralized design:
compared to print media, the lntemet has very few barriers to publication and distribution
of ideas. Its contributing membership is considerably higher than other forms of media,
giving cause to David Weinberger’s (2002) description of the lntemet as “small pieces
loosely joined” and John Seely Brown’s (2000) formula that the Web “leverages the
small efforts of many with the large efforts of the few” (p. 12). And as a collective
project, the lntemet has been incredibly successful, and now represents the instantiation
of a tremendous amount of communal information. This information — wide-reaching,
diverse, and sometimes dubious — can be seen as both a challenge and an opportunity for
those that seek to leverage this vast information network. Due to its size and open nature,
the lntemet may pose new challenges that will stretch information seekers’ ability to sort,
prioritize, and evaluate the trustworthiness of data. More so than ever before,

information is readily accessible, but the price for this convenience is exacted when we

contemplate evaluating the information we read on the lntemet.

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In the article “Trust, Authenticity, and Discursive Power in Cyberspace,” Anada
Mitra (2002) argues that in cyberspace the ﬁrst question that should be considered is:
Whose voice can be trusted? (p. 27). This is a question focused on determining the
credibility of information on the lntemet. Though this is a very important question, I
maintain as I did in Chapter 4, that the ﬁrst question of the lntemet will continue to be,
“Whose voice can be heard?” Still, Mitra’s question is one that is critical to any
discussion of the value of the lntemet. Recent survey research has found that less than
half (48.8%) of lntemet users say that most of the information online is reliable and
accurate (USC, 2005, p. 5). If we do not trust what we ﬁnd on the lntemet, how valuable
a knowledge network is it? This chapter takes aim at the growing importance of
understanding credibility in open information venues. Of particular interest is the
disconnection between how students are taught to determine credibility on the lntemet
and how such decisions occur in practice. The purpose of this activity is to unify
theoretically how users make decisions of credibility with how they approach the
complexity of the world around them. In an effort to make my case that credibility
decisions are difﬁcult to make from check-list methodology, I will employ Gestalt
psychology and Aristotle’s understanding of rhetoric — but ﬁrst I begin by exploring
previous constructions of credibility.

Explorations of Credibility

For many scholars working in lntemet studies, credibility is often deﬁned as
“believability” (Fogg et al., 2001). As we encounter information every day, we
consciously and subconsciously discard information that lacks relevance and credibility.

Several researchers have explored the different factors that inﬂuence such decisions by

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using empirical studies. The results of these studies have led to a general understanding
of the various factors that inﬂuence credibility. Wathen and Burkell (2002) summarize
the variety of variables that are relevant to credibility in interpersonal and print media:
characteristics of the source (credentials, expertise, aesthetics), the receiver (prior
knowledge, interest, issue relevance), the message (content, plausibility, familiarity), the
medium (organization, presentation), and the context (distractions). Examining
hyperspaces, F ogg et a1. (2001) identify ﬁve variables that positively impact credibility
(“real-world feel”; ease of use, expertise, trustworthiness, and message tailoring) and two
factors (commercial implications and arnateurism) that negatively affect credibility.
What uniﬁes these studies are not the factors they chose to elevate in their examination of
online credibility, but the researchers’ decisions to compartrnentalize credibility. By
dissecting credibility into lists of inﬂuencing factors, these researchers imply that
credibility is a staged process, one that is ordered, structured, sequential, concrete, and
linear.

Such a position is not only important as we discuss the theoretical importance of
credibility and the nature of believability in online interactions, but it also may inﬂuence
those who choose to speak to the pragmatics of online credibility. Technology advocates
who write for a practitioner audience mirror this atomistic understanding of credibility by
offering checklists for making credibility decisions. A representative example is found in
Gardner, Benham, and Newell’s (1999) discussion on teaching students how to evaluate
the credibility from sources ﬁom the lntemet. The authors offer ﬁve general categories
by which the quality of a Web source should be evaluated: authorship, accuracy,

objectivity, currency, and coverage. Each category includes a series of sub-questions to

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help guide the students through the evaluation process. More recently, the large testing
organization ETS joined with a number of universities to design a “standards-based”
information literacy assessment that closely conforms to the Association of College
Research Librarians (ACRL) Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher
Education. According to the ETS website, the 75-minute assessment is “a comprehensive
test” of information and communication technology literacy (ETS, 2007). Such a test
will be used by institutions as “pinpoint speciﬁc indicators that identify a student as
information literate” (ACRL, 2000, p. 5).

These examples of standards of information literacy reveal how credibility on the
lntemet can be constructed. By constructed, I imply that there is no ﬁxed deﬁnition or
universal criteria for credibility. Decisions on credibility range depending on context,
purpose, and medium, which is particularly relevant for this dissertation. Book
credibility is different than lntemet credibility. Often examples from information
literacy studies include in their formulations of credibility contested terms like
“objectivity” and “accuracy,” but this chapter challenges the values implicit in such
thinking. Credibility criteria are made, not discovered.

My principle argument in this chapter is that credibility decisions on the lntemet
are not easily reduced to a single approach, particularly if that approach is a staged
process or sequence-oriented algorithm that is represented as objective, value-free,
universal, and scientiﬁc. The problem with a single algorithm in researching the lntemet
is that lntemet is far too diverse a collection of resources, practices, and purposes to be
reduced to a small checklist of credibility criteria. Not only do many scenarios on the

lntemet resist the use of a staged-approach to credibility decisions because of a lack of

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speciﬁc authorship, purpose, or motivation, but also many times we use the lntemet in
ways in which the primary question we ask is not one of believability. Websites are
created for a wide range of purposes including entertainment, political action, commerce,
personal experimentation, fandom, hobbies, research, professional associations, and an
innumerable number of other purposes. Each genre certainly requires a different set of
expectations when one visits the page. Naturally, visitors of the satirical site

theonion. com do not step through any process to evaluate the believability of the site for
the point of the site is disbelief. Rather than questions surrounding the credibility of a
page, a visitor of theonion. com decides, “Do I like this? Is this funny? Will I come back
here?” So the issues surrounding credibility are speciﬁc to particular kinds of sites and
particular purposes on the part of the searcher. Even within this narrower band of
purposes in site and search, the robust needs of searchers require credibility decision-
making utilities beyond that of the academic checklist. The subject of the question, “Is
this true?” changes how the evaluation is made. “13 this research article believable?”,

is different than, “is this person’s proﬁle real?”

Given the broad diversity of the lntemet, I argue in this chapter that decisions
about the credibility of online resources are more likely to be based on intuitive, biased,
and personal approaches that are more reﬂective of the ill-structured nature of the
lntemet, particularly if the lntemet source is not “backed” by a real-life organization with
considerable reputation capital like major newspapers and new agencies. Deciding
whether an online resource is credible may be more an act of subconscious perception
through which the individual relies on layers of experience to build an internal consensus

than it is an act of external validation through a checklist of standards for credibility.

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Through Aristotle’s writing on rhetoric and those that contributed to Gestalt psychology,
I will create an argument for “perceptive credibility” as one of the valuable approaches to
online credibility decisions.

While I suggest that many who write about credibility in online spaces are
theoretically misguided, these studies do represent an important part of the ever-growing
ﬁeld of media literacy. As our existence is increasingly a technological one, becoming
critical readers of the lntemet and other information sources is a survival skill in an
interconnected world - as Steven Johnson (1997) reminds us in Interface Culture, “there
is no such thing as digital information without ﬁlters” (p. 38). While the checklist
approach offered by Gardner et al. (1999) and others (Schrock, 1999) can be valuable to
raise students’ awareness to the importance of engaging free information critically, one
may wonder if it is realistic to expect new or even experienced Web surfers to mentally
work through a laundry list of evaluative questions each time they encounter a new
source of information.

Rather than turning immediately to empirical research to answer this question,
perhaps leveraging the tools of philosophy and psychology can lead to an informed
understanding of how users approach credibility on the Web. In order to understand the
nature of credibility in virtual spaces, an understanding of credibility itself should be
reconsidered. Fortunately, at the very foundation of Western intellectual history sits this
topic. We will turn back to ancient Greece, where Aristotle provided a detailed
discussion of what makes information and people believable, what he terms the study of
rhetoric.

Aristotle’s Rhetoric

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Aristotle deﬁnes rhetoric as “the faculty of observing in any given case the
available means of persuasion” (1356a). For Aristotle, rhetoric is the domain by which a
purveyor of information convinces an audience of the quality and credibility of the
information. It is the power of persuasion, and as such, is not limited to mathematics,
science, psychology, or the social sciences — for “in its technical character, it is not
concerned with any special or deﬁnite class of subjects” (1356a). Certainly, if Aristotle
were still theorizing today, he would not have limited his examination of rhetoric to
traditional venues such as speeches or print media. Given that the lntemet is capturing a
larger percentage of the information and news market ("Internet sapping broadcast news
audience", 2000), virtual spaces of the lntemet should also be considered.

Logos, Ethos, and Pathos

Aristotle divided rhetoric into three supporting components: the speaker’s
efﬁcacious application of personal character to add credibility to the message (ethos), the
utilization of emotions of the audience (pathos), and the power of proving something true
through persuasive arguments and rhetorical syllogisms (logos). Such an understanding
of rhetoric ﬁnds a comfortable nest within well-structured rhetorical domains — those
when the author is known, the context is clear, and purpose is apparent. Examples of
well-structured rhetorical domains abound in the world of print media. When reviewing
an article, book, or newspaper column, the critical reader can consider (1) the author’s
personal character (ethos) through the known reputation of the author, the author’s
credentials, and past work by the author; (2) the underlying emotional or persuasive tone
(pathos), ascertaining whether the author seems committed to her position; and (3) the

strength of the argument (logos) found in the publication. Concern of the critical reader

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is also satisﬁed by the perceived level of accountability common to print media. One
assumes that authors and publishers alike would not knowingly disseminate spurious
information (though this certainly can happen, as in the case of James F rey’s (2004) A
Million Little Pieces). There is an implicit assumption of legitimacy to print media that
likely inﬂuences decisions readers make when it comes to rhetorical validity.

For thousands of years, Aristotle’s basic framework for rhetoric has served
consumers and producers of information well. It neatly synthesizes the basic components
of believability that are difﬁcult to capture in organized schema. Yet, as effective as
Aristotle’s rhetorical hierarchy is in well-structured information domains, applying
Aristotle’s understanding of rhetoric to ill-structured spaces, those where authorship,
purpose, and context are nebulous, is where many challenges surface. Because the
lntemet lacks the same level of guardianship of information that print media boasts, the
concrete standards of ethos, pathos, and logos have difﬁculty ﬁnding root. How do we
evaluate the personal character and credibility of an author who remains veiled to us?
Aristotle thought the character of the speaker/author so important that he argued:

We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true

generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is

impossible and opinions are divided... It is not true, as some writers assume in
their treatises on rhetoric, that the personal goodness revealed by the speaker
contributes nothing to his power of persuasion; on the contrary, his character may
almost be called the most effective means of persuasion he possesses. (1356a)

His position underscores the complications of developing credibility standards for
the lntemet. This perplexity is at the heart of developing an lntemet rhetoric. The

problem with formulating rhetoric and credibility on the lntemet at the source end of

information is that it leaves critical readers of the lntemet short on many of the

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assessments. If a page is relevant, reads well, and appears well researched, but is not
explicit in its authorship, must readers disregard the information?

Comparing credibility online with credibility in print reveals that there may be
fewer analogues between the conventional notion of credibility and rhetorical
effectiveness of print media and the Web than originally thought. As Wathen and
Burkell (2002) comment, “It has been proposed that the lntemet combines the broad
reach advantages of mass communication channels with the persuasion characteristics of
interpersonal channels by allowing for give and take between the message source and
receiver.” This unique quality of the lntemet, the elegant marriage of broad and
narrowcasting, is what sets this technology apart from other forms of mass media — radio,
television, ﬁlm, and print media. Yet, it is this strange concoction of characteristics that
has created such a stubborn problem in evaluating the trustworthiness of the Web. Never
before has it been so easy to mass distribute misinformation.

Such complications do provide sufﬁcient motivation to move past Aristotle’s
trichotomy of rhetoric, which does little to explicate the problem of ambiguity and
credentialing on the lntemet. If we do leave the comfortable roost of Aristotle’s rhetoric,
where do we go? Fortunately, we do not have to go far for more robust solutions to the
lntemet credibility problem. Once again, Aristotle will be helpful in exploring this
difficult problem of ﬂaming believability on the lntemet through his concept of style —
the aesthetic presentation of an argument. Aristotelian Style will prove an important tool
to develop a more precise understanding of an lntemet rhetoric.

Aristotle ’s Sense of Style

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In his treatise on rhetoric, Aristotle devoted signiﬁcant energies to constructing a
style of rhetoric. He begins by reminding the reader that “it is not enough to know what
we ought to say; we must also say it as we ought...” (1404a). This appears to be a point
that Aristotle concedes begrudgingly, as he criticizes the need to consider the style of
one’s presentation and attributes the necessity of style to the “defects of our hearers.” In
reading Rhetoric, one gets the sense that in Aristotle’s ideal world, the value of the facts
and not their presentation should sufﬁce in persuading an audience. “We ought in fairness
to ﬁght our case with no help beyond the bare facts: nothing, therefore, should matter
except the proof of those facts,” laments Aristotle (1404a). Even so, Aristotle is ﬁrm in
his commitment to “the arts of language” as he maintains that the way in which
something is said has great inﬂuence over its acceptance. His commitment is conﬁrmed
as he prescribes three guiding questions for the orator or writer who wishes to present
more effective arguments. In his ﬁrst question, Aristotle challenges us to consider how
persuasion can be produced from the facts themselves. This demonstrates his bias against
style and for “facts.” Secondly, he encourages the reader to consider how to set the facts
out in language. Do our word selection and their arrangement best support our ideas?
Lastly, Aristotle emphasizes the proper “method of delivery.” Aristotle recognizes the
importance of how we deliver information, and he suggests that presentation is often the
determining factor for those that win prizes in “dramatic contests.” It is they that
consider the “right management” of voice — “of speaking loudly, softly, or between the
two; of high, low, or intermediate pitch; of the various rhythms that suit various subjects”

— that typically are successﬁrl in their endeavors (1404a). This is the essence of style.

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At the time of his scholarship, Aristotle addresses both old media (oratory) and
new media (writing) and sees the importance of style for each. And though he certainly
could not have anticipated the proliferation of a world-wide network of information,
Aristotle’s emphasis on the style of information is a deﬁning characteristic of an Intemet-
appropriate conceptualization of rhetoric. Just as Aristotle emphasized how speakers
empower their words through volume, pitch, rhythm, and pace, in the realm of the
lntemet there are many aesthetic variables that serve to comprise its style. The “look and
feel” of a website is certainly an important aspect of style. Does the presentation of the
website resonate with what the audience has pictured as credible, professional, and
trustworthy information sources? Recall the research cited earlier in this chapter (Fogg et
al., 2001) which suggests that lntemet sites that are “amateurish” cast doubt on their
believability. Certainly, poor quality graphics, gaudy banner ads, and inconsistent
formatting of text may throw the veracity of a website into question, but are there speciﬁc
site characteristics — colors, types, fonts, formats, navigation structures —- that web readers
ﬁnd particularly compelling or questionable? There may be, but such a question is
beyond the scope of this chapter. Being that style is a personal enterprise, it is difﬁcult to
elaborate on any general principles of rhetorical style that apply universally to all Internet
sources. Rather than following the prescriptive tradition of lntemet credibility studies, I
prefer to lean on Aristotle’s use of the metaphor of “scene painting” to anchor our
understanding of style (1414a).

Aristotle’s Scene Pointing
For Aristotle, scene painting implies that we should consider our purpose and

audience when stylizing our message. As in art, the style of technique depends greatly on

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the nature of the subject: “the bigger the throng, the more distant is the point of view: so
that, in the one and the other, high ﬁnish in detail is superﬂuous and seems better away”
(1414a). No matter the medium — public speaking, poetry, prose, or legal proposition —
Aristotle emphasizes painting the scene with the audience in mind. Certainly a legal
brieﬁng for a judge would have a style distinct from a lesson on mammals presented to
elementary children. In this way, style is not a matter of particular rules and speciﬁc
instructions, but is guided by a single question: is the presentation of this information
appropriate for my given audience, thus increasing the strength of my argument and the
veracity of my claims? Just as an artist makes decisions about the nature of paint, canvas,
and technique based on her subject, so must the public speaker or writer do so for her
audiences. It would be nice if Aristotle could have provided speciﬁc rules for the
different media of his day, but he insists that the discussion cannot extend beyond
determining the appropriateness of the presentation — “to analyse style still further, and
add that it must be agreeable or magniﬁcent, is useless” (1414a). Thus, effective
presentations of information on the lntemet cannot be guided by speciﬁc rules universal
for all sites and all viewers; rather, effective websites must create an atmosphere of
credibility by pointing a scene of credibility that is appropriate for its audiences.
Assessing the Internet with Scene Painting

The differences of scene painting on the lntemet reveal themselves through both
the genre of websites and the type of publication technology employed. Certainly,
irs. gov should have a different style than yohooligans. com. In its design, irs. gov aims to
present authority through its disciplined organization, hierarchical arrangement of

resources, and use of governmental vocabulary. Yahooligons.com is designed to convey

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something entirely different - that of a site which is fun, exciting, interactive, and safe for
kids. Both sites aim to be believable, but in different ways. Visitors at irs. gov should
believe they are getting accurate answers to their tax questions. Visitors to
yahooligons. com should believe that the site is fun, educational, and safe. The
differences in purpose of each site change the approach they must take to scene painting.
These same principles hold true if the online resource is created by an individual,
such as a social networking member page. Social networking sites are used to maintain
or develop their members’ social connections. Often, such services are used to stay
connected to friends, relatives, and former classmates around the world. Yet, social
networking sites are also used to meet people for ﬁiendship and dating. Recent reports in
the mainstream press detail violence against members of MySpace who unknowingly
meet troubled individuals on the popular social network site. Noah Shachtman (2006) of
Wired magazine reported that, “With more than 120 million registered users on MySpace,
odds dictate that some of them will die by violence. The ghoulish, encyclopedic Web site
MyDeathSpace chronicles about 600 victims and more than 35 accused, convicted, or
executed murderers with MySpace proﬁles.” Even if lntemet-linked violence is
relatively rare, such situations illustrate another important dimension of online credibility
— safety. The question that brings a user to a page may be one of interest or curiosity:
“Will I like this person?” and “what are they like?” However, invariably the questions
will also become, “can I trust this person?” and “are they lying on their proﬁle?” Not
surprisingly, the style of personal trust is different than the style of a research paper,
making evaluation of a proﬁle dissimilar to evaluating a source for a research paper. This

example throws into sharp relief the need for additional tools, beyond the typical

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“credibility algorithms” to address the ever-growing need for decisions of believability
based outside of an informational context.

The differences of technology of publication also create subtle variations in scene
painting on the lntemet. One such contrast is found in how news information and
political commentary are published on the lntemet through blogs versus how they are
published by conventional media websites like nytimes.com. Conventional media outlets
extend their print-based credibility practices to their online news sites. In an effort to
paint a scene of credibility, they rely on the reputation of their real-world publication, the
identiﬁcation of the reporter, and the disclosure of sources of information (as
appropriate). More than many sources of information on the lntemet, news sites like
msnbc.com, nytimes.com, and cnn.com can rely on the credibility of their real-life
organizations for authority. So for most users of the lntemet, decisions about credibility
become easy when they encounter familiar facets of the regular world online (even given
recent problems at the New York Times with ﬁctitious reporting). This makes scene
painting for such organizations a matter of replicating their real-world personas.

Such luxuries are not afforded to most of the information found on the lntemet,
such as most of the blogosphere. Blogs are an enormous source of news information and
political commentary on the lntemet; yet, bloggers are often unknown and unveriﬁed. If
they expect their writing to be discussed, used, and shared, then they have a different
challenge in creating a credible style. The style of blogging is typically more reliant on
linking to sources around the lntemet, effectively harnessing the power of the lntemet to
paint a scene of credibility. They write with and through the Web. As they provide their

observations of world events, political bloggers often leverage hyperlinks to draw support

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from examples around the lntemet. Consider this portion of a typical post from political
blogger, Arianna Hufﬁngton (2007): “Sharpton has also been parroting the lame
"Where's the Beef?" attacks on Obama. ‘We keep hearing sizzle from the media,’ l_rg
Ml, ‘we're not hearing substance.’ ‘I want to know from Senator Obama where the meat
is,’ he said on another occasion. And it's not just Sharpton. Columnist Stanley Crouch
also took a few swats at Obama.” The emphasized phrases are links to other resources
on the lntemet. The style of the blog encourages readers to check references as they
assess the credibility of the commentary.

For some, blogging isn’t simply a technology for simple publication of ideas, but
it is its own style:

Blogging is also about style. Dave Winer, a software engineer who pioneered

several blogging technologies, and who keeps what by his own estimate is the

longest-running blog of all (dating back to 1997), has argued that the essence of
blogginess is “the unedited voice of a single person”, preferably an amateur.

Blogs, in other words, usually have a raw, unpolished authenticity and

individuality ("It's the links, stupid", 2006).

Bloggers assume a less formal style, but in doing so, often take fuller-advantage
of the hyperlinked structure of the lntemet. This illustrates how within a genre like news
information and political commentary, scene painting on the lntemet is very different
depending on who you are and how you publish.

Gestalt Psychology

In Rhetoric, Aristotle demonstrated the inﬂuence of style on the different
mediums of his day. The case can also be made that style is an important characteristic of
information contained in new media — the lntemet, television, and radio. By resting the

nature of credibility on the lntemet on an Aristotelian notion of style, we have broadly

deﬁned how designers of information portals on the Web should approach the

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presentation of their sites; yet, we have done less to indicate how lntemet users may
approach credibility decisions. For this, we must engage in the difﬁcult complications of
human perception and with it, Gestalt psychology, a tradition of psychology rising out of
early twentieth century Germany that chooses human perception as its point of focus.

In the index of Kurt Kofﬂca’s (1935) Principles of Gestalt Psychology are 23
“laws” that identify the properties of human perception that “Gestalt” (German for
whole, shape, or form) psychologists feel fundamental to the human experience.
Examples of these laws include the laws of closure, good shape, simplest path, and good
continuation. What uniﬁes these laws is a general atmosphere of understanding in
Gestalt psychology that seeks to ﬁnd a holistic rather than atomistic understanding of
human comprehension of their environment. “We have not divided behavior or mind into
so-and-so-many different functions or elements, each to be studied in isolation,” writes
Koffka, “Instead we have followed the principles of organization as they become
manifest under diverse conditions, starting from the simplest and proceeding to those of
higher and higher complexity” (p. 682). Koffka’s work signiﬁes an important break from
the stance of previous psychological methods that favored an associative understanding
of the human mind and mechanistically analyzed the effects of individual stimuli. As
Kofﬂta explains, Gestalt psychology represents a break from those in psychological
studies who hold to the “constancy hypothesis,” which assumes “that we can investigate
the whole of perceptual space by examining its individual points separately one by one”
(p. 115). Kofﬂta and his German colleagues Kohler (1929) and Wertheimer (1925) were
interested in studying the “organized wholes,” and expressed a signiﬁcant commitment to

the Aristotelian concept that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Put another

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way, Gestalt theorists recognized that a collective entity, such as a painting, carries a
different meaning than its individual components (canvas, paint, brush strokes, etc.), and
they applied such an understanding to the study of human behavior.
Principles of Gestalt Psychology

The holistic position of Gestalt psychologists is best captured by Wertheimer’s
proposition, the Law of Pragnanz, which states that a psychological organization will
always favor those structures that impose the lightest cognitive load. As humans interact
with the world around them, they structure their experiences through a biased perception,
one that truncates a confused landscape of symbols and subtleties by favoring a number
of properties associated with consistency: regularity, symmetry, and simplicity (Kofﬂta,
193 5, p. 110). Other scholars have used a similar vocabulary to describe the general bias
in instruction and media toward cognitive case, such as Spiro’s (1987) “conspiracy of
convenience,” Gitlin’s (2002) “imperatives of simpliﬁcation,” and Zipf’s “principle of
least effort”(Chrzastowski, 1995).

Through their study of human perception and behavior, Gestalt psychologists
‘ conclude that the human mind employs a number of psychological apparatuses to
condense the irregular complexity of physical and

social phenomenon to something more manageable, ‘

apparatuses are described by the many laws of "
A L
Gestalt psychology. Of particular interest of this I, ‘

chapter are two related Gestalt principles —

one that is more easily organized. Such

reiﬁcation and closure. For Gestalt psychology, Figure 1. Reiﬁcation

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reiﬁcation is the perceptual process by which human visual systems produce a more
complete and explicit perceptual entity based on a less complete visual input” (Lehar,
2003, p. 392). Consider Figure 1. Experimental psychologists have shown that most
respondents recognize the ﬁgure as a sphere with cones protruding from its surface,
rather than an assortment of cones in space. This ﬁgure aptly demonstrates the tendency
to perceive a completed whole over an assortment of parts. Our mind’s eye chooses
harmony over disjointedness. The sphere is perceived, but not present. As this ﬁgure
shows, reiﬁcation properly casts perception as a generative process.

Related to reiﬁcation is the law of closure, an important

i i Gestalt principle for lntemet studies. Like reiﬁcation, closure

is a meaning making activity in which our minds add missing

I l elements to an incomplete representation in an effort to

produce a more complete representation. In the case of Figure
Figure 2. Closure.

2, the four brackets do not meet the deﬁnition of a square, yet
our minds group the four together to complete the entity. Rather than focusing on what is
in the ﬁgure (four right-angle brackets), it is more likely that we consider what is missing
from the perceived square. Through closure humans perceive the experiential whole by
observing the parts.

This activity shapes how we encounter our daily experiences with media. Scott
McLoud (1994), cartoonist and philosopher, observes that “comic panels fracture both
time and space, offering a jagged staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure

allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous reality” (p. 67).

Through his illustrations, McCloud masterfully illustrates how readers perceive not only

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what happens in the comic frames, but what occurs between them. Readers construct a
cohesive narrative, and closure is the structural mechanism that allows them to do so.
Thus, McCloud values closure as the “grammar” of comics.
Gestalt and the Internet

Closure and reiﬁcation describe how human perception is instrumental in the
construction of credibility in online spaces. As surfers move in and between sources of
information on the lntemet, they likely encounter a ranging degree of ﬁxed relations with
the outside world 4 such as the author’s name and credentials, the institution supporting
the site, the purpose behind providing the information, etc. Often some or all of these
elements are absent from the online information. How then does the online researcher
construct credibility? One solution is to avoid sites that are ambiguous on authorship,
pm'pose, and that lack physical institutions (such as a major newspaper) supporting them;
however, such strict criteria would make much of the Internet irrelevant for informational
purposes. Doing so would reduce the egalitarian nature of the lntemet (if one must be a
staffer for National Geographic to write about climate change, then why have an open-
access information network?), and relegate sites such as Wikipedia.org to the status of
feel-good project with no impact on the information ecology. However, what closure and
reiﬁcation reveal is that human perception is often ﬁlling in the gaps of the world that is
presented to us. This includes websites.

As lntemet surfers encounter information on the lntemet, the credentials of the
information they encounter are often incomplete. Suppose the author is not known, but
the prose of the site is well-written and the aesthetics of the site are professional,

polished, and appealing. In such a situation, the lntemet user may ﬁll in the missing

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pieces to the credibility puzzle through reiﬁcation and closure. Absent a clear author,
visitors to the site generate an author out of the remaining missing elements and thus
complete the “square” of credibility. If, however, the site is plastered with banner ads
and is gaudy in its presentation, the author the user constructs is far less credible, making
the overall “square” of credibility incomplete. Likely the surfer moves on to the next
site.

The application of Gestalt principles is a way of describing psychologically and
perceptively how lntemet users “satisﬁce” in their assessment of lntemet sources (March
& Simon, 1958). When faced with the hazy credibility of the thick fog of information on
the lntemet, most users cannot perform the ideal assessment, but do the best they can
given the conditions. The doable job may include generating missing elements of
credibility based on what is known about the site — and what is commonly known of
every website is its style.

Judging Style: Application of Gestalt Psychology

While numerous quantitative researchers have presented empirical data
supporting Gestalt principles (Phillips & Craven, 2000; Pomerantz & Kubovy, 1986), it
would appear that a holistic understanding of human perception has yet to penetrate the
ﬁeld of lntemet credibility studies. This is surprising given the strong emphasis of
Gestalt psychology on human perception. Koffka (1 93 5) properly paints the importance
of perception in Gestalt theory for his readers:

Why to the spectator does this actor on the stage look furious or embarrassed or

grief-stricken? And in answering this question we must not introduce our

knowledge of what he feels, whether he actually experiences the emotions of his
part or whether he remains detached or full of glee. Only when we have answered

our question can we turn to this second fact and try to explain why in this case our
perception was possibly illusory. (p. 76)

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Interestingly, the object of Gestalt psychology is not to explain whether what we
perceive is “true” reality or not; rather, it is ﬁrst to describe how our perceptions form.
Likewise, one could argue that it is equally important to discuss how lntemet users
perceive credibility in virtual spaces before we move onto whether our decisions about
credibility are correct or not. This chapter aims at doing just that by exploring lntemet
rhetoric from the other side — what makes information on the Web appear credible, for
rhetoric is about being persuasive. “First, credibility is a perceived quality; it does not
reside in an object, a person, or a piece of information,” argues Fogg et a1. (2001, pp. 61-
62). The authors conclude: “Therefore, in discussing the credibility of a computer
product, one is always discussing the perception of credibility.” It is easy to see how the
optical tradition of Gestalt psychology might frame the perceived believability of
websites by paraphrasing Koffka:

Why to the Internet user does the web page look so credible or valueless or

untrustworthy? And in answering this question we must not introduce our

knowledge of the content of the site, whether it is actually composed by
conscientious researchers or disaffected students completing a course
requirement. Only when we have answered our ﬁrst question can we address the
second task and try to explain why Internet users may be misperceiving the
veracity of Internet content.

Addressing the Incongruency

Gestalt psychology is more than just a helpful theoretical tool to dissect the
credibility problem of a decentralized publication space; rather, it also illustrates the
incongruency of current lntemet credibility theory in the literature today with the
complex realities that consumers of information face each day. Such efforts described in

the introduction of this chapter often reduce the complex problems of credibility to a list

of questions that are often not easily answered in online spaces. Current literature

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unnecessarily compartmentalizes credibility in online spaces, confusing human
perception as a staged process. Scripts, standards, and hierarchies do little for a virtual
environment whose deﬁning attributes included dynamic, ephemeral information
published by copy-and-paste, cite-if—you—like hypermedia writers. It is not only
impractical, it foists upon students a disingenuous representation of the nature of
research: “When we try to help our students by making the complex things simple, when
we describe mountains as cones and clouds as spheres, we often unwittingly promote
hierarchies of value and authority based on oversimpliﬁed external signs, not on genuine
critical thinking” (Fister, 2006, p. 103).

Equating credibility with its building blocks is to ignore the common contribution
of both Gestalt psychology and Aristotelian philosophy to credibility studies — that the
whole is greater than the sum of its parts. As an example, journalists understand that
writing a traditional news story will likely answer the ﬁve w’s — who, what, when, where,
and why. Yet, it is difﬁcult to imagine that a newspaper columnist would ever agree that
the quality of writing can be measured solely by the ﬁve w’s. This, however, is how the
practice of credibility decisions is being framed. It conﬁrses the parts for the whole.

Decisions of rhetorical credibility are not always determined by conscious
practices of skeptical contemplation (though it is often framed this way in lntemet
studies); rather, in everyday surﬁng, they usually occur during the initial few moments on
a website, in what Malcom Gladwell (2005) refers to as “rapid cognition” or perhaps
more accurately as Stephen F ew’s (2006) “rapid perception.” These decisions are
informed by the multitude of evaluation opportunities humans in today’s infocentered

world have. Each day we face an all-encompassing swell of information, a land of iconic

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plentitude, a “bafﬂing media totality” (Gitlin, 2002). Through radio, newspapers,
billboards, and especially television, media consumers make thousands of credibility
decisions toward media each year. Is it any wonder that users of the lntemet transport the
skills they are using to make snap credibility judgments about talk radio, political
pundits, sales persons, new acquaintances, etc. to the lntemet?
Gut and Guess Strategies

How do users, particularly student-aged lntemet users, perceive credibility on the
lntemet? One of the more comprehensive efforts to answer that question found that rules
and lists were not part of the perception equation. In a study of the online habits of teens,
the Pew lntemet & American Life project reports that some teens use a “gut-sense” or
“I’ll know it when I see it” rubric for evaluating the veracity of information on the
lntemet. When it comes to evaluating web content, a l7-year old respondent offered that
she “think(s) you have to use your best judgment and best guess” (Lenhart, Rainie, &
Lewis, 2001, p. 36). Certainly, there are some in media studies who may despair at the
lack of criticality embodied in that statement, but if we evaluate our own web practices
reﬂexively perhaps we might recognize that this teenage lntemet user has captured how
credibility decisions often occur in practice. It would appear that in the ebb-and-ﬂow of
lntemet surﬁng, gut-and-guess strategies have much more inﬂuence over credibility
decisions than rules or algorithms. Should this be a surprise? The use of the theoretical
tools presented in this chapter — Aristotle’s notions of style and scene painting and Gestalt
psychology’s holistic understanding of human perception — suggests that many times
users of the lntemet, critical or otherwise, cannot judge a website granularly by working

through credibility issues one-by-one. Rather, when the basic tenets of credibility are

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unavailable, users must “satisiﬁce” like the respondents of the Pew study who employ
gut-and-guess strategies. As Burbules and Callister (2000) comment, “. . . judgment [on
the lntemet] is based on indirect inferences about the source’s reputation, reliability, and
trustworthiness” (p. 73). It is the indirect variables (those not directly related to the
“facts”) that comprise the style of information presentation.

Several thousand years ago, Aristotle (begrudgingly) recognized the importance
of style in framing an argument. More recently, the quantitative research community,
represented by Edward Tufte (1995, 2001) and Stephen Few (2004, 2006) have echoed
Aristotle’s emphasis on the style of quantitative data, what Tufte (2006a) calls “beautiful
evidence.” But as the Gestalt psychologists suggested, humans reductively perceive
credibility through a process that favors completeness. It is tools like reiﬁcation and
closure that make surﬁng a complex, unpredictable domain like the lntemet possible, for
if we had to judge the information we encountered through set scripts and schema, it is
likely that the task of web surﬁng would be far too daunting. Rather, web surfers may be
generative in their judgments as they ignore obvious deﬁciencies in the rhetoric of the
lntemet (unknown author, publisher, etc.) and yet still produce a complete judgment as to
the veracity of the website. This is reiﬁcation and closure applied against style. It is
taking Aristotle’s formula —- (logos + pathos + ethos)"style = believability - and
recognizing that on the lntemet some of those variables are often left undeﬁned. Like a
partial picture, web surfers construct the rest to ﬁnd completeness. Likely, when
teenagers say that they use their best judgment, this is what they mean. They are
indicating for us that Gestalt perception of a website’s style is important when judging

websites. For them, it is an intuitive, internalized process — a function of their

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environment of media totality. And why shouldn’t it be? They have been around the
lntemet their entire lives; they do not know of life before the World Wide Web.
Gut and Guess Strategies: Implications for Education

Thus far, my primary claim is that in making complicated evaluations of
credibility, lntemet users justiﬁably rely on the tools that have served them well in other
contexts to manage such demanding tasks. Such tools include perception and intuition,
guided by our appreciation for the style of credibility. This is not to force a dichotomy
between reason and perception; when we use “gut-and-guess” strategies, we are making
our “best judgment” and “best guess” by ﬁltering our intuitive evaluations through
reason. In a ﬁnal rhetorical push, I aim to provide one more justiﬁcation for perception
and intuition in lntemet studies. In doing so, I take the opportunity to speak to the
signiﬁcance of these ideas for education. Given the importance of information literacy to
educators and the rising “knowledge society,” any treatment concerning the nature of
information literacy should include a discussion of the implications for education.
Klein’s Naturalistic Studies

In his extended study Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, Gary Klein
(1989) reports that people draw on a diverse set of abilities, or sources of power, to make
decisions, many of which are not rational, logic, or explicitly analytical. He argues that
intuition and perception are particularly important in naturalistic-decision making
settings, those situations that can be characterized as having high-stakes, time pressure,
inadequate information, poorly deﬁned procedures, and dynamic conditions. These

characteristics apply to the natural settings Klein studies, such as ﬁreﬁghting, naval

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warfare, paramedic rescues, and weather forecasting, but the premise of his book is that
they also describe most settings in which people live and work.

While the lntemet is not as sensational an environment as a burning house or a
battleship in war, it does meet the demands of complexity described by Klein. Decision-
making on the lntemet is time-pressured, for many workers and students who mine the
lntemet for information do so with a deadline in mind. Outside of adolescents, few have
the time to explore the Web to their heart’s content; we need to get on, ﬁnd what we
need, and move on to the next step. The lntemet is also, if anything, a platform that
offers dynamic conditions. The life of information on the lntemet changes continually,
removing stability and predictability from user decision-making. As such, the lntemet
places “unusual demands on notions of regularity,” making the task of information
evaluation difﬁcult (Feltovich, Spiro, & Coulson, 1989). The information we do ﬁnd in
this shifting, ﬂuid space is important to our work, research, even our health, and as such
decisions about its veracity should be considered high-stakes. Yet, our preparedness to
meet the extraordinary demands on the lntemet often lack. We meet the challenge often
with inadequate information and poorly deﬁned procedures, or procedures that are well-
deﬁned but misaligned to our tasks, similar to Klein’s “misguided manuals” for
engineers.

So how is it that we survive the taxing cognitive load that these variables
introduce in our search for quality information? Through his interview and observational
data, Klein (1989) makes a persuasive case that humans often adapt to their environment
through their non-analytical abilities, namely intuition and perception. He writes:

Intuition depends on the use of experience to recognize key patterns that indicated
the dynamics of the situation. Because patterns can be subtle, people often cannot

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describe what they noticed, or how they judged a situation as typical or atypical.
Therefore, intuition has a strange reputation. (emphasis in original, p. 31)

For Klein, our internal ability to make intuitive judgments from a paucity of data
is often due to the human mind’s pattem-recognition ability. “Pattern matching
(intuition) refers to the ability of the expert to detect typicality and to notice events that
did not happen and other anomalies that violate the pattern,” writes Klein (1989, p. 149).
Clearly, pattern matching is highly dependent on experience to develop expertise.
Through pattern matching, we “see inside events and objects” to recognize the depth and
subtleties of their ﬁeld (p. 152). Not surprisingly, intuitive judgments stem from quick,
holistic snapshots of our environment. If we saw the world piece-wise, the cognitive load
would overwhelm us. We would experience “paralysis by analysis” or qualify as
“rational fools” (Ridley, 1996). As Klein explains:

We would be dazzled if we had to treat everything we saw, every visual input, as

a separate element, and had to ﬁgure out the connection anew each time we

opened our eyes or moved them from one ﬁxation point to another. Fortunately,

that is not necessary. We see the world as patterns. Many of these patterns seem
to be built into the way our eyes work. . .. We have other powerful organizers to

frame the visual world into Gestalts. .. (p. 178).

It is easy to see that Klein is convinced of the importance of intuitive judgments
based on Gestalt perceptions. While this is well and good, the problem lies in the
application of this understanding of evaluation. If we develop our understanding of the
world through dense interactions and a wide collection of experiences, how can this be
taught to the novice who lacks experience? Klein found that experts have difﬁcultly
explaining the subtleties of these internal processes, as they felt compelled to artiﬁcially

divide their holistic approach to a collection of subtasks. By decomposing complex

processes like evaluating the nature of a radar blip (is it an enemy missile or ally plane?)

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into a series of steps, experts recognized that the lack of authenticity of the process would
lead to further errors. Some researchers have observed that these “stage models” are the
most common form of problem-solving mechanisms represented in the research (Lipshitz
& Bar-Ilan, 1996). The reduction of complex evaluative mechanisms to systems may fall
victim to what Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich and Anderson (1988) term “forms of reductive
bias.” Spiro et a1. observe that often instructional settings falsely reduce the enormous
complexity found in ill-structured environments, and impose hierarchical, linear,
compartmentalized forms of representation on the subject. This is done to make for
easier assimilation for the learner and a more organized delivery of instruction for the
teacher, but such actions violate what Jerome Bruner (1977) described as the “scrupulous
intellectual honesty” necessary for authentic education.
Teaching Intuition

If reducing complex problem solving to staged models is not always the best
course of action for assessing credibility on the lntemet, then what should educators do?
Perhaps educators should teach multiple methods of website evaluation, focusing some of
their efforts to teach students to embrace their intuitive sensibilities. If lntemet users
often rely on perception to make decisions about websites as they do in many other facets
of their life, why not sharpen this tool, rather than presenting means and methods that do
not adequately address the wide variety of purposes for assessing content on the lntemet?

The importance of intuitive thinking for education is not without precedent.
Bruner (1977) recognizes the importance of intuitive thinking in other academic
disciplines, such as mathematics, physics, and biology. He says of geometry:

The point has been repeatedly made that in high school plane geometry is
typically taught with excessive emphasis upon techniques, formal proofs, and the

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like, that much more attention needs to be given to the development of students

who have a good intuitive feel for geometry, students who are skillful in

discovering proofs, not just in checking the validity of or remembering proofs

with which they have been presented (p. 56).

Bruner describes the difference between a real artist of mathematics and someone
who does paint-by—numbers math. If we recognize the value of intuitive thinking for
what is clearly one of the most valued subjects in the academic canon, why not do so in
less prestigious disciplines such as media studies? Bruner argues that one important
means of teaching intuitive thinking is by modeling one’s own thinking for students.
Teachers should verbalize their intuitive problem-solving approaches, giving students
conﬁdence in utilizing their own perceptions, intuitions, and internal heuristics.

Of course, in this chapter the question of primary importance is how to describe
the mechanisms for assessing credibility in ill-structured, online spaces. It has not been
whether actual decisions about the veracity of the sites made by lntemet researchers are
correct. K-12 education cannot afford such a luxury. The answers do matter, particularly
in a subject like mathematics, but even in media studies. Once again, Bruner (1977)
provides the proper balance for this dilemma:

The complementary nature of intuitive thinking and analytic thinking should, we

think, be recognized. Through intuitive thinking the individual may often arrive

at solutions to problems which he would not achieve at all, or at best more slowly,
through more analytical thinking. Once achieved by intuitive methods, they
should if possible be checked by analytical methods, while at the same time being

respected as worthy hypotheses for such checking. (p. 58)

If we follow Bruner’s script, we avoid the unnecessary divide of intuitive versus
analytical thinking. The solution for educators is not either/or, but both/and. In my

presentation, I have spent the majority justifying how lntemet credibility decisions are

made in practice through philosophical and psychological thinking. Yet, I did this not to

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privilege intuitive thinking, but to recognize its proper place at the discussion table.
Bruner (1977) warns that many look at intuitive thinking as “all ala mode and no pie” (p.
56). As such, it was quite necessary to provide for its defense. That said, lntemet
credibility decisions can sometimes be veriﬁed by analytical means. In their response to
the challenges inherent to operationalizing credibility on the lntemet, Burbules and
Callister (2000) propose a “digital triage” for the critical reader of the lntemet. They
argue that lntemet users are often bombarded by a voluminous amount of information on
the lntemet -— from general surﬁng, email, discussion boards, and list-servs. Information
from these varying data sources must be evaluated for persuasive strength, and one way
to do that is by rhetorical analysis. Recognizing the immense challenge inherent in such
a task, the authors develop a number of heuristics for evaluating the rhetorical quality of
information on the Web. This includes cross-checking information, adopting a skeptical
stance, developing an understanding of how search engines rank-order sites, and so on.
These are good and useful suggestions which help broaden our understanding of the
pragmatics of an lntemet rhetoric.
Conclusion

The lntemet has already proven itself useful in helping scholars ﬂesh out theory
in a variety of disciplines, broadening our understanding of concepts including identity,
community, and democracy. While our enthusiasm for this medium must be tempered
with a critical eye, we have seen that the lntemet has also served as a place that enables a
more complete understanding of the realization of rhetoric. We have seen that in
rhetorically ill-structured spaces, the Aristotelian notion of style has elevated importance.

In invoking this concept, some may worry that we may be forcing Aristotle to sleep in a

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Procrustean bed. This is not the case, for Aristotle foresaw the possibilities of new media
and built in the necessarily conceptual ﬂexibility: “It should be observed that each kind of
rhetoric has its own appropriate style. The style of written prose is not that of spoken
oratory, nor are those of political and forensic speaking the same”(1414a). Past
discussions of rhetoric too often impose an understanding of rhetoric that is more
applicable to print media. We should acknowledge that the Web is its own collection of
genres that uniquely combines the characteristics of broadcast media and interpersonal
communication. As Wathen and Burkell (2002) comment, “It has been proposed that the
lntemet combines the broad reach advantages of mass communication channels with the
persuasion characteristics of interpersonal channels by allowing for give and take
between the message source and receiver,” and as such, warrants its own rhetorical
understanding — one based on holistic perceptions of style.

The lntemet is an ill-structured domain, so it only follows that one of the
strategies employed for assessing the materials on the lntemet is also ill-structured.
Admittedly, the idea of a perceptive credibility is very messy, difﬁcult to teach, or even
more difﬁcult to assess or observe. It seems like an ineffective way to teach or model
decision-making on the lntemet, but in this way, it mirrors the problems and
opportunities of the lntemet itself. As Tim Bemers-Lee famously observed, "The Web

will always be a little bit broken.” So also is our use of it.

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CHAPTER 8
THE DEMOCRATIC VALUE OF THE INTERNET

The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.
US. President Ronald Regan, 1989

We don’t believe in kings, presidents, or voting. We believe in rough consensus and
running code.
David Clark, Senior Research Scientist at the MIT and Internet Architect

In the last decade there has been increasing interest in how the lntemet effects the
beliefs and practices of development of citizens and consumers, and, more broadly, the
revitalization of the public sphere, the invigoration of participatory democracy, and the
closer realization of a just society. Howard Rheingold, an early theorizer on lntemet
community observed that “virtual communities could help citizens revitalize democracy,
or they could be luring us into an attractively packaged substitute for democratic
discourse” (Rheingold, 1993, p. 276). The promise - and the false promise - of the
intemet politics and democracy perhaps ﬁrst drew public attention during the presidential
campaigns of 2004.

The democratic primary elections for the 2004 presidential nomination were in
many ways no different than they had been for years. Assembled before voters were an
assorted number of politicians, all with established careers in politics on the national
stage. It would appear to be a year like any other — speeches were delivered, promises
were made, stumping was in full effect — yet, the 2004 campaign season was hardly
politics as usual. The rapid rise of Howard Dean illustrated that the political landscape
had undergone a change unnoticed by most informed observers. Dean, a little known
governor from Vermont, was a ﬁery and charismatic speaker who challenged the core

platform of the Democratic Party. While outspoken reformers hailing from outside the

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beltway are no strangers to United States politics, what made Dean unique was his
campaign war chest. Dean had raised more money than any other Democratic candidate;
more than established and seasoned politicians like John Kerry and Richard Gephardt.
Dean accomplished this surprising feat not by the support of several politically-active
billionaires, but through the small donations of many. Sixty percent of Dean’s campaign
resources came from donations of $200 or less, compared to Bush’s thirty-one percent
and Kerry’s thirty-seven percent ("Small donors and online giving", 2006). He and his
campaign team leveraged the power of the lntemet to catalyze a grassroots effort to
garner support, raise money and ultimately, place Dean as the forerunning democratic
candidate.

The Dean campaign’s innovative lntemet-based fundraising and campaigning
model did not propel Dean to the presidency, as poor strategy, aggressive use of
campaign funds, and perhaps even an in-person style less compelling than Dean’s
lntemet persona, led to a disappointing showing for Dean at the Iowa caucus. His
lackluster showing at this important caucus leeched his campaign of its momentum, and
Dean eventually dropped out of the race, conceding defeat to John Kerry. Dean’s
lntemet-fueled presidential rocket ride gave him a permanent place in national politics, as
he went on to chair the DNC. Joe Trippi, Dean’s political consultant credited with
leveraging the lntemet in such an effective manner, came out with a book forecasting the
important role the lntemet would play in the future of American politics. In The
Revolution Won ’t Be Televised, Trippi’s (2004) enthusiasm for the democratic potential
of the lntemet leaps off the page:

For twenty years, people have been calling this era of computers, the lntemet, and
telecommunications the “information age.” But that’s not what it is. What we are

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really in now is the empowerment age. If information is power, then this new

technology — which is the ﬁrst to evenly distribute information — is really

distributing power. This power is shifting from institutions that have always been
run top down, hording all the information at the top, telling us how to run our
lives, to a new paradigm of power that is democratically distributed and shared by
all of us. I believe that what we do with that power will determine the course for
this country. I believe the lntemet is the last hope for democracy. I believe

Americans will use it the next decade to bring about a total transformation of

politics, business, education, and entertainment (p. 5).

Trippi’s unquestioning faith in the lntemet is not without foundation. Dean’s
candidacy in the 2004 Democratic primary sent a clear message to Democratic machine
that the lntemet, when properly utilized, can propel a candidate to the head of the pool
and arm him with a war chest of ﬁnancial resources. Through its use of the lntemet, the
Dean campaign redeﬁned grassroots effort, from local rally and town hall meeting, to a
hyperreal mobilization fueled by blogs, web donations, and lntemet psychology. Even
though Dean was not successful in his bid, he did demonstrate that working outside the
existing political structure is possible. But do these successes warrant Trippi’s crowning
of the lntemet as “the last hope for democracy”?

This chapter seeks to evaluate the political and ethical dimension of the lntemet
by assessing its value as a common good and democratic space. Exploring the political
dimension of technology is a well-established tradition, dating back to the early Greek
philosophers. Aristotle argues that inside technology (techne/craft) are the values of its
designers. As he says, “Every craft is concerned with coming to be; and the exercise of
the craft is the study of how something that admits of being and not being comes to be,
something whose origin is in the producer and not in the product” (Aristotle, p. 6.32.10).

Browker and Leigh-Star (1999) refrarne Aristotle by suggesting that “values, opinions

and rhetoric are frozen into code" (p. 135). If the answer to Winner’s (1985) question,

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“Do artifacts have politics?” is yes, what are the politics of the lntemet and how do they
inﬂuence our democratic sensibilities?

This chapter is organized into four principle sections. First, I will begin by
reviewing the meanings of “democracy” by brieﬂy discussing its history, its critics, and
its principle features and theoretical dimensions. Democracy’s sketchy history does not
allow for crisp deﬁnitions based on a long tradition of practice, and as such, the views of
what constitutes a democracy or democratic activity vary widely. Second, I will explore
the Intemet’s impact on democracy, using David Held’s (1995) seven “sites of power”
that are “necessary to enable people to participate on free and equal terms in the
regulation of their own associations...” (p. 191), a framework that encompasses aspects
of both procedural democracy and cultural democracy. Held’s framework will reveal both
the complexity of democracy and democratic practices on the lntemet. Third, I will
review the division of views of those in lntemet studies who describe the democratic
value of the lntemet. I will offer a continuum as a tool to organize many of these
perspectives so that we might be able to more readily draw conclusions. Such a review
will illustrate the need for understandings of the lntemet and democracy that stress the
plurality of each. My fourth and ﬁnal section will expand on this conclusion by
leveraging John Dewey’s notion of democracy as becoming.

Meanings of Democracy

Before I can evaluate the role of the lntemet on democracy, the nature of
democracy itself must be explored. Most of those who have led informed discussions
about democracy, its roots, meanings, and boundaries have agreed that the concept

“democracy” is contested and its complicated history resists clear deﬁnition. It may seem

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strange to discuss the meaning of such a common word as “democracy,” and for some
such a discussion should be a short one. From its Greek etymology, we know that
democracy, literally translated is “rule by the people” (demos, “people”; kratos, “rule”).
It would follow that democratic forms of government are ruled by the people for the
people, to paraphrase Lincoln. With our modern sensibilities, we have a vivid sense of
what this could or should look like. Many times this involves imprinting liberalism upon
democratic rule; that is, rule by the people has often come to include respect for
individual rights. Inalienable freedoms, universal suffrage, and open dialogue are pillars
upon which a “modern” democracy stands. Put another way, for many who use the term
today, democracy “signiﬁes” these things. As the chapter of semiotics explained, the
relationship between the signiﬁer and the signiﬁed is arbitrary and certainly subject to
change.

For some, democracy may be described through its procedural characteristics:
free-elections, balance of governmental powers, open political competition, universal
suffrage, and public debate. Others discuss not a single democracy but distinguish
between many historical forms of democracy: Athenian democracy, defensive
democracy, protective democracy, demarchy, J acksonian democracy, Jeffersonian
democracy, liberal democracy, participatory democracy, polyarchy, social democracy,
Soviet democracy, and even totalitarian democracy. For still others, democracy is not
best understood as a form of national government or a series of processes alone, but
instead, needs to be understood through philosophical claims about the nature and
capacities of people and societies. These philosophical claims are rooted in human social

dispositions, in the capacity for critical reasoning and collective deliberation, in a belief

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in human rights and freedoms and an argument for the inherent legitimacy of a
governance based on these. Democratic capacities include a sense of human connection,
collective responsibility and a willingness to be civically active. Democratic
understanding should always be understood to be in ﬂux and this ﬂux requires us to
constantly wrestle with the meanings of freedom, rights, voice, fairness, representation,
and justice on our way to their realization. From this point of view, democracy has an
anti-foundationalist epistemology. In theory, open media, open public spheres, equal
opportunity, and deliberative procedural processes are intended to alleviate the tensions
between the tmiversalistic claims of rights and human rights and the particularistic claims
to autonomy coming from different groups.

Considering the Democratic Effects of the lntemet: Held’s Sites of Power

The term democracy can clearly hold a range of meanings, making a conversation
of the democratic value of anything problematic. Yet, as a review of e-democracy
scholarship will show, many have made bold claims about the Intemet’s democratic
value, which range between the lntemet as a utopic technology for the promotion of
democracy to the lntemet as a technology of false democratic promise. Before turning to
the limited understandings of democracy and the lntemet common to lntemet studies, I
ﬁrst offer my own analysis of the lntemet and democracy. In this section, I provide an
evaluation of the Intemet’s impact on democracy, using David Held’s (1995) seven “sites
of power” that are “necessary to enable people to participate on free and equal terms in
the regulation of their own associations...” (p. 191). These rights—health, social,

cultural, civic, economic, pacific and political are the foundations of what Held calls the

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democratic public law and they include both procedural characteristics of democracy as

well as “sites” related to civil society and capacities of people and societies.

The Advantages of Held ’s Framework for Internet Studies

Held’s “spheres of human interchange” deﬁne democracy in very broad terms,
rather than narrowing it to a form of governmental process alone or to civic or cultural
considerations alone. I believe this to be advantageous for two reasons. First, Held’s
framework throws into sharp relief the realization that voting rights don't mean much if
one experiences economic or social inequality, or for that matter, coercion or violence,
the darkest aspect of lived experience. It is best to cast a wide net when evaluating
democracy as “people’s equal interest in the principle of autonomy can only be protected
if they enjoy a common structure of political action across each of the sites of power” (p.
191). Second, these bundles of rights expand the way that lntemet studies typically
evaluate the democratic possibilities and realities of the lntemet. Rather than
conceptualizing the lntemet as purely an information network, the use of Held’s sites of
power properly frames the lntemet as a socio-cultural entity. The lntemet is more than
connective tissue for information; it embodies social, cultural, economic, legal, and
political practices. Held’s work, when applied against the lntemet, reveals this.
A General Limitation of the Internet

When one discusses the impact of the lntemet on any social, political, legal, or
economic sector, issues of access often dominate the conversation. No matter how the
lntemet inﬂuences anything or anyone, its impact is often mitigated by variability in

lntemet penetration rates. Though lntemet penetration rates have dramatically increased

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over the past decade around the world and here in the United States, there still exist great
disparities in lntemet use among various categories of people. lntemet usage studies
from December 2006 indicate that the poorest Americans lag behind in lntemet usage, as
do African-Americans and the uneducated. Over ninety percent of households with
annual incomes over $50,000 use the lntemet, while about half of those households
making less than $30,000 per year do. Ninety percent of those with a college degree use
the lntemet, while only ﬁfty-nine percent of those with high school educations do
("Demographics of lntemet Users", 2006). The statistics are equally divided when we
look at lntemet adoption rates internationally. Europe and North America make up
approximately half of the world’s lntemet users, even though they only comprise around
17% of the world’s total population. Asia, the Middle East, Aﬁica, and Latin America all
have lntemet penetration rates under 20%. Only 3.5% of Africans have access to the
lntemet ("Internet usage statistics: The big picture", 2007).

For the minority of humans who have access to the lntemet (approximately one
out of ﬁve people), there is also the question of which lntemet they access. The lntemet
is not language-neutral. Much of the early lntemet content was created in English,
reﬂective of the demography of early lntemet adopters; however, as the world begins
connecting to the Web, the dominance of the English Net is fading. Fueled by its
enormous population base, some believe that Mandarin may become the new lingua
franca of the online world, though English will continue to be an important international
language (J. Q. Anderson & Rainie, 2006). Regardless of which languages remain
dominant, those lntemet users in less developed or less populated parts of the world may

not experience the totality of the Web simply due to the limited content in their native

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language. Certainly the lntemet of Arabic is different than that of English or French, and
these groups differ from the Chinese Web. Thus, connectivity does not tell the whole
story when considering the level of inﬂuence the lntemet may have in democratic spaces,
particularly if one is choosing to examine the phenomenon globally.

Inconsistencies in access cloud any evaluation of the lntemet. To this point,
many technology pundits, including Howard Rheingold and Ed Lyell, have identiﬁed
increased access as the most important issue facing the development of the lntemet
between now and 2020. Lutfor Rahman, executive director of the Association for
Advancement of Information Technology at Pundra, Bangladesh, opined in a report on
the future of the lntemet, “Everybody should know the beneﬁt and problems of using the
intemet, and this should get ﬁrst priority” (J. Q. Anderson & Rainie, 2006, p. 69).
Rhaman’s recognition of the beneﬁts and problems of lntemet use provides a leveled
perspective on the impact of the Net in social, political, and economic spaces. As the
forthcoming analysis will reveal, the lntemet offers exciting developments for
democracy, and yet, it still may be a very conservative technology in the effects it
produces. What follows is a site-by-site analysis of the Intemet’s democratic value
according to Held’s (1995) framework, beginning with health.

Health

“Health rights concern the basic conditions of human agency,” writes Held (1995,
p. 194). Without basic rights protecting physical and emotional well-being, Held argues
that human beings will not be able to function fully. This site is fundamental to a
democratic experience, without which the democratic process will be incomplete,

distorted, and without root. In addition to basic rights for well-being, Held includes

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“non-toxic, sustainable environments.” As such, he cautions that balance must be struck
between individual rights and the impact of any action on the global commons.

It is difﬁcult to imagine that the Intemet’s inﬂuence on basic rights to physical
and emotional well-being is singularly positive or negative. It could be argued that the
lntemet connects individuals to others like them through its offerings of virtual
communities, associations, and groups. For those with geographical limitations, the
lntemet can prove to be a vehicle to connect one’s self to an extended network of similar-
minded individuals. Sherry Turkle (1995) has pioneered research efforts to describe the
sense of personal and psychological fulﬁllment realized by those that leverage the
lntemet through email, role-playing games, and chatrooms to develop a stronger
connection with humanity. She argues that “many of the institutions that used to bring
people together - a main street, a union hall, a town meeting — no longer work as
before...[however], social beings that we are, we are trying. . .to retribalize” (p. 178).

For Turkle, the lntemet plays a central role in the process of retribalization, and it
is easy to see why she was enthusiastic. Certainly, the proliferation of network-based
communication technologies -- texting, instant messaging, email, web cams, cell phones,
and social network sites —- provide greater opportunity to combat the negative effects of
television on connecting with others (Putnam, 2000). A study published by the Pew
lntemet & American Life Project found that even simple lntemet technologies like email
inﬂuence the formation and qualities of the social networks of lntemet users. Social
network orthodoxy dictates that as an individual’s social network increases, the
percentage of contacts made with individuals within the network declines. In other

words, it is easier for Jane Doc to keep in contact with ten members of her ﬁfteen

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member network than it would be for lane to communicate regularly with twenty

members of a thirty member network. The additional members in the thirty member

network place too great a strain on Jane’s time, making the percentage of members

contacted decline. This pattern holds true for all forms of contact, save one — email. Pew

researchers found that “as the size of people’s social network increases, the percentage of

one’s social network contacted weekly by email does not decline but remains about the 1,
same at about 20% of core and signiﬁcant ties” (Boase, Horrigan, Wellman, & Rainie,

2006, p. iii). In other words, email can help us stay connected with larger support

networks.

The unique attributes of email provide reason for its unique value to social
networks. Email is easy to use, free, convenient, and asynchronous. Many of these same
properties likely inﬂuence how the lntemet is used in connecting to broader social
networks. Users can pick the time, context, and conditions of their participation with
others on the Net in ways far different than the physical world, and these differences
appear in how people use the lntemet. One study found that 84% of American lntemet
users have connected with an online group or community such as trade associations,
hobby groups, fan sites, religious groups, political organizations, and support groups for
medical conditions (Honigan, 2001).

As health support groups, communities, and information websites are particularly
important to Held’s “health” site of power, it is worth noting that the lntemet is a popular
tool toward gathering health-related information and support. Susannah Fox (2002,
2006) found that eighty percent of American lntemet users have searched the Web for

information on at least one of seventeen health topics, ranging from disease to diet

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information. On any given day, more than eight million Americans use the lntemet for
health information searches with the majority of users ﬁnding themselves satisﬁed with
the information they ﬁnd. Twenty-six percent of American adults have researched
prescription drugs online (Fox, 2004). The sobering part of Fox’s studies is that seventy-
ﬁve percent of those surveyed did not critically evaluate the health information they
found online by checking source or date of the information.

The usage studies discussed here do not consider the value of many of the latest
lntemet technologies for retribalization. Social networking sites including facebook,
myspace, and friendster assist their members’ efforts to maintain or expand their personal
social networks. Members keep abreast of each other’s activities by posting messages,
pictures, and linking between accounts. Such sites how we form tribes. For some
informed observers, “the intemet has fostered transformation in community from densely
knit villages and neighborhoods to more sparsely knit social networks” (Boase, Horrigan,
Wellman, & Rainie, 2006, p. ii). These new social networks may be sparsely knit, but
they are wide-reaching and robust. When lntemet users desire more robust forms of
communication than what typical social networking software provides, many turn to
voice-over—IP technology. Voice-over-IP (lntemet Protocol) allows users to talk to each
other ﬁ'eely and clearly over the lntemet. This technology converts the lntemet into a
global telephone. The most popular brand of such technologies is Skype, which sent
shockwaves through the traditional world of telecommunications. When Former Federal
Communications Commission Chairmen Michael Powell saw Skype, he immediately
recognized the far reaching impact of the technology: “I knew it was over when I

downloaded Skype. When the inventors of Kazaa are distributing for free a little

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program that you can use to talk to anybody else, and the quality is fantastic, and it's free-
-it's over. The world will change now inevitably” (Roth, 2004). The world has changed
as Skype and other lntemet based technologies offer cheap or free, ubiquitous methods
for communication. And people are using the cheap communication possibilities of the
lntemet to connect with a broader emotional and social network.
Limitations of the Internet for Health Rights

The problem with the lntemet and its relationship to Held’s formulation of
health/body rights is that while the lntemet is a virtual space, one that can “take” the user
anywhere in the world, bending our sense of time and space, it does not physically move
us. The lntemet may very well provide new opportunities for identity and greater sense
of community and connectedness, but it does far less to provide protection of physical
freedoms. This is because no matter where the lntemet enthusiastic is virtually in the
world, she still has a physical address and is subject to the laws of the land. This is the
argument advanced by Goldsmith and Wu (2006), two law professors who argue that
because lntemet users are located in real places with real governments, rules, and
regulations, the lntemet is far from borderless. Rather, Goldsmith and Wu argue that the
lntemet is subject to extensive government oversight and regulation. So, if one does not
have basic physical rights in the nonvirtual world, it is difﬁcult to imagine how the virtual
world may rectify the problem. This is typiﬁed by recent reports of steep measures taken
by the Chinese government for those teenagers who are “addicted” to the lntemet.
Alarmed by the “grave social problem” of lntemet addiction, the Chinese government
now offers parents the option of checking their children into a military-run institution

designed to treat lntemet addiction. Treatment includes electric shock therapy and

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isolation from family and ﬁiends (Cha, 2007). For several years, policy groups have
reported that China employs approximately 30,000 “Internet police” who monitor the use
of the lntemet by its citizens (Grebb, 2002). The consequences for “inappropriate”
lntemet use in China can include imprisonment.

Even in those societies that present themselves as free, such as in the United
States, the use of the lntemet remains closely connected to the politics of bodies. Lisa
Nakamura (2006) describes how kozmo.com, a commercial service for delivering
convenience foods and products, claimed to deliver to those areas with the highest rates
of lntemet penetration and usage. However, it was later revealed that kozmo.com refused
to deliver to some upper-class Aﬁican American neighborhoods, even though their
lntemet penetration was as high as predominantly Caucasian neighborhoods which did
receive the service. Nakamura concludes, “It seems that these African-American lntemet
users possessed online identities too ﬁrmly moored to their raced bodies to participate in
the Utopian ideal of the lntemet as a democratizing disembodied space” (p. 322). This is
but one example of “cybertyping.”

The lntemet offers a dubious relationship with the emotional health and wellbeing
of children who go online. As usage statistics and observation conﬁrm, children and
adolescents turn often to lntemet-based technologies for social facilitation. Instant
messaging, facebook, and myspace are some of the common social network tools used by
the young. While it could be argued that young users of the lntemet enjoy more robust
social relationships with friends, the lntemet is also a place of emotional and physical
danger. It has been reported that in 2003, one in ﬁve kids aged 10 to 17 received an

lntemet sexual solicitation (McNamara, 2004). As recent media attention has shown, the

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lntemet can be a haven for sexual predators and pedophiles. Yet, the lntemet is also
instrumental in bringing attention to registered sex offenders. Many states now offer
lntemet-based registries that identify the location of sexual offenders. So the lntemet
may be a site of emotional and social freedom for pre-adults, but such freedom lures
those who would do harm to children as well.

A ﬁnal example of bodily regulation on the lntemet is that of “cyberbullying.”
Cyberbullying is a term used to describe how some students use the virtual planes of the
lntemet and other communication devices to extend their reach of physical, emotional,
and psychological intimidation. In some ways, cyberbullying is similar to its traditional
counterpart: it can involve childish harassment, denigration, name-calling, and exclusion.
However, one of the differences of bullying in the electronic age is that those that bully
online are emboldened by a sense of distance and anonymity. Often, cyberbullies elevate
their methods of intimidation, sometimes escalating as high as death threats, stalking, and
threats of extreme physical violence (Li, 2006).

The reality of the lntemet as a platform for preserving or extending health rights
is far from clear. Certainly, many of the lntemet-based collaborative technologies (such
as the Web 2.0 technologies) provide new means by which humans can overcome
geographical limitations to connect to an increasingly broad network of people. In this
way, the lntemet may be a tool which enhances emotional well-being. The lntemet is
also a regular source of information for those seeking health information, though these
consumers of information are often uncritical about the information they ﬁnd on the Web
(Fox, 2006). However, as many examples have shown, the lntemet does little to secure

physical well-being. Goldsmith and Wu’s (2006) thesis illustrates that our bodies and

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minds are very much situated in a physical context, even if we identify more closely with
a virtual world. As such, the politics of our bodies including race (cybertyping), age
(cyberbullying), and citizenship (government regulation of lntemet practices) are very
real when we use the lntemet. As Barry Wellman, director of NetLab, once observed,
“We still have bodies; we, states and organizations still have territorially-based interests
(in the political sense of that word)” (J. Q. Anderson & Rainie, 2006, p. 54). This makes
the lntemet a dubious site of health/body power.
Social

For Held (1995), social rights are those that “affect the nature and range of
opportunities and skills citizens can enjoy and develop as members of a political
community” (p. 195). Included in this site of power is a cluster of rights that include
universal access to education, childcare, and social services. While the lntemet may fall
silent on issues of childcare and social service, it does present certain opportunities for
universal education. The lntemet has long been lauded as a democratically constructed
knowledge network, one lacking formal gatekeepers. Information wants to be free, and
freedom may be found on the lntemet, a space with far fewer publication standards than
other media outlets. Though we may question the notion of “free information” (see
Chapters 4 and 7), the initial results of the Intemet’s success as an information platform
are startling — as of 2002, the lntemet boasts of well over a half of a million terabytes of
information ("How much information? 2003", 2003). As a vehicle for propagation of
information, the lntemet is decidedly effective; however, we should not confuse access to
information with access to education. Information does not always create knowledge;

knowledge does not always form education. Also, “free” information is not “universal”

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information. Information on the lntemet, though easily published, has been ﬁltered,
sorted, and classiﬁed. Even the often optimistic technology commentators like Steven
Johnson (1997) agree that “there is no such thing as digital information without ﬁlters”
(p. 38). So information on the lntemet is not necessarily free, universal, or educative.
Does this mean that the lntemet is disqualiﬁed as a vehicle for universal education?
Recent developments on the lntemet suggest otherwise, though it is still too early
to fully judge their success. What has captured the attention of those who wish to
promote universal education on the lntemet are the recent initiatives in creating “open
courseware.” Open courseware is a movement led my MIT to provide their course
content online for free. According to MIT’s open courseware website, the university’s
project goal is to “provide free, searchable access to MIT's course materials for educators,
students, and self-learners around the world” ("About OCW", 2002). MIT’s initiative
represents an aggressive step toward the universal education, and anecdotal evidence
reveals some impact of their efforts. Self-directed students from Vietnam to Nashville
have found useful extensions for their education at the MIT OCW site (Diarnon, 2003).
A number of universities have now followed suit and begun to move their materials to
free online repositories. Also, other projects that step outside the efforts of a single
institution are beginning to gain traction. The best known in this group includes
Wikipedia, the well-known “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Wikipedia’s
growth has been rapid. The site now draws over 160 million unique visitors each month
and holds over 1.6 million articles in the English wikipedia (McNichol, 2007). This site
certainly is valuable to anyone who needs a general survey of a topic. An emerging

location for free coursework is Connexions (www.cnx.org), an environment which opens

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up MIT’s open courseware model to the general public. The site is designed to be an
environment for open collaboration of academic information, a “content commons” in
which teachers, professors, and students can create modules of learning and assemble
them into larger courses.

Perhaps the most inﬂuential attribute of the lntemet for self-directed learning is
the availability with which it offers lntemet surfers access to primary sources and
“classic” works. The aptly named Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org) provides access to
around 20,000 free ebooks in a number of languages. Project Gutenberg relies on
volunteer “distributed” proofreaders to work collectively to compile its ebooks. In a
typical month, lntemet users download over 2 million free ebooks from the site, from The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer to War and Peace. Founded in 1992, Project Gutenberg is
one of the older efforts to democratize print information. More recently, Scribd.com, the
“YouTube” for documents, allows its users to freely post and comment on any documents
they wish to share. Scribd.com allows for those texts not classiﬁed as “classics” to be
shared electronically between users.

Limitations of the Internet for Universal Education

The lntemet’s potential as a location for universal education is dampened by two
realities of the lntemet. The ﬁrst is the problem of universal access to the lntemet.
Ninety percent of those with a college degree use the lntemet, while only ﬁfty-nine
percent of those with high school educations do. The lntemet may be positioned to
facilitate universal access to rich educational options, but its impact is mitigated if those
that can beneﬁt most from open courseware (the poor and uncredentialed) have the

lowest rates of lntemet usage ("Demographics of lntemet Users", 2006). A second

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problem is how these self-directed learners who do ﬁnd ways to utilize the educational
material found on the lntemet transfer their informal education into economic and civic
capital. Lacking the authority associated with learning credentials from official
institutions, one wonders what explicit beneﬁt can be reaped from learning from
unsponsored online courses. In its current form, the new lntemet initiatives geared
toward universal education are best understood as an unfulﬁlled promise. As the lntemet
matures, we will likely see open courseware’s footprint expand to include more courses
for a greater number of ﬁelds. It also may hold that lntemet penetration rates will
continue to increase, particularly if the cost of access continues to decline. What people
are able to do with this Web-based learning material is still a great unknown.

A third criticism of the lntemet as an educational equalizer concerns the problems
with reliability and accuracy of information found on the Net. While this topic is
explored in greater detail in Chapter 7, the lack of gatekeeping on the lntemet does allow
anyone to publish anything. This is the Intemet’s greatest strength and perhaps its
biggest weakness. Sites like Wikipedia are marvelous examples of an informational
collective commons; yet, such sites are also prone to the accident but sometimes
deliberate falsiﬁcation of information. There have even been problems with those who
are given the responsible to monitor problems on the Wikipedia site, such as the case
where a 24-year old college named Ryan Jordan dropout lied about his academic
credentials (he claimed to be a tenured professor with a Ph.D. in theology and cannon
law) and edited over 16,000 Wikipedia articles (Wolfson, 2006). As a wikipedia

manager, Jordan’s work was highly respected by many in the Wikipedia community.

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The revelation of his false persona is an indication of some of the information problems
facing open-source information networks.
Cultural and Civic

Often coupled together are cultural rights and civic rights, both of which are
commonly associated with democratic societies. We also take them together because the
Intemet’s relationship to these two sites of power is similar. At its core, the cluster of
cultural rights contains “a distinctive set of conditions and principles without which
citizens would be unable to pursue and test freely the nature of symbolic orders and
different modes of discourse” (Held, 1995, p. 196). Included in cultural rights are those
principles that concern weighty matters including freedom of thought, faith, expression,
and criticism. Held argues that inextricably linked to these conditions is an atmosphere
of tolerance in which forms of expression do not present “categories of persons as
inadequate or incapable of autonomy” (p. 196). Civic rights are a set of rights that
include free association with autonomous organizations, active membership of civic
groups, and freedom of information. Held encourages his readers to consider “the quality
of access to these associations and the nature of their accountability to their members” as
key metrics for evaluating the legitimacy of civic rights (p. 196).

When considering the impact of the lntemet on cultural and civic rights of power,
it is important to consider the lntemet’s relevance to the key pillars of these sites of
power: freedom of thought and expression, criticism and toleration, association and
organization, and information. In this process, there is a tendency to evaluate how the
lntemet is used rather than the technology itself. For example, it is easy to ﬁnd shocking

examples of ways in which fringe groups have leveraged the power of the lntemet to

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bring attention to their misguided beliefs. At the time of this writing, if you google for
“jew” one of the top-ranked sites is jewwatch.com, which presents itself as a “the
Intemet's largest scholarly collection of articles on Jewish history.” In reality, the site is a
massive collection of anti-Semitic materials. Visitors can read of Jewish conspirators,
Jewish-sponsored assassinations, Jewish-controlled governments, and extensive
propaganda about World War II and the Holocaust. The site makes devastatingly
effective use of a wide range of lntemet technologies, from basic htrnl pages to mp3
downloads and youtube videos. It is hyperlinked hatred.

Jewwatch.com is so disturbing that Google runs a banner ad at the top of the
search results explaining how the site’s high ranking is not reﬂective of the opinions or
attitudes of Google, Inc. A search for “Nazi” and other intolerant groups reveal more
websites preaching values that would reduce the autonomy and dignity of particular
categories of people.

Are these examples of online hatred representative of the lntemet? Does the
activity of solitary bigots spoil the lntemet as a space for the promotion of cultural rights?
Does this form of free association invalidate the Intemet’s utility for civic rights? We do
not think 30. Though sites like jewwatch.com violate held’s requirement for tolerance in
speech and action, the same can be said for societies that allow for free speech. The
lntemet may mirror the ugliness found in the virtual world, but isolated acts of
intolerance on the Net should not diminish our regard for the technology. The lntemet is,
if anything, a well-suited environment for freedom of thought and faith, expression and
criticism. Within the thousand plateaus of the lntemet is ample opportunity for valid,

healthy self-expression. Consider the utility of the blogosphere for expressing one’s

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thoughts, working out beliefs, and criticizing established powers. Blogs are an enormous
part of the lntemet; as of 2007 the blog search engine Technorati tracks over seventy
million blogs ("About Technorati", 2007). The blogosphere grew 100 fold from 2003 to
2006, and it now averages 1.6 millions posts per day (that is over 18 posts per second)
(Sifry, 2006). The ease of publication makes blogs the virtual instantiation of
independent thought; the ease of idea prOpagation makes them highly effective sharing
beliefs and ideas.

These same characteristics could be said of the Web itself. Its decentralized
architecture is built with the individual in mind; its culture is for the “creative commons.”
If evaluated solely by its potential, the lntemet is an optimal blend of narrowcasting and
broadcasting, giving voice with minimal cost or obstacle. Though some of the most
popular sites on the lntemet are corporate media outlets (e. g. msnbc.com), the lntemet as
a platform for information and ideas falls outside of mainstream media. This positions
the lntemet as a vehicle for freedom of information and association. Groups like
moveon.org are examples of highly effective use of the Intemet’s strengths — providing a
platform for alternative information and transcending the limitations of geography to
build a national association of political activists. The same can be said for Howard
Dean’s effective use of the lntemet to form a grassroots campaign ﬁnance vehicle which
leveraged the small contributions of many. YouTube has now added its “You Choose
08” site, an online repository for presidential campaign related video. While the site
offers a number of campaign-produced videos and commercials, it also will feature

“response videos” to candidates and issues made by youtube members (Steve, 2007).

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Intemet-ﬁreled associations and the propagation of free information have done
more than propel unlikely political candidates or provide fodder for a sea of bloggers. In
a celebrated account, Howard Rheingold (2003) describes how Filipinos used text
messaging to stage massive demonstrations and force the resignation of Philippine
President Estrada, whose rule was tainted by corruption charges and impeachment
proceedings. Protesters coordinated demonstration locations and attire (“Wear blck”),
drawing out over a million protestors over a four-day period. Rheingold raises this as an
example of a grassroots use of “cooperative” technology to hold governments
accountable.

To summarize, the most promise aspects of the lntemet as a site for civic and
cultural rights are not just the ability of small interest groups to ﬁnd and communicate
with each other but, more importantly, the leveraging of power by smaller, less powerful
and geographically dispersed groups with common interests. The intemet facilitates the
availability of a wide range of points of view, and there is a great variety and range of
archival materials on the lntemet, from journalistic, academic and private sources, that
often have a short life in print publication or required research skills and special trips to
libraries to access.

Limitations of the Internet on C ultural/C ivic Rights

As the example of Jewwatch.com illustrates, the capacity of small interest groups
to ﬁnd and communicate with each other and also leverage power, is only as healthy as
the groups themselves. The intemet facilitates the power of grassroots democracy and
fascism alike. A concern with intemet based groups is that if they are vile, they don’t

experience the sort of social pressure that real time, real space groups do, when for

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example the KKK marches in any community. In theory, democratic expression is to be
mediated by counter opinion and by deﬁned pubic limits on hate speech. Yet, this
happens to some extent in intemet environments. Many sites are ﬁltered and censored.
For example, selling Nazi paraphernalia and propaganda is expressly forbidden under
German law. The large trading site BigPost “strictly forbids any item that is excessively
offensive or that promotes or gloriﬁes racial, ethnic, sexual or religious hatred or bigotry
in any form. Freedom of expression is important to BigPost; but not at the expense of
other users” ("Bigpost listing rules", 2007).

The problem, of course, is that what is censored varies enormously by website
and even by nation. However promising the growth of the blogosphere or examples from
political association sites, the lntemet is not a utopian compilation of code that is beyond
the reach of repressive powers. As noted in the discussion of the site of health, the
lntemet is only liberal to a point and provides surfers little ability to escape the conﬁnes
of national borders. Many governments exercise pervasive censorship of the lntemet by
tightly regulating, ﬁltering, and monitoring how citizens use the lntemet. Vietnam, Iran,
Syria, North Korea, Cuba, and Uzbekistan all heavily ﬁlter Internet use and behavior,
sometimes jailing dissidents who publish anti-govemment views on the lntemet. The
efforts of these countries are often modeled after the success of China to ﬁlter lntemet
activity. With the most advanced ﬁltering technology in the world, the Chinese
government has been successful at building the “great ﬁrewall of China.” Researchers at
the OpenNet Initiative tested the extent of Chinese lntemet ﬁltering made the following
conclusion:

Our testing found efforts to prevent access to a wide range of sensitive materials,
from pornography to religious material to political dissent. Chinese citizens

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seeking access to Web sites containing content related to Taiwanese and Tibetan

independence, Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama, the Tiananmen Square incident,

opposition political parties, or a variety of anti-Communist movements will
frequently ﬁnd themselves blocked... China operates the most extensive,
technologically sophisticated, and broad-reaching system of lntemet ﬁltering in
the world. The implications of this distorted on-line information environment for

China's users are profound, and disturbing (ONI, 2005).

Censorship of the lntemet in China is multifaceted. Filtering may occur by those
in control of China’s lntemet backbone, Chinese ISPs, Chinese search engines, and
Chinese content production sites. Chinese blog services either prevent posts with certain
keywords or remove them. Cybercafes in China are required to keep a log of their
patrons lntemet activities. lntemet police monitor activity on the lntemet. The presence
of lntemet ﬁltering at many levels of lntemet architecture (from blog censorship to
search censorship) is likely to due to China’s political and economic structure. Those
who wish to run lntemet-based services must get licensed by China’s Ministry of
Information Industry, and as such, comply with the culture of censorship required by the
Chinese government (ONI, 2005).

There also exists considerable cooperation with the Chinese government by US.
based technology companies with economic interests in the largely untapped Chinese
market. In a well-publicized report, Google has agreed to provide censored search and
news results to its Chinese users. Microsoft has admitted to removing the blog of a
dissident Chinese blogger, citing Microsoft’s policy to “adhere to local customs.” The
French media watch group “Reporters without borders” has also accused Yahoo of

providing information to the China which led to the identiﬁcation and imprisonment of

Shi Tao for emailing “state secrets” to a foreign website. The “state secrets” that Tao

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leaked was a message to his newspaper warning of the dangers involved in returning to
China to mark the ﬁfteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre (Mills, 2006).

Generally speaking, the lntemet does far less for free expression in nation-states
that do not offer protection of speech. In many ways, the lntemet is a better amplifier of
open and ﬁee discourse than it is a reformer for these causes. This is not to imply that
the individual is powerless to the hegemony of governmental oversight. Rather, it is only
to say that the lntemet is a place of free expression, thought, belief, and association -
with two caveats. The ﬁrst is that sometimes free expression on the lntemet mirrors the
ugliness of human history. For Held (1995), this would seem to dampen the openness of
the lntemet as a site of cultural and civic power. Such a collection of rights “should not
be mistaken for an unlimited license to express oneself; for such a license fails to
recognize barriers which ought to be created in order to protect the equal autonomy of
others” (p. 196). Yet, the lntemet — via blogs, social networking sites, and other
collaborative technologies — is home to historically unprecedented self-expression,
independent thought, association, and criticism. We only need to look at other mediums
of expression — television, corporate book publications, radio monopolies — to recognize
that for the individual, using the lntemet to publish or ﬁnd information freely and to build
coalitions across local boundaries is the only plausible option for most citizens. Given
the wealth of Opportunity the lntemet presents in the domain of cultural and civic rights,
fringe intolerance should not deter our enthusiasm for the lntemet. To balance this
optimism is the recognition of a second caveat (and a familiar one by now). The lntemet
has been limited in its cultural and civic usefulness by the policies of national

governments. Autocratic regimes have been highly successfully at controlling lntemet

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activity and behavior through ﬁltering, ﬁrewalls, and policing. The disturbing examples
of government censorship of the lntemet and its users abound, particularly in nation-
states that generally deny freedom of expression and association to its citizens; yet, we
have also seen in the Philippines text messaging example that lntemet-based technologies
have also proven valuable in holding governments and politicians accountable for their
words, actions, and policies. Thus, an enthusiasm balanced with caution from past
abuses should deﬁne our attitude toward the Intemet’s impact on cultural and civic sites
of power.

Economy

Each site of power is intended to protect the autonomy of the populous. The site
of economy is no different, but of all Held’s sites of power, economic rights are the most
difﬁcult to concisely deﬁne. Economic rights are concerned with the ability of members
of a democratic society to pursue economic activity without “immediate ﬁnancial
vulnerability.” Held provides several examples of economic rights, including guaranteed
minimum income, diverse forms of consumption and productive property, and accessible
productive and ﬁnancial resources. Put another way, these rights are about ensuring
opporttmities for members of a democratic society, while providing assurance of basic
needs.

It is difﬁcult to imagine how the assurance of basic needs is met in lived
experience of the lntemet or in the potential that lies inside its design; however, there is
some modest evidence that the lntemet provides new access to productive and ﬁnancial
resources. In their book Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Andy Williams (2006) argue that

the lntemet is a location for mass collaboration, transforming how groups form and work

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together. “In the past, collaboration was mostly small scale. It was something that took
place among relatives, ﬁiends, and associates in households, communities, and
workplaces,” write the authors (p. 10). Tapscott and Williams believe that the lntemet
drastically changes the ability of people to cooperate, which has understandably broad
political effects. Many have suggested this same proposition, but what makes Tapscott
and Williams’ work unique is that these two business writers provide an extensive study
of the economic effects of mass collaboration. Their conclusion is one that celebrates the
empowerment of economic “Davids” in their battle against the industrial giants of ﬂesh

and steel:

Now, to great chagrin, industrial-era titans are learning that the real revolution is
just getting started. Except this time the competition is no longer their arch
industry rivals; it’s the uberconnected, amorphous mass of self-organized
individuals that is gripping their economic needs ﬁrmly in one hand, and their
economic destinies in the other. ‘We the People’ is no longer just a political
expression—a hopeful ode to the power of ‘the masses’; it’s also an apt
description of how ordinary people, as employees, consumers, community
members, and taxpayers now have the power to innovate and to create value on
the global stage (p. 14-15).

Is this more rhetoric than reality? It may be, but Tapscott and Williams (2006) do
provide examples of “wikinomics” in action. Their lead example is the story of Goldcorp
Inc., a struggling Canadian good-mining ﬁrm. The underperforming company invested
ten million dollars into exploratory drilling of one of their mines to determine if there was
more gold to be extracted. The results were encouraging: test drilling indicated that the
mine contained rich deposits of gold, as much as thirty times what Goldcorp was
currently mining. The problem settled in when Goldcorp’s team of in-house geologists
failed in providing an exact location of the gold. Inspired by open-source creation of

software, the company’s frustrated CEO, Rob McEwen, did the unthinkable: he

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published all of the company’s geological data dating back to 1948 on the lntemet and
issued the “Goldcorp Challenge” — $575,000 in prize money to participants with the best
estimates of the size and location of the mine’s gold deposits. This was a drastic move
for a mining company, which typically guard their proprietary data religiously. The
results of McEwen’s bold move were even more drastic. The company received entries
from far more than just geologists. “We had applied math, advanced physics, intelligent
systems, computer graphics and organic solutions to inorganic problems,” recalled
McEwan, “When I saw the computer graphics I almost fell out of my chair” (p. 9). What
shocked McEwan were the results of his experiment. The economic collaboration
between Goldcorp and its contributors yielded over eight million ounces of gold
discovered. Put in terms of dollars and cents, Goldcorp was transformed from a
struggling $100 million dollar company to a $9 billion powerhouse.

While we should not call a $100 million dollar company a “David,” this story
does illustrate the power of economic collaboration on the lntemet. And those research
scientists, physicists, geologists, and mathematicians who did participate in the Goldcorp
Challenge were “Davids” who beneﬁted from the exchange. There are other examples of
this same type of economic “exchange” between individuals and established companies.
The pharmaceutical Novartis posted its research data in order to accelerate its quest to
ﬁnd a genetic basis of type 2 diabetes (Pincock, 2007). Still, this rather narrowly deﬁnes
new access to productive and ﬁnancial resources. More important to the idea of common
access is the impact of the lntemet on small business and the individual.

In a survey of businesses with lntemet access, AC Nielsen found that 58% of

small businesses surveyed indicated that the lntemet helped their business grow or

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expand, 51% said that the lntemet made them more proﬁtable, and 49% said the lntemet
helped them reduce costs (Greenspan, 2004). Perhaps most notably is the 15% of the
small businesses surveyed who said they rely on the lntemet for their economic survival.
One can see why the lntemet is popular among those who own and operate small
businesses. The lntemet offers small businesses a visible presence that can rival a well-
capitalized large corporate website. Through Web-based technologies such as Google
AdWords, highly-targeted, pay-per-click advertising maximizes the advertising dollars of
small business (who typically cannot afford blanket advertising) (Battelle, 2005).

While the lntemet has had a measurable impact on small and large businesses, it
also has served the interests of the individual. Each day in the United States, over four
million workers use the lntemet to search for information about jobs (Boyce & Rainie,
2002). Put another way, forty-seven percent of all adult lntemet users in the United
States have searched the lntemet for jobs. The lntemet is also being leveraged by
workers to improve working conditions, wages, and strengthen solidarity. A highly
publicized example of the importance of the lntemet to the labor movement is the 1996
Bridgestone/Firestone (BFS) strike. The BFS strike of 1996 is not nearly as famous as
the Pullman Strike, the Haymarket Affair, or the historic sit-down strike at Fisher Body in
Flint (which transformed the relationship between workers and management in the
automobile industry). What does set the BFS strike apart from others in the labor
movement were the tactics involved: the 1996 BFS was the ﬁrst “cyber-strike.” When
Bridegstone/Firestone terminated several hundred United States workers during a dispute
over pay cuts and other concessions, the International Federation of Chemical, Energy,

Mining, and General Workers Union (ICEM) offered assistance to their US. afﬁliate.

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Using their website as a organizational focal point, the union published the email
addresses of major BFS executives and shareholders. With 20 million ICEM members, it
did not take long for the union to apply enormous pressure on BFS via its “cyber-strike.”
The union’s efforts drew sizable media attention, which forced a settlement of the
contract dispute and the reinstatement of the terminated union members (Schmidle,
2002)

The lntemet may provide a closer realization to Marx and Engels vision of uniting
the world’s workers than what has been possible in the past. The global reach of this
network has ﬂattened worlds (to borrow from Friedman (2005)), connected economies,
and forever changed the global economic landscape. Perhaps it also may revitalize
unions into worldwide organizations that act collectively on behalf of the labor interests
of the invidual member nations. The irony of this possibility, or perhaps the enormous
oversight in such an assumption, is that the lntemet has faciliated the movement of jobs
from high-paying industrialized nations to developing nations with lower-standards of
living. In this way, the lntemet may pull unions together and apart, as the interests of the
workers in North America and Europe may be different than those of Asian or Central
American.

Pacific

Paciﬁc rights are those that concern the maintenance of a peaceful and non-
violent existence. Paciﬁc rights, like rights of health, are ﬁrndamental to a democratic
experience, “for without [them] the deliberative, representative and aggregative elements
of democracy cannot function satisfactorily” (Held, 1995, p. 198). For examples of

paciﬁc rights, Held offers peaceful coexistence, a lawful and accountable foreign policy,

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and accountability of political leaders. Like previous sites of power, in countries that
offer citizens stable freedoms, the lntemet is a tool which can amplify the amount of
accountability for public ofﬁcials, transparency of government action, and fuel protest
concerning the violation of basic human rights. In repressive nation-states, the lntemet is
often ﬁltered and monitored, and thus restricts the ability of citizens to effectively
publicize the violation of paciﬁc rights. However, many times such nation-states are the
subject of signiﬁcant international pressure harnessed by human rights group who use the
lntemet to magnify violations of basic rights. What follows are a few examples of how
early efforts on the lntemet have increased the probability for a peaceful existence
through public accountability.

There is a power found in video, beyond the reach of text or speech, to impact
human perception and belief. The combinatory effects of cheap video recorders, cell
phone video, and the video-sharing website YouTube are of enormous paciﬁc value. For
example, US. Senator George Allen’s bid for re-election was derailed when video posted
on the website youtube.com showed Allen calling a volunteer for his opponent’s
campaign the name “Macaca.” The volunteer was a college-student of Indian decent
named Shekar Ramanuja Sidarth. Allen’s comments were taken as being racially
insensitive and the incident brought to light Allen’s less than progressive record on civil
rights. Similar accounts exist for other political ﬁgures. The lntemet was instrumental in
circulating graphic pictures of human rights violations by United States military ofﬁcers
at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The resulting military scandal and political fallout soured

American attitudes toward the Iraq war and damaged the international reputation of the

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United States. It also brought to public attention the questionable interrogation practices
in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and secret CIA prisons.

Watchguard groups, such as Human Rights Watch, use the lntemet to publicize
human rights violations around the world. HRW ﬁghts for universal paciﬁc rights by
reporting on a wide range of problem areas: women’s rights supression in Iran, atrocities
in Darfur, attack of freedom of speech in Russia, and the myths and realities of cluster
bombs used in war. Such groups bring attention and pressure on those governments who
deny basic paciﬁc rights, and though change is often slow, the HRW site offers
interviews of leaders from sanctioned countries defending their human rights records.
That public leaders feel compelled to defend their image from allegations is a sign of
measurable progress in human rights. Most, if not all, international crises in which
organized violence is perpetrated upon individuals have large-scale, highly visible web
presences which draw attention, gather resources, and focus action toward helping.
UNICEF, World Vision, the United Way, among others, all draw signiﬁcant support
through their Web sites.

Legal and Political

The legal and political site of power is the nuts and bolts of democracies.
Included in this cluster of rights are the mechanics of democracy: due process, equal
treatment before the law, debate, petitions, participation in public agenda setting, etc.
(Held, 1995). Given that we are to evaluate how well the lntemet may turn democracy’s
gears, we should narrow our discussion to those nations that are run by representative
governments. In nations like the United States (which has been studied more than other

democratic societies), the lntemet is a likely tool for the enactment of democracy.

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The 2006 mid-term elections in the United States gave further witness to the
expansion of the lntemet as a source of political information and personal debate. Thirty-
one percent of all Americans (or 46% of lntemet users) reported that they went online to
gather information about candidates and exchanged views about those candidates with
others via email (Rainie & Horrigan, 2007, p. ii). This group represents more than 60
million people, an impressive ﬁgure particularly considering the voter apathy common to
mid-term elections. Motives for going online to get political information included the
convenience of the lntemet (71% cited this as a major reason) and the depth and breadth
of the information available (49% cited as a major reason). Of those that did use the
lntemet for seeking and sharing political information, almost one quarter of this
population became politically active by blogging or forwarding political commentary.
Coupling these data with the ﬁgures cited earlier about the impact of email on social
networks, one may conclude that through the lntemet and email, American voters are
discussing politics with a broader network of social contacts. It may be that we share
political news and information with those we may not see or speak to via phone because
of the convenience of the lntemet and email and the depth of the information we ﬁnd
online.

These surveys point to increased political dialogue in online spaces through
personal email and personal publication (e. g. blogging). The lntemet is also becoming
more valuable as a conduit for participation between public ofﬁcials and their
constituents. Based on their extensive survey data, Elena Larsen and Lee Rainie (2002b)
project that 42 million Americans have used government websites to research public

policy issues, 23 million have used the lntemet to correspond with public ofﬁcials

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regarding public policy, and 13 million have participated in online lobbying efforts.
Elsewhere the two researchers found that vast majority of local ofﬁcials use the lntemet
to complete the duties of their offices (Larsen & Rainie, 2002a). This includes answering
questions about civic issues via email, corresponding with constituents, and conducting
research. The extensive use of the lntemet by citizens and public officials is creating
more amicable relationships between the two. Eighty percent of those surveyed reported
that they were satisﬁed with government websites, while over seventy percent of online
ofﬁcials say that email with constituents helps them better understand public opinion.

Survey statistics aside, there are numerous examples of lntemet-based lobbying
campaigns. Examples include the boycotts (violent movies, corporations), environment
advocacy (save whales, stop pollution), and candidate support for various ofﬁces. One of
the better known websites that turns the gears of progressive politics is Moveon.org.
Moveon.org successfully lobbied the Democratic Party of Nevada to drop Fox
Broadcasting Company as the host of its presidential debate. The organizers of the site
are also leading efforts to stop paperless voting and to protect funding for NPR and CBS.
It also held a virtual march against the escalation of the war in Iraq. Conservative groups
have similar mechanisms, such as thevanguardorg, which coalesce conservative
sentiment into measurable action on issues ranging from victory in Iraq to partial birth
abortion bans.

What the Pew lntemet and American Life Project’s survey statistics and the
examples drawn from online advocacy groups reveal is that the lntemet is important (and
becoming more so) in the activity of democracy. The lntemet is home to political

exchange between individuals via email and blogging, diverse news and political

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information, conversations between public ofﬁcials and their constituents, and online
petition, phone and letter campaigns. Based on the trend of data currently available, one
would only expect the lntemet to become increasingly more important to the procedures

of democracy.

Reigning Opinions on the Democratic Value of the lntemet
I offer up this analysis of the lntemet through Held’s (1995) sites of power to
serve as a contrast with how many in lntemet studies discuss democracy and the lntemet.
This is not to suggest that any conceptualization of democracy or the lntemet is superior
to another, for no one should lay claim to exclusivity on the meaning of either of these
complex phenomena. Rather, a sites-of-power analysis of the lntemet reveals how

narrow some conceptualizations of democracy and the lntemet are.

optimism

essentialism t oinstrumentalism

 

 

d
pessimism

Figure 3. Continuum of democracy/technology perspectives.
One thing is certain: the question of the Intemet’s democratic utility is one that
has been considered by a number of scholars and informed observers. The diverse

collection of views can be organized in a variety of ways, but I have chosen to arrange

these perspectives along two axes: one ranging from optimism to pessimism and the

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other offering essentialism and instrumentalism as its opposite endpoints since this seems
to capture the sort of presentations typical to the ﬁeld. The geometry of this arrangement
is illustrated in Figure 3. This schematic can be used to loosely organize the division of
views about the Intemet’s democratic potential. I begin by exploring the utopian-

dystopian axis, a binary familiar to technology studies.

Optimism, Democracy, and the Internet
Those optimistic about the democratic potential of the lntemet, like Trippi (2004),
often valorize the lntemet, casting it as the socio-technical phenomenon that will
revolution and reinvigorate democratic governments around the world. Typically, these
commentators argue that the Intemet’s open architecture creates a platform that quite
naturally supports expanded community, democratic exchange, and free discourse. For
many of these writers, an increase in information availability will translate into increased
democratic activity. This is best characterized in the scholarship of Charles Horton
Cooley. Cooley, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century was not only optimistic
about the prospects offered by new communication technologies like the railroads,
telegraphs, daily papers, and telephones, but he saw their services as essential democratic
participation. I quote Cooley (1909) at length:
Democracy has arisen [in the United States], as it seems to be arising everywhere
in the civilized world, not, chieﬂy, because of changes in the formal constitution,
but as the outcome of conditions which make it natural for the people to share and
to express a consciousness regarding questions of the day. It is said by those who
know China that while that country was at war with Japan the majority of the
Chinese were unaware that a war was in progress. Such ignorance makes the sway
of public opinion impossible; and conversely, it seems likely that no state, having
a vigorous people, can long escape that sway except by repressing the interchange

of thought. When the people have information and discussion they will have a
will, and this must sooner or later get hold of the institutions of society (p. 85).

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For Cooley and many since him, access to information is a required component
to political democracies. This perspective is quite popular for those that speak on the
political impact of the lntemet. For example, Dyson, Gilder, Keyworth and Toffler
(1994) see the lntemet as the “Magna Carta” for the information age, a platform that
equalizes the gap between information rich and information poor, empowering those
closest to political decisions. Selnow (2000) argues that the possibilities that are found in
an information network as extensive as the lntemet qualify it as “the soul of democracy.”
He sees the lntemet as “a remarkable Swiss army knife of information and
communication,” one that harnesses the power of forms of media in one uniﬁed platform.
“Like print, the lntemet provides public information. Like the telephone, it permits
interpersonal exchange. Like books and manuals, it offers tutorials, like movies and TV,
it provides entertainment,” writes Selnow (p. 59). Bergman and Weitzner (1997)
characterize the lntemet as an “abundance of communication opportunities” which
provides “an abundance of opportunities for democratic participation” (p. 1314). Others
optimistic in their viewpoint see the Intemet’s fundamental contribution to civics through
the reinvigoration of local communities. Meeks (1997) observes that traditional, analog
communities are shrinking into extinction (see Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000) while
virtual communities of like-minded people have exploded on the plateaus of the lntemet.
For Meeks, these virtual communities are where citizens begin to “take back” democracy
through “a kind of societal guerilla warfare” in which people will use the connective
power of the Net to coalesce into civic-minded activist groups (p. 76). Other writers who
look favorably on the democratic potential of the lntemet see it connecting candidates

with voters, and voters with other voters. These commentators observe that a principle

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problem of politics a one-way, uni—cast approach to political dialogue. In its place,
Westen (1998) envisions a system in which two-way communications “from candidate to
candidate, from voter to candidate, and from voter to voter” will offer “signiﬁcant hope
for revitalizing American democracy.”

More recently, Morris (2003) argues that the lntemet will undermine three
longstanding assumptions in political campaigns: the assumption of uniformity,
repetition and density, and unilateral, one-way communication. In the place of these
stalwarts of the political process, Morris sees customized lntemet-based campaign
messages targeted to precise demographics, in-depth presentation of political issues, and
dialogue between candidates and voters. Law professor and blogger extraordinaire Glenn
Reynolds recently published a book, An Army of Davids, which argues that information
technology like the lntemet are more empowering to individuals than they are to large
institutions. Professor Reynolds (2006) writes, “The growth of computers, the lntemet,
and niche marketing means that you don’t have to be a Goliath to get along. Like
David’s sling, these new technologies empower the little guy to compete more
effectively.” If anything, democracies are about the voice of the “little guy” (or gal).
Pessimism, Democracy, and the Internet

Perhaps one unifying characteristic of lntemet optimists is their faith in the
potential of the lntemet for democratic revitalization. Though exceptions exist, they
often describe what the lntemet will be to democracy rather what the lntemet is today.
Those pessimistic toward e-democracy see nothing in the lntemet of today or the future

that would warrant such enthusiasm. Some suggest that society is generally enamored

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with technology as a magic bullet to solve the political and social ills and point to falsely
laid enthusiasm for prior technologies. R.W. McChesney (1999) writes:

Every new electronic media technology this century, from ﬁlm, AM radio,
shortwave radio, and facsimile broadcasting to FM radio, terrestrial television
broadcasting, cable TV, and satellite broadcasting, has spawned similar utopian
notions. In each case, to varying degrees, visionaries have told us how these new
magical technologies would crush the existing monopolies over media, culture, J

 

and knowledge and open the way for a more egalitarian and just society” (p. 119-
120, as cited in (Nugent, 2001)).

The pessimists decry how the optimist treats technologies like the lntemet as “an
inkblot test into which everyone projects their desires, fears, and fantasies” (Noam, 2005,
p. 57). Rather than seeing the lntemet as a platform for free information and egalitarian ‘
relations that circumvents central government, they ﬁnd an lntemet that reproduces the I
patterns found in other media. Hindman, Tsioutsiouliklis, and Johnson (2003) explain
that discussions of the lntemet often tout increased availability and production of
information, but in doing so, the authors argue that lntemet optimists often confound
information’s retrievability and its visibility. All information on the lntemet is
retrievable, but only a small percentage is visible — that is, 0.01% of the lntemet accounts
for around 50% of all Web traffic (Sandvig, 2003). Skeptics argue that while the lntemet
allows for proliﬁc production of information, ironically, it is this very characteristic that
is responsible for the Intemet’s conservatism. Hence, equal opportunity of publication
does not equate to equal exposure of viewpoints. “By way of analogy, social scientists
would never assume that equality of opportunity in the economic sphere would result in
an equal distribution of wealth,” comment Hindman et al., “But some observers have

made a similar sort of error with regard to the Web - they have taken the open

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architecture of the lntemet as a promise that the outcome would be similarly egalitarian”
(p. 13).

Rather than viewing the lntemet as a public utility owned by the people, skeptical
scholars warn that since central governments do not lead in oversight of the platform,
they leave the lntemet to the whims of the private sector, thus forsaking the Intemet’s
status as a commons (Schiller, 2000). Yet, other commentators critical of the Intemet’s
democratic potential, suggest that Big Government is intensely involved in lntemet
governance. In Who Controls the Internet, Goldsmith and Wu (2006) argue that because
lntemet users occupy a particular place during their use, their online activities are often
subject to governmental control and inﬂuence. For these two law professors, geography
and physical force are “persistent” sources of order in the cyberspace.

Essentialism, Democracy, and the Internet

The optimism-pessimism axis is complemented by a second dimension of theory
consisting of a range of values from essentialism to instrumentalism. Those scholars who
ascribe to an essentialist position believe that within each technology is a fundamental
essence that shapes the reality of its sphere of inﬂuence. The most famous essentialist is
Marshall McLuhan (2003) whose trope “the medium is the message” has come to deﬁne
the essentialist position. He argues that “the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is
the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” (p. 203).
McLuhan uses the example of electric light to illustrate where the meaning in media lies:

The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, unless it

is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. . .Whether the light is being used for

brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference. It could be argued that

these activities are in some way the ‘content’ of the electric light, since they could
not exist without the electric light. This fact merely underlines the point that ‘the

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medium is the message’ because it is the medium that shapes and controls the
scale and form of human association and action. (p. 203)

In brief, McLuhan argue that the true “content” of a message is inﬂuenced not
only by what is sent but also by the way it is sent (Lunenfeld, 1999). The essence of the
medium matters. Essentialism is most often associated with technological optimism. As
we saw with many of those scholars optimist about the democratic possibilities found on
the lntemet, make their case based on the fundamental properties of the technology. The
Intemet’s open standards and architecture affords free, cheap, and egalitarian discourse
for the common person. As Morris (2003) says, “The essence of the lntemet is that it
permits you to speak, that it makes a monologue into a dialogue and the essence of the
media, the message of the media of the lntemet is interactivity and dialogue...” (p. 15).
In other words, the essence of the lntemet is agency. This is the Intemet’s message, not
its “content” (ranging from political blogs to pornography), but the scale, pace, and
pattern that it introduces into human activity. Thus, for many optimists, immediate
evidence is not needed to justify the enthusiasm for the Intemet’s democratic
possibilities.

Instrumentalism, Democracy, and the Internet

Our last spectral endpoint, one that ﬁnds itself as the polar opposite of
essentialism, is that of instrumentalism. This position claims that technologies are neutral
instruments whose value is deﬁned through their uses. McLuhan (2003) describes
instrumentalism as “conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are
used that counts” (p. 207). Many placing the weight of the evaluation of technology on
its use and not some fundamental property, instrumentalists prefer to examine instances

and uses of technology as case studies for evaluation. In the context of our conversation

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about the democratic potential of the lntemet, instrumentalists are often those who either
remain neutral about the e-democracy or become pessimistic or skeptical of claims about
the role of the lntemet to revitalize modern democracies. Joint’s (2005) recent comments
illustrate instrumentalist thinking in the context of the lntemet: “. .. intemet technologies
are just that, technologies. No technology is good or bad, democratic or undemocratic.
In terms of its political effect, the intemet is simply what we choose to make of it. It is
vital therefore that the intemet is used eLiterately, to the right effect” (p. 81-82). In
“How the lntemet Did Not Transform Russia,” Rohozinski (2000) describes how “the
‘new dog’ of the lntemet was adapted and used to perform the ‘old tricks’ inherent to the
Soviet system.” (p. 337). According to Rohozinksi’s account, the lntemet was colonized
by state leaders, making the technology a conservative tool for state control. A research
group recently found that terrorist networks enjoy use of the lntemet because of its many
advantages to underground organizations: ease of use, anonymity of posting, large
potential audience, and lack of oversight and regulation (Qin, Zhou, Reid, Lai, & Chen,
2007). In their analysis of the “Dark Web,” Qin et al. found that terrorist/extremist
websites created highly sophisticated web presences, complete with multimedia, online
forums, and chat rooms. Such accounts strengthen the instrumentalist perspective on
technology.
The Limitations of the Two-Axes Approach to E-Democracy

The two axes described in the preceding paragraphs are not able to offer a plane
onto which perspectives about the viability of e-democracy can be fully mapped. They
do, however, offer a helpful platform to plot much of the current scholarship on e-

democracy. As we have seen, two quadrants are populated more often than not — the

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“I

 

 

essentialist-optimist quadrant and the instrumentalist-pessimist quadrant; that is, some
argue that lntemet is by its very design democratic, whereas, many others contend that in
its use the lntemet does not impact the democratic process. Yet, by mapping the division
of views found in the ﬁeld, have we really addressed the complexity of the question as
revealed by a brief examination of Held’s seven sites of power?

A site-by-site evaluation of the lntemet does not allow for simple conclusions
about the democratic utility of the lntemet. This is not surprising, as the lntemet is an
incredibly broad set of practices spread across local context and cultures around the
world and “democracy” embodies many values, ideals, and activities. Within this
variation, however, a few themes did emerge during the course of this evaluation.

First, there were a few factors which almost universally dampen the democratic
impact of the lntemet (no matter which site of power we consider). A consistent
constraint to the democratic value of the lntemet is found in inconsistencies in access.
With descriptive statistics revealing wide-ranging lntemet penetration rates across racial,
socioeconomic, and national groupings, the power of the lntemet to inhibit or enhance
democratic experiences is applied unevenly. While the lntemet may have the potential to
be supportive of developing and mature democracies, the pragmatics of access limit the
realization of any such potential.

Second, while the lntemet is a “virtual” entity, those that use the lntemet are still
grounded in a particular socio-political context. Our bodies are still subjugated to the
realities of national borders and local policy. As has been the pattern for this evaluation

of the lntemet, repressive societies offer fewer chances to use the lntemet for direct

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democratic activity, which may explain why lntemet consultant Nan Dawkins has
argued:
While ensuring access certainly impacts the intemet's potential as a change agent,
it is important to remember that simple access is not enough. Giving a man (or
woman) a laptop and a cheap connection is not sufficient to change his/her plight.
The intemet is a tool with some potential, but it is probably not within the top 100

factors that can drive signiﬁcant change in the world (J. Q. Anderson & Rainie,
2006,p.68)

These two dampening factors do not make the lntemet irrelevant to democracy;
rather, they only add caution to any evaluation of the Net’s democratic attributes. As an
exploration of the lntemet across the seven “Sites of Power” revealed, even with the
limitation of access and the bordered nature of the Net, the lntemet has been used in
democratic ways to support democratic causes. Perhaps the balance needed for
evaluating the lntemet can be found in Held’s (1995) observation: “It does not follow, it
should be stressed, that democracy is an all-or-nothing affair. . .democracy must be
understood as a continuum across which particular rights within clusters will be more or
less enforced, and different rights clusters will be more or less entrenched” (p. 191).

Held’s comprehensive approach to discussion of democracy is rarely achieved in
lntemet studies, as the above review reveals. Often, those writing about the lntemet and
democracy conceptualize either entity by a single dimension. They elevate a few
attributes of the democracy or the lntemet above all others, and then pass unnecessarily
deﬁnitive judgment on the lntemet and democracy. If they are procedural democrats,
then they may enthusiastically hail the Intemet’s democratic value to the extent it
supports the methods and materials for democracy. If they are philosophical democrats,
they may base their evaluation on the kind of democratic experience the lntemet offers.

If they are essentialists, they evaluate the architectural potential of the lntemet, but if they

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are instrumentalists, they only consider the lntemet as it is experienced in the present.
Each of these approaches reduced the lntemet and democracy to simple deﬁnitions, but
both the lntemet and democracy are complex sets of practices, beliefs, and values. As
such, a more complex exploration of e-democracy is required.

The remainder of this chapter reafﬁrms that the debate about the civic virtue of
the lntemet is clouded by confusion between different realizations of the “Internet” and
an often narrow conception of “democracy.” It would appear that there is not one

lntemet, but many; there is not a singular notion or expression of democracy, but many.

The lntemet and Democracy: Becoming and Plurality

In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey (1991) criticizes the popular view that
democracy springs up from a single root toward a finite end. For Dewey, it is not a
“movement [that] originated in a single clear-cut idea, and has proceeded by a single
unbroken impetus to unfold itself to a predestined end, whether triumphantly glorious or
fatally catastrophic” (p. 83). Rather, Dewey argued that “political democracy has
emerged as a kind of net consequence of a vast multitude of responsive adjustments to a
vast number of situations, no two of which were alike, but which tended to converge to a
common outcome” (p. 84). Democracies can grow in common soil, or spring up in
wildly different contexts as they are fed by diverse sources. Democracies have no natural
climate or habitat. Certainly, there may be common characteristics found between
different installations of political democracies, some factors that are certainly important
to growing this type of community. However, Dewey’s admonition against discussions

of a “democracy” versus “democracies” is characteristic of his thinking about binary

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categorization. As he wrote in Experience and Education, “Mankind likes to think in
terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors,
between which it recognizes no immediate possibilities” (Dewey, 1987, p. 17). By
arguing against a single representation, Dewey was breaking down the ability of
commentators to speak about democracy vs. non-democracy. Such a distinction, in
Dewey’s eyes, is false.

Dewey’s emphasis on democracies over democracy is a distinction that throws
into doubt the divisions many scholars make as they discuss the democratic value of the
lntemet. When these scholars, commentators, and pundits discuss the democratic utility
of the Web, to which democratic ideal are they referring? What will make for a
democratic lntemet: is it virtual communities that tie like-minded people around the
country together; is it increased information about candidates, resulting in better voter
turn-out and local political activity; is the egalitarian distribution of ideas through the
open link structure of the Net? In other words, which of Held’s sites of power do
scholars include when they debate the degree of a democracy?

Dewey’s observation that democracy can take many forms illustrates the problem
that can occur when authors isolate one sense of democratic activity over all others as the
single basis for evaluation. For example, Sandvig (2003)and Hindman et a1. (2003) argue
that the lntemet will be democratic if and only if it supports the egalitarian distribution of
ideas through use. In other words, their democratic lntemet requires a space where a few
sites dominant the trafﬁcking ideas. But as these authors point out, the 0.01% of websites
that receives 50% of all lntemet trafﬁc became visible because many sites link to these

few. 13 that not also a form of democracy in action? Google would argue that by

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counting links between sites they are leveraging the democratic nature of the lntemet.
Who is correct depends on the perspective one takes toward what is a democracy, and in
this sense, both are right.
Democracy — A Work in Progress

This dispute about the democratic possibilities that lie in the Web can also be
attributed to an improper understanding of the status of democracy. Dewey (1991)
writes, “[Democracy] is an ideal in the only intelligible sense of an ideal: namely, the
tendency and movement of some thing which exists carried to its ﬁnal limit, viewed as
completed, perfected. Since things do not attain such fulﬁllment but are in actuality
distracted and interfered with, democracy in this sense is not a fact and never will be” (p.
148). Democracy never is; rather, it is a work in progress. It is a goal, not a standing.
Once a political form is established, it is subject to “a vast series of adaptations and
responsive accommodations, each to its own particular situation” (p. 84 ). From Dewey’s
standpoint, forms of government are always evolving and adapting, like biological
organisms, in order to meet the demands of their environment. This sense evokes a
notion of growing over grown. For Dewey, democracy is the activity of becoming more
than it is a being — as Comel West (2004) reﬂects, “democracy is more a verb than a
noun - it is more a dynamic striving and collective movement than a static order or
stationary status quo”. Saito (2002) reminds us that Dewey’s conception of democracy is
paradoxical in nature, “as both attained and unattained; his sense of democracy not as
some ﬁxed telos, but rather as something forever to be worked towards, never ﬁnally to

be achieved” (p. 248). For scholars like West, Saito, and Dewey, democracy is always a

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work-in-progress, “a pattern of moving towards an ultimate goal to a metaphor of
‘traveling [as] constant arriving’” (Dewey (1983) as cited in Saito (2002)).

This line of Deweyian thought raises another problem with the nature of inquiry
in lntemet studies regarding e-democracies. Whether they optimistic or pessimistic,
essentialist or instrumentalist, most scholars paint e-democracy as that which is attained,

attainable, or unattainable. Most accounts do not capture a sense of growing and

movement in their representations of democracy on the lntemet; they are more of a status

check — are we there yet or not — when there is no “there” to get to. The complexity that
Dewey brings encourages a form of scholarship that makes small statements about a big
phenomenon (for example, discussions of political blogs) than large, sweeping
evaluations of a socio-technical as large as the lntemet. Such caution is particularly
prudent when one considers how volatile the atmosphere of the lntemet can be.
The Plurality of the Internet

Perhaps this tension could be partially alleviated with a simple acknowledgment:
the phrase “the lntemet” improperly represents this knowledge network monolithically
and singularly, when in practice there are many Internets. The lntemet common to our
thinking is a large, open discursive network of information, a platform for connections
between people, organizations, and ideas. It is the “Deep Web,” the lntemet of a
“thousand plateaus,” the “essential” lntemet. Certainly, this lntemet exists, but there is
also the lntemet in eﬂect. This is the lntemet that is realized in everyday surﬁng. It is
the popular and visible parts of the web, the commercial sites that dominate the search
engine listings and garner the vast majority of user activity. This is the “Shallow Web,”

the form of the lntemet described by many instrumentalists, the realization all digital

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information is ﬁltered (S. Johnson, 1997). The difference between these two Internets is
much like the difference between the known and unknown Universe, or at least the
difference between commercial television and public television. The Shallow Web
mimics television’s reductive presentation of the knowledge universe; whereas, the Deep
Web leverages the rhizomatic structure of hypertext to create a medium that is worthy of
labels such as revolutionary and evolutionary. The Deep Web is also the lntemet that
offers the most potential for democratic activity, but it is through the Shallow Web that
so many of these promises fail to materialize.

The distinction between the Deep and Shallow Web draws partial inspiration from
one of Plato’s central ideas: the Archetype. Plato argued that in order to understand
anything in this world - colors, truth, beauty — humans must become familiar with many
examples of those objects in the world. For Plato, the artifacts of this world are partial
derivatives of an Archetype or Form. So if we want to know what is beautiful, we should
examine many objects we ﬁnd beautiful (ﬂowers, sunsets, the Fall colors) as a way to
gain an appreciation for the ideal of Beauty. In this way, “the Platonic perspective
requires the philosopher to go through the particular to arrive at the universal” (Tamas,
1991). By distinguishing between the Shallow and the Deep Web, I have assumed the
existence of an archetypal lntemet — an ideal space, one that is open, communal,
discursive, and free from any existing power structure. No such place exists; yet, this is
the lntemet that many pundits and commentators aspire to. We recognize the architecture
of this lntemet and express our enthusiasm for its dynamic hyperlink and open structure,

but here in the shadow lands, the Deep Web is not the lntemet we often seen. Our

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lntemet is the Shallow Web, the commercialized lntemet, the lntemet of msnbc, msn,
yahoo, and Google.

The confusing struggle between the Shallow and Deep Web is what creates some
of the disagreement about the Intemet’s democratic potential in lntemet studies. Those
that trumpet the Intemet’s democratic potential have narrowed their conceptualization of
the lntemet to the Deep Web. When thinking of the Deep Web, it would be easy to see
the lntemet as a space for the “free discourse” for which Dewey (1966) advocates. The
Deep Web represents the means of dispersion of knowledge that Dewey (1991) sought —
one that is a “systematic, thorough, and well-equipped search and record” (p. 179).
However, the lntemet in practice is the Shallow Web. It is the commercial, infotainment
version of the Deep Web. Those that advocate that the lntemet is an irrelevant player in
the evolution of democracies around the world often cannot see past the Shallow Web to

its deeper form.

The Nature of Space

The nature of the lntemet as a “space” (as it is often described) may best explain
its bifurcated identity. In “Space, Power and Knowledge,” Foucault (1993) outlines the
relationship between architectural spaces and the values they promote. Foucault rejects
the notion of an ideal space, one that perfectly, reliably, and consistently promotes any
social value, whether desirable (liberty) or undesirable (oppression). He writes, “. . .I do
not think there is anything that is functionally - by its very nature — absolutely liberating.
Liberty is a practice” (p. 135). Foucault is not precluding the notion that certain spaces

can promote certain social values, but rather that no space can guarantee any particular

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social value, desirable or not. “This is not to say that the exercise of freedom is
completely indifferent to spatial distribution,” argues Foucault, “but it can only function
when there is a certain convergence; in the case of divergence or distortion, it
immediately becomes the opposite of what was intended” (p. 136).” Consequently, even
if the lntemet were designed as a platform to share ideas without commercial
interference, the design of space itself does not guarantee the realization of any value.
Designing a Deep Web may still result in a Shallow Web, just as one may still ﬁnd the
ﬂowers of “resistance, disobedience, and oppositional groupings” in the most restrictive
environments, as in concentration camps. For Foucault, “nothing is fundamental” (p.
136). This includes spaces designed to be fundamentally restricting and fundamentally
liberating. The lntemet, whose means of production and distribution are drastically
different than other media including television, radio, and print, can be understood as a
space that is not indifferent to freedom, democratic discourse, and liberty; yet, it also is
one in which opposing values circulate with regularity. When we look at the lntemet, we
see glimpses of both a Deep and Shallow Web.

The division between a Deep and Shallow Web is in many ways, an extension of
critical debates about the very nature of technology itself. They represent opposite ends
of the essentialism-instrumentalism axis. The Deep Web is the ideal Web, the essential
Web; whereas the Shallow Web is the realized Web, the Web in-ejfect. The position that
Foucault helps his readers ﬁnd is the seat between the extremes, one that recognizes the
predisposition of the design and the contrary realization of its purpose through its use.

This leaves us with an lntemet that is similar to Andrew Feenberg’s (1995)

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characterization of all technology, entities that are best seen as “neither determining nor
as neutral” (p. 4).
Looking Back

13 democracy a worthy topic of inquiry? Dewey responds to this question with a
single question of his own: “Can we ﬁnd any reason that does not ultimately come down
to the belief that democratic social arrangements promote a better quality of human
experience, one which is more widely accessible and enjoyed, than do non-democratic
and anti-democratic forms of social life?” (1987, p. 34). In this statement, Dewey
provides not only a justiﬁcation for democratic societies, but also for continued inquiry
about democracy. For Dewey, democracy was ultimate good for a pragmatic society.

This chapter was meant to continue the conversation that Dewey started about
democracies and technology so many years ago. In it, I found that the differences in
perspective about e-democracy offered in the current scholarship can be traced to varying
understandings about the nature of democracies, the role of technology in democracies,
and the nature of the lntemet itself. Many writers I surveyed settled on a fairly narrow
notion of what a democracy is and then evaluated either the lntemet as practice or the
lntemet as potential. There conclusions about the democratic value of the lntemet fell
predictably along a simple two-dimensional grid.

Through an analysis of the lntemet guided by Held’s (1995) sites of power, I
suggested that current research about the lntemet and democracy must assume inclusive
understandings of both democracy and the lntemet. As its history reveals, democracy is a
complicated, contested term, and the lntemet is a complex set of economic, social, and

political relations. As such, e-democracy scholars should consider emphasizing the

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plurality of the lntemet and democracy. Plurality in democracy means considering
multiple facets of democratic living -— physical, emotional, economic, political, and so
forth. The plurality of the lntemet requires that scholars divide their commentary
between what the lntemet is today in effect (Shallow Web) and what they see in the
future via the Intemet’s architecture, core technologies, and design (Deep Web).

The lntemet, in its current bifurcated state, is not the democratic space many wish
it to be (though signs of democratic activity exist across every site of power); yet, it may
be “a matrix that gives birth to our ideal aspirations” (Saito, 2002, p. 254). Like Dewey’s
democracy, both ideal and also unperfected, the lntemet is very much a democratic work
in progress. Dewey (1991) felt that the equitable distribution of knowledge was
fundamental to the formation of public opinion; yet, he also recognized that though “this
marks one of the ﬁrst ideas framed in the grth of political democracy it will be one
of the last to be fulﬁlled” (p. 176). It may be that the growth of the Intemet’s democratic
role is stepwise rather than an instant revolution. Yet, the potential is there, even in the
heart of pessimism there is hope, as illustrated‘by the conclusion to Noam’s (2005),
“Why the lntemet Is Bad for Democracy”:

The lntemet does not create a Jeffersonian democracy. It is not Athens, nor

Appenzell, nor Lincoln-Douglas. It is, if anything, less of a democracy than those

low-tech places. But, of course, none of these places really existed either, except

as an ideal, a goal, or an inspiration. And in that sense, the expectations vested in
the lntemet are a new link in a chain of hope. Maybe na’r‘ve, but certainly

ennobling. (p. 58)

Both positions, commentators of Shallow Web and the Deep Web, must recognize
an important distinction in democratic development in virtual spaces: the lntemet that is

a place of becoming and growing toward democratic utility, not because it has yet to

realize its democratic potential, but because there is no “there” to get to. Dewey reframes

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the question asking to what end do we grow to one that asks by what means do we grow.
It is the difference between “growth toward what?” and “growth how?” This should
quite properly change the nature of the conversation from one of status to one that

measures progress and slope.

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CHAPTER 9
LESSONS FROM LINKS

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.
Henry David Thoreau (1854), Walden

This dissertation represents an exercise of extended reﬂection on the
philosophical, sociological, historical, and psychological attributes of the lntemet, as
conceived as a collection of technological artifacts, people, and practices. Looking back
to the ﬁrst chapter, my stated purpose for this dissertation was to examine the real-life
implications of a virtual phenomenon. To do so is to mirror the reversal of thinking
about technology that Thoreau models in Walden. Thoreau was making an appeal to a
simpler time when individuals did not aspire to accelerate “commerce, and export ice,
and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour. . .”; however, my intention is
not to lament recent technological developments. The romanticization of rust is just as
problematic as the hype of hypertext. What is valuable about Thoreau’s words is that
they do encourage observers of society and technology to examine the relationship
between the two, and the various factors that inform the development of each. Translated
to today’s “information age,” perhaps Thoreau can be paraphrased, “We do not surf the
lntemet; it surfs upon us.” This adaptation of Thoreau does properly emphasize the
direction of analysis for much of this dissertation, though as I argued in Chapter 2,
technology development is not best conceptualized as vectors of force, but as spheres of
inﬂuence.

In the preceding chapters, I examined how the lntemet changes our relationship
with knowledge, identity, community, democracy, and language. For an epilogue, I

choose not to summarize the work (it may be better to return to the introductory chapter

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for a chapter-by-chapter review); rather, I include a variety of general lessons this

dissertation offers. These “lessons from links” include: (1) the difﬁculty of theorizing on
a developing phenomenon; (2) the difficulty of theorizing on an established phenomenon;
(3) the importance of technology theory (speciﬁcally lntemet theory); (4) implications of

this work for intemet theory; and (5) the implications of this dissertation for education.

Lesson #1 : The Difﬁculty of Theorizing on a Developing Phenomenon
Remember the anecdote of the wealthy recluse whose butler brought in the
morning paper, took it to the basement, and retrieved the paper from the same day
20 years earlier. The only way to tell what was truly important, he said, was to
see what was relevant 20 years after the fact (Rogerson, 2005, p. 238).

Kenneth Rogerson’s words serve as a reminder of the difﬁculty of studying
anything early in its development. Though many books, articles, and other forms of
scholarly activity have been dedicated to the impact of the lntemet, there is a sense in
most published works that no one is really sure what will be relevant even ten years from
now, not to mention twenty. Early studies of lntemet use focused on MUDs
(multiplayer, lntemet-based, role-playing games), chatrooms, “ﬂaming,” bulletin boards,
news groups, and text-based browsing — a collection of technological practices that seem
antiquated when compared to Web 2.0 technologies (blogs, RSS feeds, peer production,
podcasts, social networking, etc.). Certainly, early pioneers studied an lntemet far
different from the lntemet of today; however, today’s research runs the same risk when
the lntemet community moves to Web 3.0, or whatever we call the next big development
on the lntemet. We do not have the luxury of Rogerson’s wealthy recluse, waiting

twenty years to see what matters. For this reason, this dissertation was designed

primarily as a general treatment of the issues fundamental to hypertext and a connected

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information network of a global scale, a collection of chapters that address issues that I
believe lie at the core of the lntemet and those not as likely to change. Though I have
consciously tried to minimize speciﬁc examples or discuss particular technologies, a
certain amount of speciﬁcity, such as Google’s position in the lntemet ecology or
statistics pertaining to lntemet penetration rates, cannot be avoided. However, as
Chapter 4 argues, the importance for lntemet studies is not to understand particular
technological practices (whether they be Yahoo vs. Google’s search algorithms or
Facebook vs. MySpace’s social network design), but to provide a critique of a particular
practice on the lntemet, such as the search engine as a producer of knowledge through a
circuit of exchange and the role of the social networking site in identity construction.
Had this dissertation been written ten years ago, the discussion of power relations and the
search engine could have been included, though the search service Altavista would have
likely been the subject of study rather than Google. The lntemet technology may change,
but not necessarily the principles that lie beneath them.

The exciting aspect of the lntemet is that it is always changing, but this is also its
challenge as well. The lntemet is a technological representation of Donald Schon’s
(1973) “1033 of the stable state,” his belief that our society and its institutions are in the
continual process of transformation. It is a reframing of Heraclitus’s observation that one
cannot step in the same river twice. In the end, the problem and opportunity of studying

the lntemet is its dynamicity.

Lesson #2: The Difﬁculty of Theorizing on an Established Phenomenon

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The irony of the state of lntemet studies is that while it lacks a mature research
agenda or a stable platform for study, the lntemet has already become a common ﬁxture
in the lives of millions of people around the world. With regular contact with the
lntemet, users develop a relaxed familiarity for the technology and with it, develop a
number of hidden biases, assumptions, and practices. One of the more valuable
contributions that a theoretical examination of technology can provide is a fulﬁllment of
Geertz’s (1973) mission to make the familiar, unfamiliar. Ubiquitous technologies
become invisible. As Steve Johnson (1998) once observed: “Technology. The word has
become so commonplace in our culture that we take it for granted, unless, of course,
technology doesn’t do what we expect it to do (like when the soda machine takes our last
quarter or the electricity in our house goes off)” (p. 75). When users take a technology
for granted, the values built into or produced by the technology through its use often
become assumed, expected, or perceived as “natural.” Lost is our sense of surprise or
imagination for the tool’s effects. Consequently, a periodical critical reevaluation of the
place of technology in our lived experiences is beneﬁcial. A critical “retelling” of the
lntemet is to tell the hypertext story again, but in a way that both afﬁrms and challenges
past efforts to understand the lntemet, and in the process, make hidden assumptions
visible. Chapter 4 revisits the notion of power relations on the lntemet, and through that
discussion, a structural understanding of power is challenged as well as the notion of
“value-free” information on the Net. In exploring the nature of credibility in online
spaces, Chapter 7 problematizes the notion of “credibility” online, and with it, the utility
of algorithms taught to evaluate website content. These are but two examples of critical

retelling designed to lead to a de-farniliarization of the lntemet.

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So familiar has the lntemet become that many of the fundamental assumptions of
the lntemet often go unnoticed and unchallenged. In many ways, we take for granted the
implications and inﬂuence of the lntemet in our daily lives. As a member of the
unconnected world, Vannevar Bush (1945) expressed with awe the potential for his
memex, an early hypertext concept, to meet the informational needs of scientists. His
description reminds us exactly what promise the lntemet can provide for self-directed
learning:

The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of

the bow and arrow. Speciﬁcally he is studying why the short Turkish bow was

apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He
has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs
through an encyclopedia, ﬁnds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it
projected. Next, in a history, he ﬁnds another pertinent item, and ties the two

together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a

comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail

to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of
available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side
trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical

constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a

trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.

To Bush and his readers in 1945, such ﬂexible interactions with a vast knowledge
network must have read like science ﬁction, lumped in with ﬂying cars, houses on the
moon, and robotic maids. Bush’s prescient article anticipates the information age, one in
which “navigation may well be the main form of literacy for the 213t century” (Brown,
2000). Reading his account of how knowledge should be organized reminds us of what is
truly evolutionary about the lntemet. He describes what will be the experience of the

unforeseen lntemet for the learner, like a Vygotskian (1978) tool that extends our abilities

beyond our biological limitations.

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Another unlikely candidate whose pre-World Wide Web reﬂections add to an
appreciation for the novelty of the lntemet is French philosopher Michel Foucault.
Foucault (1996) shares his dream for the development of an open-access information
system, and in doing so, reminds readers in this information age of the unique
informational taxonomy found on the Web:

I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is

there; the things to be known are inﬁnite; the people who can employ themselves

at this task exist. What are we suffering from? From too little: from channels that
are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufﬁcient. There is no point in
adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent “bad” information from invading and
suffocating the “good.” Rather we must multiply the paths and the possibility of
comings and goings... Which doesn't mean, as is often feared, the homogenization
and leveling from below. But on the contrary, the differentiation and simultaneity

of different networks. (p. 305)

It would seem that the lntemet answers Foucault’s call for a network that offers
multiple paths and seemingly unlimited “comings and goings,” and with it, his
understanding of distributed power. His words also put into perspective concerns
addressed in Chapter 7 (Credibility at a Click) regarding “information pollution” (to
borrow from Jakob Nielsen). Most importantly, Foucault’s dream serves as a second
example of a scholar’s anticipation for the possibilities found on the lntemet. To
complete this exercise in lntemet de-farniliarization, I conclude by turning to one of the
earliest reﬂections on the experience of the lntemet available — Robert Wright’s New
Republic piece from 1993, entitled “Overhearing the Internet.”

Wright (1993) tells his readers that he was just returning from his ﬁrst “mission to
cyberspace, where I logged a couple of dozen hours on the Net (as we say there).”

Wright reports back to his readers his adventures in this strange place they “probably

never actually [have] been...” Cautiously optimistic, his work represents a fresh look at

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the lntemet as it was ﬁrst starting to make inroads into public use. Wright gives his
readers a description of his encounter with some very basic lntemet technologies:

[The Intemet’s] dimensions are many and diverse. lntemet Relay Chat offers real-

time written conversation--it makes your monitor look like an unfolding

screenplay, with you speaking one of the several parts. File Transfer Protocol lets
you enter computerized archives all over the world and download zillions of ﬁles.

I could go on. But the usenet newsgroups are (arguably) the most socially

momentous of the Net's dimension, and they're where I spent my time. . ..Within

each group is a changing mix of distinct conversational lineages ("threads"), each
labeled with the subject heading of the posting that started it. As of late August in
the soc.culture.celtic group, you could choose to associate with one or more of
half a dozen crowds, including the s crowd, the crowd, the f crowd and the

{Looking for name of Dentist in Belfast N.I.} crowd. . .When you read a posting,

its lineage appears as a family tree in the corner of the screen. If three people

respond to the {Scottish Stereotypes} posting, those responses are its "offspring"-

-siblings of one another--and each may then have offspring of its own. You can

navigate these lineages, go from one posting to its parent, its offspring, its

younger or older sibling or straight to the root or the outrnost leaf.

Wright’s experiences are based on an lntemet that pre-dates graphic browsers and
the World Wide Web; yet, his account demonstrates an enthusiasm for open-publication
standards and a global network of information. Cautious not to be taken in by the latest
“fad,” Wright ﬁnds plenty to be pessimistic about when it comes to life online. He does
not foresee the lntemet transforming democracy or the metaphysics of human existence;
yet, his report from the frontiers of cyberspace validates the cultural signiﬁcance of the
experience and the value of extending physical reality with a virtual one — if only to ﬁnd
a dentist. Reading his words now, they seem anything but revolutionary, but at the time
(and this is the point), they were. It is with Bush’s same sense of imagination that
Wright explores this new medium, and it is good to remind ourselves about what life was

like B.B. (Before Broadband). Reﬂecting back allows us to look forward.

Lesson #3: The Importance of Theorizing about Technology

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This dissertation was an attempt to reinvigorate the novelty of the lntemet, and
this chapter seeks to ﬁnd closure by returning to the importance of theorizing about
technology. Philosophy of technology is not a ﬁeld of rich tradition, despite the recent
attention it has received by twentieth century philosophers. Philosophy is an activity that
ﬁnds its roots in the inquiry of the early Greeks several millennia ago, and has
historically consumed itself with those questions fundamental to the examined life — what
is real, what is true, what is right, and what is good or beautiful. For thousands of years,
the answers to these questions have varied, or philosophers’ conclusions have remained
constant but their justiﬁcations have differed. Given the long history and rich tradition of
philosophy, it should not be surprising that philosophers have been slow to speculate on
the matter of technology (a ﬁeld characterized by change).

Scharff and Dusek (2003) offer several reasons as to why the philosophy of
technology has historically been undertheorized. As they suggest, some intellectual
traditions (including the European positivists, Anglo-American empiricists, and French
Enlightenment thinkers) recognized only the possible good associated with technology.
Perhaps this early enthusiasm for technology explains the heightened criticality of more
recent philosophers toward technology, like those in the Frankfurt School, as a reaction
against such unguarded optimism. These authors also suggest that science has subsumed
technology and “speaks” for technology on matters of epistemology, axiology, and
metaphysics — a conclusion that others (Idhe, 1993) have also put forward. Lastly,
Scharff and Dusek persuasively argue that technology has been undertheorized because
the early Greeks, such as Socrates and Plato, set a precedent by differentiating between

technical/craft/practical knowledge and a higher form of knowledge that is contemplative

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in nature. To create craft is not as high a form of life as to contemplate principles and
abstract knowledge. I qualify their conclusion with the acknowledgement that early
Greek philosophers did not wholly ignore technology, particularly the values embedded
within technology. Aristotle argues that inside technology (techne/craft) are the values of
its designers. As he says, “Every craft is concerned with coming to be; and the exercise
of the craft is the study of how something that admits of being and not being comes to be, 1
something whose origin is in the producer and not in the product” (Aristotle, p. 6.32.10).
Surely Aristotle was one of the ﬁrst to examine the nature of the Homo faber, the human
designer.

Yet, while references to technology exist in Plato, Aristotle, and other thinkers
foundational to the Western Mind, their treatment is far from comprehensive. It was not
until Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and the scientiﬁc revolution that technology found its
way into mainstream philosophical discourse. Bacon’s axiom, “knowledge is power,”
signaled a shift in the purpose of knowledge. For the Greeks, the purpose of knowledge
was to know — knowledge is the fodder for the contemplative life. Once attained, it was
to be mediated upon. For Bacon and those that followed, “the purpose of knowledge is
not simply to know, but to change things” (Ihde, 1993). As society came to value
technique, philosophers began to take notice of technology. It is a long journey from
Plato to the present-day’s technological landscape.

As a recent addition to the technological landscape, the lntemet and the theory
that surrounds it are understandably underdeveloped. Too often, the ritualistic
observations of promise common to educational technology, eCommerce, and political

democracy dominate conversations about the lntemet and its signiﬁcance. Yes, the

 

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lntemet represents a remarkable shift in how humans organize knowledge, but as a
knowledge network, it is also inﬂuenced by the pre-existing social practices of those that

‘6

use it. Recall Dewey’s (1987) explanation: ...we live from birth to death in a world of
persons and things which in large measure is what it is because of what has been done
and transmitted from previous human activities” (p. 39). The lntemet shapes us; we
shape it.

Dewey’s work highlights the importance of being intentional about one’s
experiences with and through technology. Dewey places particular emphasis on how
experiences shape both our present and future realities. Dewey (1987) uses a familiar
example in Experience & Education to illustrate this point:

Moreover, every experience inﬂuences in some degree the objective conditions

which further experiences are had. For example, a child who learns to speak has a

new facility and new desire. But he has also widened the external conditions of

subsequent learning. When he learns to read, he similarly opens up a new
environment. . .He renders himself more sensitive and responsive to certain
conditions, and relatively immune to those things about him that would have been

stimuli if he had made another choice. (p. 37)

Dewey recognizes that an experience can change the quality of our present
condition, but also exerts signiﬁcant inﬂuence on our ﬁrture experiences. He uses
experiences to explain more than a direction of the personal life, but the direction of
society itself. For Dewey, technological artifacts impact not only the kinds of
experiences we have personally, but the experiences we have in our larger social context.
They shape and make societies. Dewey baldly claims that the differences between

“civilization” and “savagery” are principally found in the way technological artifacts

structure our experiences. Take away our roads, power, electricity, and rapid

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transportation and society would temporarily assume a more “barbaric” form (Dewey,
1987,p.39)

For Dewey, experiences form the foundation for the structure of society. Ten
years ago, home lntemet was for the early adopter and the avant-garde geek. Now, most
television and radio commercials, print ads, billboards, and business cards offer website
and email addresses. What used to be the haven for hobbyists is now a requirement for
the appearance of commercial credibility. Who would attend a university without a
professional online presence? The heavy use and reliance on the lntemet creates a certain
experience, or more speciﬁcally, a particular type of relationship between people and
their information. Understanding this relationship is critical in answering historical
questions (what has happened?), but also in developing a reasonable course for the future
(what will happen?)

lntemet theory is important because how we think about anything is important.
As Jerome Bruner (1986) argued in his conclusion of Actual Minds, Possible Worlds that
once theories are accepted into the prevailing culture, they no longer simply describe;
rather, they “give a social reality to the processes they seek to explicate to a degree, to the
‘facts’ that they adduce in their support” (p. 134). Misinforrned theories can shape the
world in undesirable ways, as we have seen in educational policy, national politics, and
global economics. Any theorization of a technology must balance technology’s promise
with technology’s problems.

Lesson #4: Implications for lntemet Theory
As I argued in the introduction of this dissertation, the opportunity and challenge

of lntemet studies are its lack of history, tradition, and calciﬁed beliefs. Recall Steven

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Jones’ keynote address to the 2003 Association of lntemet Researchers Conference:
“There is not yet a canon; there are not departments and degrees. . .There are not yet
methods speciﬁc to lntemet studies. Perhaps most importantly, there is not yet a
theoretical structure or exploration of Internet” (p. 23 3). Some may lament the ill-
deﬁned status of lntemet studies, but I believe it to be an exciting ﬁeld ripe with
opportunity. The years following Jones’ keynote have been witness to rapid growth in
the number and diversity of scholarly activity centered around the lntemet. I offer this
dissertation as part of the growing momentum of individuals interested in the social,
psychological, economic, and philosophical signiﬁcance of this phenomenon. What
follows are the implications of this dissertation for the nascent ﬁeld of lntemet studies.
The Plurality of the Internet

I have argued in several chapters for the plurality of the lntemet. Many of the
current tensions and debates within lntemet studies stem from a general disagreement
about what the lntemet is. What is the democratic value of the lntemet? Does the
lntemet represent a revolution in our relationship with information? Is the lntemet a
technology of the people, or another medium domesticated by government and corporate
interests? Our answers may depend on which lntemet we consider. Are we evaluating
the lntemet common to our thinking, which is the egalitarian lntemet, an open-access
information network with seemingly unlimited potential for the free publication of ideas
with negligible gatekeeping? In Chapter 8, I described this lntemet as the “Deep Web,”
and it is this lntemet of which those most enthusiastic for this technology often speak.
However, there is the matter of the lntemet in practice, the lntemet in effect. This is the

lntemet that is realized in everyday surﬁng and sharing. It is the popular and visible parts

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of the Web, the commercial sites that dominate the search engine listings and garner the
vast majority of user activity. This is the lntemet whose website trafﬁc obeys “power
law” distributions. It is what I termed in Chapter 8, the “Shallow Web.” This division
of Internets does not fully describe the plurality of lntemets. To be sure, there are other
ways to conceptualize the Web’s multi-dimensional characteristics. The distinction
between Shallow and Deep Web is meant to illustrate that some conversations about the
lntemet unnecessarily characterize it one-dimensionally. Likely as the lntemet continues
to grow in richness of experiences and participation (narrowing the digital divide within
socioeconomic groups and between developed and developing world), the need for
multiple Internets will become increasingly clear. I believe that the activity of
“discovery” of other Internets to be an exciting course of research and helpful in ﬁ'aming
the controversies that surround the technology.
The Value of Multiple Methods

A second implication of this dissertation for lntemet studies comes in how we
may approach lntemet studies. When studying a global, cross-cultural phenomenon like
the lntemet, the use of theoretical bricolage is helpful (Levi-Strauss, 1974). The lntemet
is a complex set of practices: social, economic, personal, communal, and global. As
such, this study drew on perspectives of philosophers, sociologists, psychologists,
anthropologists, linguistics, economists, historians, and political scientists to unpack the
Intemet’s complexity. The power of multiple theories and perspectives allow for a wider
range of questions to be asked and more inclusive answers to be given. Even if the
questions that we ask are narrower than what I have offered here, the use of multiple

frames may be helpful because as many of these chapters have shown, it is difﬁcult to

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separate the political, economic, legal, epistemological, and psychological effects of the
lntemet from each other. This advocacy of theoretical bricolage is not a novelty nor
unique; rather, it is a conﬁrmation for those informed observers of the lntemet who
already have cast their nets wide to capture the richness of the lntemet as a project. This
list includes many of the scholars referenced throughout this dissertation.
Direction for Future Research

A ﬁnal set of implications of this dissertation is found in setting the direction for
future research in lntemet studies. Certainly, a ﬁeld as undeveloped as lntemet studies
should offer a rich future of meaningful research. Many questions have yet to be fully
developed and others that have yet to be asked of the lntemet. One could take any of the
questions posed in this dissertation and perform extensive further research, but what
follows are what are some of the more provocative questions now and in the future.

Given the instability of the global political landscape, it is important for scholars
studying the lntemet to continue to explore, monitor, and interrogate its democratic
value. What is the future of this bordered lntemet? How successful will closed nations
be in trying to leverage the lntemet for maximum economic beneﬁt while minimizing its
political effects? In what ways will the lntemet be used in the free elections of the
future? The lntemet is an intriguing development in politics, and likely a worthy course
of future investigation. This may include further reﬁnement in what it means for the
lntemet to be a democratic space, or how the lntemet is used (or not) to advance the
cause of democracy around the world.

There are also important questions about the ﬁrture of the lntemet and its impact

on the storied self. As lntemet penetration rates increase and the sophistication of the

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Intemet’s narrative technology increases, how will users experience the lntemet? What
will this mean for our sense of self and our lives in the “real world”? How will an
increasingly common lntemet inﬂuence the collective human experience? At the
impasse of the self and the lntemet is globalization. To what extent could the lntemet
reduce the relevancy of national boundaries or local culture? This should include a
consideration of the linguistic effects of this platform. What will be the enduring effects
of the lntemet on language evolution? If the lntemet has ﬂattened the world, will it also

ﬂatten language?

 

The nature of the lntemet as a knowledge network was a central part of this
dissertation and will likely continue to be integral to lntemet studies for years to come.
Important (and interesting) questions arise as we consider the way human beings have
related to information over the millennia. With the development of oral history and
writing systems, movable type and the codex book, the lntemet is positioned to be
another important development in how human beings store, organize, and interact with
their collective knowledge. Seeing the wide-spread effects of movable type, scholars
should be properly motivated to continue to consider the effects of the lntemet on a
burgeoning “knowledge society” (Hargreaves, 2003). Exploring more speciﬁc questions
about knowledge producers and consumers should be a ﬁrst priority for those interested
in pushing the ﬁeld forward. In particular, an extended examination of the role of search
engines is an advisable next step. Perhaps this could include studies that compare the
produced results of search engines and what they mean for different stake holders
(information producer, consumer, and organizer).

Lesson #5: Implications for Education

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Most departments and programs of education teach about the lntemet, often in
teacher preparation courses devoted to technology, but also as a component integrated
into other courses such as subject methods courses, and in more specialized courses and
programs devoted exclusively to technology education. A common practice for colleges
of education is to house their instructional technology programs in educational
psychology departments. This has created a healthy emphasis on the value of technology
for teaching and learning. Often, educators ask, “How can this technology assist me in
making a learning experience meaningful?” For a period of time, particularly in K-12
schools, we educators (I include myself) were quite enamored with anything involving
technology. The focus for practitioners and colleges of education was in leveraging
technology “properly,” an agenda that was pursued with vigor. Legislators and policy
makers seeking progressive solutions for the “problems” of American education saw
technology as a magic bullet and acted accordingly. From 1990-2000, United States’
federal spending on educational technology was a staggering $37.8 billion dollars
("QED's technology purchasing forecast, 2000-2001", 2001). This ﬁgure does not
include what state governments, intermediate and local school districts invested in
technology through state monies and local millages.

The overwhelming optimism that surrounded technology created a predictable
backlash against the uncritical use of technology in education. Contrarians like Larry
Cuban (2002), Clifford Stoll (1999), and Todd Oppenheimer (1997) called for a
moratorium on technology spending in schools. Stanley Katz (2001) warned against
confusing a tool with a goal. With funding fading after the dot-com bubble burst and

inﬂuential thinkers questioning the value of educational technology, the relationship

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between technology and learning cooled. In the years that have followed, a more
balanced approach has risen out of the valley of the dot-com era and run-away optimism
toward technology. Now, educators who speak to the value of technology for education
do so with cautious optimism and a critical eye. In their comprehensive volume on
teaching and learning, Bransford (2000) and his colleagues capture the spirit of the
current times with technology:
The new technologies provide opportunities for creating learning environments
that extend the possibilities of “old”—but still useful—technologies—books;
blackboards; and linear, one-way communication media, such as radio and
television shows—as well as offering new possibilities. Technologies do not
guarantee effective learning, however. Inappropriate uses of technology can
hinder learning— for example, if students spend most of their time picking fonts
and colors for multimedia reports instead of planning, writing, and revising their
ideas. And everyone knows how much time students can waste surﬁng the
lntemet. Yet many aspects of technology make it easier to create environments
that ﬁt the principles of learning discussed throughout this volume (p. 206).
These words emphasize the importance of assessing technology through its use, as
a pragmatist would. For the pragmatist, to ask whether the lntemet is a good educational
tool is to misframe the question of technology in education: “There is no such thing as
educational value in the abstract,” wrote Dewey (1987, p. 46). Such thinking places the
emphasis of technology’s role in education on its realized effects, not the technology
itself. In many schools, colleges, and universities, the guiding question for the lntemet,
and for instructional technology in general is Deweyian: In practice, what kind of
experiences does the lntemet create for its users? And the answer to this question
certainly will differ across the range of students and situations where the lntemet is used

in education, as “it is no reﬂection upon the nutritive quality of beefsteak that it is not fed

to infants” (p. 46).

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By and large, educators no longer blindly following technology’s tune, like a pied
piper, and we also recognize the naiveté of the contrarians who pine for a past that only
exists in their memories. Rather, those who speak to the practice of teaching and
technology do so with Bransford and Dewey in mind. Do I like the technological effects
that I see? 13 this technology creating a kind of experience for my students that we value
as a school, district, department, or institution? A strong focus on effects is what being
“critical” of the use of technology in education has come to mean.

In many ways, it is helpful to consider the impact of a technology on the
landscape of education. To do so is to recognize, as Thoreau did, how the train
sometimes rides upon us, rather than we on it. This position — that technology can be
good or bad depending on how it is implemented — has been useful to educators.
Consequently, pragmatic criticality is deeply embedded in the thinking of many
preservice and practicing teachers, administrators, and technology directors. However
useful or accessible this line of thinking may be, this dissertation hopefully demonstrated
to some degree the importance of being “critical” toward technology in other ways. In
particular, I have tried to model how one may ask questions of technology, those that
may transcend the anecdotes and examples contained in the use of the technology
(though use is still very important). Three lessons emerge from such an interrogation of
technology.

The Medium-Knowledge Connection

First, I have argued that while meaning may be created through use, some values

are “frozen” in the code (Bowker & Leigh-Star, 1999). By this, I mean that technologies

are not neutral in their use or their design. They often create certain outcomes and effects

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through the nature of their design. For example, the design of the codex book coupled
with the printing press (which allowed for standardization of text) contributed to a
different relationship between humans and their information and knowledge. Through
the qualities of standard print, information organization favored indices, page numbers,
tables, and outlines — the tools of hierarchy and linearity. As I argued in Chapters 2 and
3, the lntemet presents a different kind constructural relationship than did the codex
book, one that emphasizes bricolage and nonlinear, associative thinking and working. So
while one cannot say that the lntemet is always good or bad for education (how you use it
does matter), one can discuss how the lntemet — or any technology for that matter —
predisposes us for certain kinds of existences, relationships, and interactions. In this way,
I hope to have created a comfortable roost between the essentialists, who argue that
technology is deﬁned through its inherent properties, and the pragmatists, who emphasize
the effects of technology through use. The two positions describe two sides of the same
coin, but in education, we have tended to describe the “use” side of the coin in great
detail at the expense of the essential properties of a technology. There may be rich
applications of Microsoft PowerPoint in education, but the technology’s design may also
be predisposed to reductive thinking, as Edward Tufte (2006b) argued.
The Importance of Power Relations

Second, because many believe that the lntemet will occupy an ever increasing
position of importance in education and society at large, understanding the nature of
power relationships on the lntemet is increasingly important. As I explained in detail in
Chapter 4, power relations permeate the development, use, and disregard for technology.

Through the activity of knowledge production on the lntemet, we see that power relations

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are impersonal, distributed, and act on actions, not individuals. With a distributed sense
of power, the relationship between searcher, information, knowledge, and search engine
becomes apparent. Searcher, information, and search engine work together through a
circuit of exchange to create knowledge. Without the attention of the searcher, the search
engine is irrelevant; without the search engine, unknown information is nearly impossible
to ﬁnd among the billions of web pages; without the exercise of power between the two,
knowledge will not be produced. This circuit of exchange explains why the lntemet is
architecturally open and yet still mediated by popular search engine services such as
Google. Again, the purpose of such a statement is not to paint a picture for students of
monolithic power exercised by large media giants, but to acknowledge a relationship
between search engine and user - one that deﬁnes what knowledge counts on the
lntemet. This relationship should be part of information literacy discussions in secondary
and post-secondary institutions. If students learn to question the lntemet and how its
ﬁeld of power relations impacts the organization of knowledge, then they are likely to be
less na'r've about the claim search engines like Google make to objective, non-political
results. Such an understanding should make credibility problems on the open lntemet
more manageable.
Credibility in Online Spaces

Related to the power-knowledge discussion, is a possible third vertex of a new
criticality: educators should take into consideration how users of the lntemet evaluate the
credibility of lntemet sources, rather than discussing how students should come to such
decisions. Chapter 6 explains through theoretical and empirical evidence that users of the

lntemet gather a Gestalt understanding of a web source’s credibility rather than using a

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step-wise approach. It would be ideal if young users of the lntemet would regularly
employ algorithms for evaluating websites which encompass every one of the
Association of College Research Librarians’ (ACRL) Information Literacy Competency
Standards for Higher Education, which according to the ACRL are “pinpoint speciﬁc
indicators that identify a student as information literate” (ACRL, 2000, p. 5). However
appealing a standards-based approach to information literacy may be, the ill-structured
nature of the lntemet resists such formal organization of credibility standards. There
appears to be incongruity between how users perform credibility analysis, and how the
process is taught in classrooms, as evidenced in media literacy scholarship (Gardner,
Benham, & Newell, 1999; Thoman & Jolls, 2004). The solution to this incongruity may
be more instruction, standards, and tests, but given that users bring outsides skills to the
process, we should not be surprised if they continue to make such decisions using quick
value judgments (Gladwell, 2005). It may be better to encourage the use of these
intuitive judgments about the veracity of sites, which include how the site looks and
whether it feels credible, just as students make snap judgments in their lives each day.
Through their extensive and deep experience of surﬁng the lntemet, students develop a
dense familiarity of the range of information available. As they surf for pleasure, they
employ gut-and-guess strategies to evaluate the nature of information, entity, or person
on the lntemet as they shop, chat, social network, and learn. It would not be surprising if
within such Gestalt snapshots, one did not ﬁnd in varying degrees some of the standards
currently taught for information literacy. However, we should not — as Katz warned
earlier in this chapter — confuse the tool for the goal. The goal is not to master

information literacy standards, but rather, to make good decisions about online resources.

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Coaching students to hone their abilities and rely on their organic experiences with the
lntemet rather than the artiﬁcial ones they have in school is a course of action that
respects the lntemet as a complex set of practices.

Ideas for Changing How We Teach Technology

I do not pretend that these three vertices of criticality would come as a surprise to
those who practice or research education. Nor do I believe they are in any way
comprehensive; rather, I offer them as a starting point in a conversation — one that should
lead us away from the popular but limited conceptualization of criticality (“technology is
neutral; how I use it is what matters”). An expanded understanding of criticality, as
featured in these three “vertices,” should nudge students away this “common criticality,”
one which only deﬁnes meaning through use, to a criticality that asks questions of
technology not dictated solely by its implementation. This is quite different than how
many educational technology courses teach teachers to be critical of technology.

Many courses frame criticality toward technology as a two-step process: (1) learn
how to use the tool (hardware or software) and (2) determine how to integrate it into your
teaching and your students learning. Such an approach assumes the neutrality of
technology, something with which many philosophers, sociologists, and historians of
technology would be uncomfortable. Perhaps what should change are not speciﬁc
examples of critical examination of technology — as I have provided here — but the
process by which we discuss technology. Rather than a simple two-step process of
reﬂection, teachers should be encouraged to expand how they think about technology.

While learning how to operate software or hardware, teachers should be encouraged to

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consider the broader implications of the technology. Such a process should consider ﬁve
themes of a “new criticality.”

First, what values are embedded in the design of this technology? By the nature
of the design, purpose, and features of the technology, there are some “values” that come
through the service through all of its use. They are implicit to the structure of the
technology. Tufte’s (2006b) observation that PowerPoint induces hierarchical and
reductionistic organization of ideas is the best known example, but there are others.
Assessment technologies like eInstruction’s “clicker systems” (in which students use
small, hand-held devices to transmit responses to teacher questions) do provide a highly
interactive environment and the possibility of individualized, ongoing student
assessment. However, by virtue of having software for assessment, the kinds of
questions teachers can ask when using the system are inﬂuenced. The eInstruction
system allows for questions with clear choices (true/false, multiple choice) rather than
open ended questions.

Second, teachers should question what is forced out of the classroom experience
and the curriculum by the inclusion of technology. Classrooms are ﬁnite experiential
spaces — there is an upper limit to what a class can encompass. Addition may require
subtraction. This is easy to see as teachers enthusiastic about technology assign students
PowerPoint presentations as a replacement for the conventional paper. A more subtle
example can be seen in Burbules and Callister’s (2000) treatment of lntemet use, in
which they encourage critical hyperreaders to question, “what isn’t on the Internet?” As
the authors describe, “...one of the most important and yet difﬁcult dimensions of critical

use...[is that] for all its encyclopedic content, the most striking thing about the lntemet is

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still its silences” (p. 77). Burbules and Callister’s insights may be old by lntemet
standards, but the critical insight is important. By choosing this technology, what I am
not choosing? Such trade-offs are inherent, perhaps limiting, but inevitable in the
practice of teaching. The purpose of such a question as this is not to encourage teachers
to lament the trade-off, but to be aware of it and encourage informed, choices.

Third, a new criticality toward of educational technology requires that teachers
not merely implement the technology with intentionality, but also reveal to their students,
as developmentally appropriate, how they intend to change the classroom climate with
the technology. Put another way, “educational technology” can be educational in many
ways, including using technology as a tool for conversation about criticality. Often, those
in media studies think of media literacy as a separate curriculum; however, dialogue
about the less visible attributes of classroom technology may be important to prepare
students for a technology-rich world (if one is optimistic) or the burgeoning “media
torrent” (if one is skeptical of the claims of media and technology, like Gitlin (2002)).
Conversations about classroom technologies can be extended to consider a wide array of
technological choices students make each day. Who better to model critical engagement
than their teacher? This can be realized, by example, as teachers supervise their students’
use of digital information in classroom research. Such is an opportunity to discuss the
beneﬁts and limitations of the lntemet, the role of the search engine, and the distributed
nature of power.

Fourth, while this it is important to recognize the non-neutrality of technology, its
use is still an important factor. How we use technology does matter. Technology is not

neutral, but neither is it determining (Feenberg, 1995). Though Tufte properly

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understandings the hierarchical, reductionistic uses of PowerPoint, artist and musician
David Byrne shows how PowerPoint can be used to create art. He reﬂects on his journey
with the application:

Although I began by making fun of the medium, I soon realized I could actually

create things that were beautiful. I could bend the program to my own whim and

use it as an artistic agent. The pieces became like short ﬁlms: Some were sweet,

some were scary, and some were mysterioso (Byme, 2003).

Bending the program around one’s own whim is a way of describing the agency
of using technology. This principle is seen in most stages of human life: a child uses a
yard-stick as a play sword, a teenager checks the condition of her hair in a window, and
an adult props a door open with a tub of laundry detergent. Design does not dictate use;
it only inﬂuences it.

Fifth, a new criticality requires a historical understanding of not only technology
in the classroom, but also the evolution of the goals, purposes, and practices of education.
Educational technologists often work in the present. They spend hours learning the latest
developments in a wide range of hardware and software solutions. They are rewarded for
a rich understanding of the current possibilities in educational technology, as well as their
ability to forecast its future direction. Criticality requires that we not only understand the
impact and value of present practices in technology, but also past practices. The study of
the history of education’s purposes and practices (as well as the social and economic
context of those conditions) will give teachers and educational technologists a better
appreciation and awareness of the relationship among technology, society, and education.
Rather than thinking technology only in its present forms (which narrows our

imagination), historical perspectives on technology will provide a “long view” of the

recurring themes, questions, opportunities, and constraints across time. Chapters 2 and 3

325

 

of this dissertation can be seen as such an effort — situating a current technology (the
lntemet) in the long history of representational media.

These themes are presented as opportunities, not constraints. Because the lntemet
is new, lntemet studies may be able to examine technology with fresh perspectives. The
rules of the lntemet have yet to be fully written, even after more than ten years with the
World Wide Web. With enormous change comes incredible opportunity to critically
reﬂect on what technology is, what it does, and how it constrains and creates.

The End of the Intemet/ The End of a Dissertation

If you search for the “end of the Internet,” you will ﬁnd an unusual collection of
pages that claim to represent the ﬁnal page of the lntemet. On such effort reads:

The End of the lntemet

Congratulations! This is the last page.

Thank you for visiting the End of the lntemet. There are no more links.

You must now turn off your computer and go do something productive.

Go read a book, for pete's sake.

(from www.3hibumi.org/Eotl)

In a decentralized, nonlinear environment that offers no beginning, middle, or
end, the “last page” of the lntemet is a contradiction in terms. Yet, the end of a
dissertation can be equally difﬁcult to locate. It would seem that one could go on
indeﬁnitely, adding layer upon layer of exploration and experimentation to the existing
analysis found in this dissertation; yet, all stories must come to an end. A young fan of
CS. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia wrote the acclaimed author a letter asking if Lewis
planned on extending the series past the seventh and ﬁnal book. CS. Lewis wrote back,

“. . .once a story stops telling itself to me inside my head, like a tap turned off, I can’t go

on. And if I tried to, it would only sound forced.” I cannot say that the story of the

326

lntemet has stopped telling itself to me, but as some point, one story must end so another

can begin. So it is with this one.

327

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