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8
Culture, Everyday Life and the Internet
Introduction
This chapter discusses how the Internet is becoming embedded in everyday life, highlighting the ways in which social actors are negotiating their lived realities and cultural sensibilities in shaping the Internet through its use. Everyday life is seen in terms of the 'parts of life outside of the formal worlds of work and education' (Haddon, 2004, p-1) although, of course, the more formal worlds are integrated into the everydayness of getting on with one's life There are two interrelated dimensions to this: first, how the flexibility and interactivity of the technology is adapted for multiple everyday purposes. Second, how the culture of everyday life shapes the Internet to produce socio-cultural forms that give the Internet its meaningfulness. In the early twenty-first century, ICT was reaching a 'second age' in which it was becoming embedded in everyday life. The social form of the network is underpinning changes in everyday life, but institutions of culture of the everyday continue to shape communication and communication technologies. The concept of 'domestication' is introduced to address the ways in which ICT is taken up in everyday life and shows how the Internet becomes embedded in households' social relations. The discussion extends to look at differentiated usage of the Internet by addressing participation in socio-cultural forms, such as diaspora hubs, remote mothering and communication in cosmopolitan conditions. Very often, socio-cultural forms of the Internet and their attendant forms of networked sociability and networked individualism are a combination of old and new forms of participation. The use and ongoing adaptation of the Internet by social actors are shaped through contemporary cultural trends that are, in turn, shaping culture (see Chapter 9).
The exploration of the Internet, culture and everyday life needs to be undertaken in relation to the characteristics of the Internet's relations of production and its narratives; however, the emphasis is now on
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Culture, Even/day Life and the Internet 125
user-participation (as consumers and as producers) in various everyday contexts of use. Earlier chapters considered the production and narratives of the Internet and modes of participation within those dimensions, this ; chapter and the following chapters will focus on understanding the ways in
which the Internet1 is taken-up, adapted and appropriated in everyday life.
i
Cultural Change and Everyday Life
Before considering the Internet in everyday life, it is necessary to identify the 'everyday' and to understand changes within everyday life. One way ; to understand everyday life is to consider the social and cultural forms
through which everyday life is shaped and which, in turn, gives shape and meaning to the everyday. These forms are located in and in many ways structure the situations of daily interaction in meaningful ways. The framework of the cultural form is applicable in the context of everyday life in that 'social and cultural forms which make sense of everyday life do J so practically for their inhabitants and as representations to be observed,
J enjoyed and interpreted as cultural performances' (Chaney, 2002, p. 3).
j Part of understanding the Internet and society involves gaining a grasp
\ of how social life is changing, or not, in relation to communication prac-
! rices, and the organization of everyday life in forms of entertainment and
I in Ways of representation. In general, the social sciences and humanities
.' started to address everyday life as a distinct category in its own right when
it became identified as a site for political and social engagement in the 1960s.* Radical and counter-cultural movements during the 1960s not only affected campus life as noted in Chapter 2, but they were also located and played out within society more broadly. At that time, some cultural genres were questioning established conventions, social and gender orders. From these activities, the notion of everyday life became a focus for social theory i as well as a theme of cultural representation (Crook, 1994). Crook suggests
I that, from the early identification of the importance of everyday life for
[ social thought, it remains a significant domain when analysing the cul-
| tural changes of late modernity.
I If, as mentioned before, one takes Dewey's (1939) assertion that social
life is made in and through communication, then the ways in which we communicate become a significant aspect of everyday life and its study. As | Silverstone (1994,1996,2005,2006) argues, technologies including ICT and
| media are located and given meaning through the dynamics of the every-
| day. This does not, however, just include the take-up and use of these tech-
I nologies but also the way in which they are vehicles in forming meaning
I that shapes contemporary culture and the way it is experienced. These tech-
j! nologies are both a communicative medium and a source of representation
126 Understanding the Internet
and cultural content. Silverstone (1994) calls this their 'double articulation' because they comprise both a media artefact and a sphere of the production and interpretation of cultural content. Thus, if one follows the idea of a 'communicative turn' (Silverstone, 2005) within late modernity, then new forms of communication are embedded within the social relations of everyday life, and they are both implicitly and explicitly part of changes in everyday life. The dynamics of the everyday can be both progressive and reactive, with some forms of communication being taken up within new ways of living everyday life whilst, in other cases, everyday life can prove to be resistant to some of the opportunities, or threats, that the new technologies may bring. Deciding whether change and the resistances to change prove progressive and positive for different groups in society, or whether they represent a reactionary and conservative stance, involves value judgements that are, in part, constructed from within broad cultural frameworks.
Within contemporary change and everyday life there is a rise of what can be termed popular democratization, in which populism is dominant in public discourse but which may not entail any substantial popular emancipation (Chaney, 2002). Second, in relation to increased social fragmentation (Castells, 1996) there is a pervasive sense of cultural fragmentation (Chaney, 2002). Chaney uses the term 'fragmentation' not to imply that culture is becoming less important but that the authority of a dominant culture is increasingly contested from a variety of perspectives (ibid.). Together, these processes axe seen as part of a wider process of 'informali-zation' in which there is a blurring of many of the authority structures dominant in earlier phases of modernity (ibid.). As a result of undermining of culture understood in modernist terms through informatization, 'the everyday' has become a focus for cultural criticism and is a source of cultural production and representation that now holds a dominant position in cultural discourse (ibid.). However, this does not mean that everyday life is more 'transparenť or that it ceases to be the context for social action (Silverstone, 2005).
In relation to cultural change,3 society has become more diverse and multicultural, thus destabilizing any cultural homogeneity of conventional experience. There has also been an expansion in the means of entertainment for everyone through/for example, the development of television as a mass cultural form, the transformation of popular music using new means of recording and distribution, the development of web-based cultures and a proliferation of types of performance (Chaney, 2002). There has been some expansion of notions of leisure time ■ however, with the development of flexible work patterns, contract-based employment and new forms of parenting practices, this assumption of additional leisure time cannot be adopted without further consideration. Negotiations over the control of
Culture, Everyday life and the Internet 127
[ time and space have, on the one hand, changed the structure and rhythms
of daily time and place and, on the other hand, introduced a new range of consumer goods and services for the management of time and location in everyday life.
These dimensions of social and cultural life interact with the shaping and use of the Internet in the experience of the everyday. Chaney argues that individuals gain understanding and aptitudes for a variety of activities through culture. Culture gives forms of life their distinctive characteris-I tics, which are meaningful to the social group in which particular activ-
I ities are created and embedded.* Cultural activity addresses the variety
found within social life as well as indicating that there is a level of coBect-j ive, or at least intersubjective, experience that shapes our everyday lives.
I As previously noted, the Internet was designed as a democratic medium of
j communication to enable people to communicate with each other and was
; shaped through the countercultural movements of the 1960s. The ongoing
popularization and commercialization of the Internet is continuing to shape its form and use. In fact, how users shape the Internet (as producers ; or consumers) is adding to the forms of participation available to people in
; the twenty-first century.
By focusing on socio-cultural forms we can address the way that cultural change materializes in practices and artefacts, which also provides some understanding into the meanmgfulness of these forms for social actors within their respective forms of life. Thus, social actors accomplish cultural change as they engage with the world around them, which is manifested through ordinary and extraordinary experience and ordered through routines. Cultural change is not only evident in the changing character of routines but also how these routines (whether changing or static) are talked about and mediated (to include representation and articulation) • in public discourse within modes of performance including the 'factual',
the 'fictional' and the 'staged' (ibid.). The disruption to routines is a significant part of change, seen, for example, in the concept of disruptive tech-5 nologies' in which the use of technologies may break established routines
5 as part of the social constitution of change.
This dynamic character of cultural change means that any analysis of \ change must address both the substantive aspects of change, for instance
■ lifestyles and levels of engagement in types of entertainment, as well as
the forms of that change (ibid.). An exploration of the content of change is j necessary because it provides a snapshot of the process of change but it is
I insufficient in that it cannot produce an interpretation of the significance
| of those changes (ibid.). To explore the significance of change, form must
| be considered as well as the content of change. Form includes structures
si of change framed by members of a community or culture, their sense of
identity and selves, their characteristic discourses, representations and
•6'
128 Understanding the Internet
artefacts as well as their actions, habits and accomplishments (ibid.). Thus, as described in Chapter 3, technologies themselves do not determine how they are to be used in different social settings. On the contrary, the meaning of technology is shaped by the context of competing expectations, interests and powers (ibid.). As technologies become shaped meaningfully by the activity of everyday life through different cultural constellations, they constitute the cultural forms of everyday life. These cultural forms then become the catalysts and frameworks in which contemporary social life is negotiated (Wessels, 2000b, 2007).
The concerns of everyday life in the second half of the twentieth century and in the early twenty-first century have been, and continue to be, articulated and thus constituted through what Dorothy Smith (1988) calls the 'materiality of consciousness'. She argues that consciousness is realized through artefacts, technologies and symbolic forms, which provide the means for overlapping physical and virtual environments, asserting that 'the simple social acts or tuning in, ringing up, and logging on can therefore have complex meanings for subjects' (p. 86). She is referring to the way these practices constantly overlay and interlace both the situated and the mediated worlds of late modernity (Moores, 2000, p. 9). Chaney argues that this means 'that through adopting, using, rejecting - that is selecting amongst the performances, services and artefacts of mass culture industries - practical understandings are institutionalized' (Chaney, 2002, p. 53). o For example, the media have not determined people's core expectations ^ but have, nonetheless, been a key resource in the embodiment or materialization of cultural expectations and mores. Given this, it is more productive to think of the 'products' of mass cultural industries as environments rather than texts, performances or services (ibid.). This is because when these products are used and brought together within cultural frameworks, they help to shape and constitute the everyday world. In similar vein, Silverstone (2005, 2007) points out that the media are best understood as an environment that is made up of different media platforms, channels and audience participation. The media environment is intimately linked with everyday life and its elements are mutually constitutive of the mediated and situated life that is characteristic of late modern everyday life. However, as Silverstone (ibid.) shows, this does.not mean that media and its cultural content are straightforwardly adopted; rather the process by which both the forms of media and its content are interpreted and embedded in social life constitutes its form within broader media and cultural frameworks and environments.
The use of Internet-related technology in everyday life is part of a broader change in general institutional frameworks - disembedding time and space within modernity (Giddens, 1984). The development of mobility in everyday life (Urry, 2000) is also contributing to the way the everyday
Culture, Everyday Life and the Internet 129
j acts as a framework in which social identities are established and re-
| established. The different ways in which individuals play with and dis-
I play their identity is a characteristic feature of the taken-for-granted-ness
I of everyday life, which is not only accomplished at the local level but also
| draws on individuals' respective interaction with the cultural and creative
| industries.5 As Kellner (1995) argues that if everyday life appears local,
| then the borders of locality have been diffused or extended by engage-
| ments with cultural industries that have global reach.
\ The expansion in telecommunications through mobile phones and the
j development of digital networks enable people to create new spaces and
, sites for engaging in communicative and media practices. This means that
traditional spaces for communication, entertainment and cultural performance such as theatre, cinema and television, radio and phone are no longer the only places for communicative cultural work. These spaces are still | key sites but they are expanded within environments in distinctive ways,
i such as digital video installations in built environments, user-produced
content on blogs and wiki-based media, user-produced videos on YouTube | and social networking around music on MySpace and so on. Equally and
i conversely, of course, the performance arts and traditional rituals have
l| appropriated, used and created sites for performance from space and place
I using these new technologies. The development of mobile media means
| that individuals can stay connected whilst on the move, becoming - in
effect - the 'primary unit of connectivity' (Wellman and Haythornfhwaite, I 2002). This means that individuals have to learn to manage a network of
| people and places in different contexts. The late modern individual, who is
[ connected via these technologies, therefore manages the local and the glo-
bal, work and domestic life through technology, as well as using the Web for entertainment or cultural activity.
The Second Age of the Internet and Everyday Life
Wellman and Haythornthwaite (2002) assert that the Internet is in its 'second age' (c. 2000)6 because it is now being used routinely within the everyday lives of many people. The research they report on shows that the Internet is embedded in everyday life, with almost all Internet users routinely communicating via email (which is used more than the phone), and many web surf and shop online. Another example of take-up is participation in Usenet groups, whose members participated in more than 80,000 topic-oriented collective discussion groups in 2001 (ibid.). Although a smaller percentage of Internet users play online games, their j numbers are enough to sustain a sizeable industry, Internet telephone
I accounted for 5.5% of international telephony traffic in 2001 (ibid.). The
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recent phenomenon of social networking has gained significant numbers of users, with MySpace logging 110 million unique users and Facebook logging over 100 million m January 2008 worldwide. The ten most popular Internet activities in the United States in 2000 were web-surfing/ browsing, email, finding hobby information, reading news, finding entertainment information, shopping online, finding travel information, using instant messaging, finding medical information and playing games (ibid.). The use of five Internet is integrated into the everyday life, for example, online commerce is integrated with physical stores to produce a 'clicks and mortar' form of shopping. A similar pattern of on and off-line everyday Hfe routines are seen in the way actors use online communities alongside face-to-face, phone and postal contacts to keep in touch with friends and family. Wellman and Haythomthwaite stress that the Internet is used in both old, familiar ways and new, innovative ones. They suggest that the Internet is starting to be taken for granted because it is now an accepted part of everyday life.7
Given that the Internet is integrated into much of everyday life, Wellman and Haythornthwaite raise critical issues about earlier approaches that address the Internet in dichotomous terms - such as: Is the Internet providing new means of connectivity in domestic relations or is it sucking pedple away from husbands, wives and children? In relation to community, this type of approach leads to questions such as: Is the lure of the Internet keeping people indoors so that their 'in-person' (and even telephonic) relationships with friends, neighbours, and kinfolk wither - or is it enhancing connectivity so much that there is more than ever before? A similar theme is enacted out with regard to civic involvement with questions such as: does the Internet disconnect people from collective, civic enterprises so that they are connecting alone - or is it leading people to new organizations and to the increase in organizations? In general questions of alienation run along the lines of: Is the Internet so stressful or disconnecting from daily life that people feel alienated - or does their sense of community increase because of the interactions they have online? As far as daily activities are concerned, this framework of analysis asks questions such as: Is the Internet replacing or enhancing everyday pursuits, be it shopping or finding companionship and social support?
Wellman and Haythornthwaite argue that although these questions raise issues about the Internet in everyday life, they fail to tojuch on how the Internet is integrated into ongoing daily life, actions and practices.8 Research, therefore, they argue, needs to take an integrative approach to computer mediated communication (CMC) to address and understand how online activities fit with and complement other aspects of an individual's everyday life as well as examining how convergence has materialized into socio-cultural forms such as vlogs and so on. Factors that influence
how the Internet is being taken up in everyday life include the increasing access, commitment and domestication of ICT, longer working hours, the use of ICT in schoolwork, Tceeping up' with trends in technology and media use and the pervasive development of a networked society (ibid.).
Routines and Practices in Daily Life
In the second age of the Internet, Wellman and Haythornthwaite define the Internet as a complex landscape of applications, purposes and users that interact with the entirety of people's lives, including interaction with their friends, the technologies they have around them, their life-stage and lifestyle and their offline community. They argue that people's Internet usage is related to their non-Internet attributes and behaviour. The patterns of behaviour include the observation that Internet users in the United States are more media connected than non-users: in the United States, books are used by 12% more Internet users that non-users; video games are used by 15% more Internet users than non-users; recorded music is used by 22% more Internet users than non-users; and Internet users use newspapers (6% more), radio (9% more), phone (3% more) more than non-users (ibid.). The only exception is television, which is viewed less by Internet users than non-users. These patterns of media use may be a reflection of the higher education and income of Internet users. It may also indicate characteristics of early adopters whose pre-existing inclination to use all types of media, combined with familiarity and ease with media, may have made it easier and less complex for them to adopt computing and the Internet (Rogers, 1995). It is not, therefore, surprising that people with higher incomes and education levels were the early adopters of the Internet, and that their lifestyles set some of the norms (rietiquette) for online behaviour. However, although there are early shaping factors, the Internet is nonetheless adapted and located within multiple interactions and responsibilities, both online and off-line that are comprised of people's activities, relationships and community.
Time weaves through everyday life and the increasing mobility and flexible schedules of everyday life means that time is something that individuals negotiate and manage daily; adding another activity into everyday life means making adjustments to the shape of daily life. As Wellman and Haythornthwaite (2002) note, people cannot add 16 hours spent on Internet activities a week to their daily lives without changing some patterns of their existing behaviour.' One key area for time transference is from television viewing to Internet activity, with Internet users spending 28% less time watching television than non-users.10 Nie et al. (2002) show-that heavy Internet users cut back on use of all traditional media, as well as "
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shopping in stores and commuting in traffic. Anderson and Tracey (2002), I however, find that average use of the Internet only marginally reduces f time spent gardening, reading newspapers, magazines and books, shop- I ping, telephoning, going to the pub, doing nothing, writing letters and sleeping. Thus average time spent using the Internet tends to involve some rescheduling of activity with changes in television viewing being the most affected. Only heavy users of the Internet cut back on the usual activities of everyday life.
In relation to young people, Wagner et al. (2002) note that teenagers' ; use of the Internet does not reduce their more socially acceptable activ- j] ities of reading or playing sport Instead, they find that 'computer kids' § are less likely to engage in the less-socially accepted activities of just jj 'hanging around' or doing nothing. Robinson et al. (2002) identify a simi- I lar in that Internet users in general tend to have a more active lifestyle than non-users, including having less sleep and more social contact with friends and co-workers. A different pattern of behaviour emerges when the Internet is used at home for a ma/or undertaking such as studying or working online, with online learners dropping some activities first, while preserving others.11 The first activities to go are relatively solitary experiences such as watching TV, reading for pleasure, needlework and j gardening; the next activities that are curtailed are leisure activities with % friends and work for volunteer groups; in the last instance work, sleep and j food are compromised. Time with family (especially children) is main- | tained until the end, as well as work on the educational programme itself ' (Wellman and Haythornthwaite, 2002). This discussion shows that the Internet has become integrated into the routines of everyday life. It indicates that people adapt time and existing activities in ways that integrate the Internet into their daily lives. The types of changes they make relate to their interests and priorities through which they not only take up ICT but they shape it too. The next section considers the form in which the Internet is appropriated in everyday life, which is followed by a consideration of how people shape ICT.
1 I
Networks and, Networked Individuals as Social Forms
Late modern lifestyles that involve varying levels of mobility and the micro-management of time is influential in shaping how people maintain contact with each other. Overall, the use of the Internet neither increases nor decreases contact in person Or on the telephone. Very often -staving in touch with people using the Internet results in people being in more contact with friends and relatives than when without Internet communication. The very act of communication is part of organizing and sustaining \
Culture, Everyday Life and the Internet 133
relationships. For example, in North America, being wired has local benefits: Blacksburg Internet users report increased communication with both formal groups and friends. In Netville, those with high-speed Internet connections had more informal contact with neighbours than the non-wired did and wired residents knew the names of 24 neighbours compared to 8 for non-wired individuals (Wellman and Haythornthwaite, 2002). Some of this is attributable to the Internet, although a key factor is how well connected people are in that some people might make new friends via the Internet but usually online connectivity starts with pre-established ties with friends and relatives in whom the Internet is utilized for communication purposes. Strong ties between friends and relatives often go beyond the local neighbourhood, especially if people move away for work or study, and in these contexts Internet communication builds on existing relationships, ensuring the maintenance of the relationship across disr-tance. Furthermore, adding a new medium to communication repertoires is more likely if the relationship is already strong. Frequent contact via the Internet is associated with contact via other means and people use more media in closer relationships (ibid.). Relationships and their character are therefore influential in shaping the take-up and use of ICT for communication purposes and it is proving to be useful in maintaining relationships at distances of both local and beyond the local levels.
Research in the United States shows that connectivity goes with those who are online and well connected via ICT, and that people who are already well situated socially with good incomes and education derive the greatest social benefits from the Internet (Nie, 2001). Existing connectivity levels may also interact with the success of community-wide Internet initiatives, with civic engagement via the Internet being positively associated with higher levels of other forms of civic involvement. Community networks may succeed because they are established in environments that already have high levels of connectivity, suggesting that social capital is a prerequisite, rather than a consequence of, effective CMC (ibid.). Overall, communication and connectivity reinforce each other with those already with vibrant networks of friends and relations and those active in civic life exploiting ICT to enhance communications underpirining relationships and socio-cultural life.
Wellman and Haythornthwaite argue that changes to communication practices in everyday routines are located in a social trend signifying a different relationship between the individual and society, which they call 'networked individualism'. They show how an individual within a range of social networks has become the node of connectivity: it is through the individual that connections are made and the individual manages those connections. This transition is seen as being one from 'groups' with 'each in their place' to 'networks' involving the 'mobility, of people and goods'.
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Examples of these trends include shifts
• From a united family to serial marriage, mixed custody,
• From shared community to multiple partial networks.
• From neighbourhoods to dispersed networks.
• From voluntary organizations to informal leisure, (p. 33)
Wellman and Haythomthwaite argue that the Internet facilitates changes that were already in process towards a networked society. They suggest that society was changing from one of bounded communities to numerous individualized, fragmented, personal communities. Many people's close friends and family are not geographically close - transport systems and modern communications sustain the ties. This pattern is identified as being 'glocalized' (Hampton and Wellman, 2002; Graham and Marvin, 1996), which means 'the combining of long-distance ties with continuing involvements in households, neighbourhoods, and worksites' (Hscher, 1982 cited by Wellman and Haythornthwaite, 2002, p. 32). Furthermore, they assert that the Internet has supported the move to networks, which are characterized by more permeable boundaries - interactions with a greater diversity of others, as well as engagement in multiple networks (p. 33).
The personalization, portability, ubiquitous connectivity and wireless mobility of the Internet facilitate networked individualism as a basis for community. In this way, it is the individual who is becoming the primary unit of connectivity. The characteristics of these changes point to the emergence of new social forms - first, the network as a communicative community which links different aspects of an individual's life. This social form emerges from, and is located in, the needs and desires of individuals to coordinate the fragmentation of social life. The network facilitates them to construct the everyday meaningfully by crafting rime, space and a range of resources through ICT and a myriad of communication practices. Second, networked individualism is the form through which individuals select significant others and cultural products in creating their own lifestyles in their everyday life Underpinning these forms are communication systems configured from human, as well as old and new communication technologies. However, the role of the Internet and ICT is influential in facilitating late modern networks and the communicative agency of the individual within those networks.
Placing the Internet in the Meaningfulness of Everyday Life
Although there is some evidence that the network is emerging as a social form, social life and changes in social life require change in institutional
terms. The routines, practices and meanings of everyday life are performed in the institutions of everyday life. The household and the domestic sphere are important institutions and sites in the domain of the everyday and they interact with wider social and public life. Innovation occurs in the everyday, both in terms of a range of practices and products mduding innovation in forms of communication and their technologies. Very often the interpretation and appropriation of goods and services by the diversity of everyday users is a source of innovatiorL As Chaney (1994) argues, engagement with cultural products is social action and - in relation to the innovation of ICT - the processes of the ways in which these technologies are used (or not) and shaped shows that the innovation process does not stop once a product leaves suppliers' shelves (Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992).
ICT enters the everyday through the key institution of the household. The household is the site for the domestication process, which involves fitting and fixing the new ICT into the familiar and the secure, while moulding its novelty to the needs, desires and culture <a£ the family or household (ibid.). The shaping of ICT is in the relations of the household through four non-discrete phases, which are the appropriation of ICT, its objectification and incorporation into the household through which it is meaningfully converted into domestic use (p. 16). Silverstone (with Hirsch) asserts that this process is one by which consumers incorporate new technologies and services into patterns of their everyday lives in ways that maintain both the structure of those lives and their capacity to control that structure. Domestication of ICT shows how changes around patterns of communication are contested within socio-cultural and institutional frameworks. Silverstone argues that consuming ICT is a struggle between the familiar and the new, the social and the technical. It is situated in the contested space between the revolutionary potential of the machine and the evolutionary demands of family and household. Furthermore, this concept addresses the struggle within households in the appropriation of ICT, seen, for instance, between parents and children, between male and female siblings, between male and female partners, between same sex partners and between levels of computer 'experts' and computer *novices' In all these relationships, individuals seek to manage space, time and technologies without losing position and identity within the complex and uncertain politics of age, gender and status in the home.
Silverstone (with Hirsch, 1992; also in Berker et al„ 2006, pp. 229-247) posits that the domestic sphere is a 'moral economy', a distinct social and cultural space in which the evaluation of individuals, objects and processes which form the currency of public life is transformed and transcended once the move is made into private life.12 In these domestic spaces, individuals are more or less free - depending on their available material and symbolic resources — to define their own relationships to each other and
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: to the objects and meanings, the mediations, communications and information that cross their thresholds. Households are both economic and cultural units within which their members can define for themselves a private, personal and, more or less, distinct way of life. The materials and resources they have at their disposal come both from the inner world of family values, as well as the public world of commodities and objects. This moral economy is constantly changing, affected by the 'relentlessness of the human life cycle, as well as the bufferings of everyday life, historically specific yet uneven in their consequences' (p. 230).
The dynamics of the moral economy are defined through an eternal cycle of consumption and appropriation in which a commodity is accommodated into the spaces, times and functional requirements of the home. New hardware and software technologies and services are brought into the home to be placed, displayed and incorporated into the rituals of domestic and daily life to enhance efficiency or increase pleasure (ibid.). New skills may be developed, meanings generated and new conflicts are, or are not, resolved - all of which are expressions of the constant tensions between technological and social change within the household. The novelty and achievements, the significance created and sustained in the ownership and use of new machines, access to new computer software or TV channels then become part of the currency of everyday discourse - discussed, displayed and shared in the social gossip and tails in neighbourhoods, schools and workplaces. Silverstone's understanding of the consumption and domestication of ICT is a significant contribution to understanding the Internet and everyday life. In particular he shows how institutions and institutional change is part of technological change. Therefore, although networks might be gaining greater and a particular relevance in late modernity, the social relations of households and the moral economy of the domestic sphere remain significant institutions in shaping ICT and the characteristics of communication in late modern everyday life. Furthermore, these processes are intrinsically cultural and therefore, the everyday and the shaping of the Internet are informed by the culture of everyday life in its routines and in its engagement with cultural activities whether that of networks of friends, public culture or cyber culture (see Chapter 9).
The significance of the institution of the household is often neglected in conventional discussions-of the diffusion of ICT. These discussions fail to acknowledge the work that households and the public at large do in 'domesticating' ICT to serve their own particular values and interests. This work also includes people's patterns of consumption and their everyday choices in consuming ICT (Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992). The producers of ICT, however, have significant power and influence in creating and managing the use of ICT through the way they shape and frame consumer choice (Mansell and Silverstone, 1996). Nonetheless, despite their power,
the rejection of some ICT, such as the videophone, demonstrates that consumers also play a pivotal role in ICT developments. Woolgar (2001) explains that the degree of influence exierted by producers depends on their ability to 'configure the user'. Producers can position ICT in relation to users long before they reach the marketplace; however, as research by Silverstone (2005) shows, the 'everyday is not biddable to the desires of technology/ (p. 13) or that of its producers.
Contexts of the ways in which members of households shape technologies and their cultural usage includes how TV audiences and PC users actively engage in consuming technologies by deciding how to use them and how to interpret the messages they convey. These decisions are various and include the ways households consciously regulate access to communication technologies and media other than TV: such as books, answering machines and services that screen and return phone calls. Parents regulate the use of ICT by installing software that allows children to use their parents' PC while preventing them from destroying electronic files or accessing pornographic sites on the web. Another example of parental shaping of technology and its use is the taking out subscriptions to cable or pay-TV services that are suitable for children.13 The gendering of space is another aspect of ICT use in the home. For instance, putting a PC in the male partner's office restricts privacy of the female partner, which might constrain her use of ICT (Haddon and Skinner, 1991). The design of the home is also changing as more homes are being built to accommodate PCs and other ICT equipment, in contrast to previous homes being designed to accommodate print technologies by installing bookshelves." Culturally accepted beliefs and attitudes about the organization of the household structure these choices.15 In so doing, households actively shape access, sometimes by design, but often inadvertently, in the pursuit of other values and interests. However, the choices for households are not open-ended, being constrained by prevailing attitudes to the arrangements of the home, which varies across cultures, socio-economic groups and time. Consumers' choices are also constrained by the influence of producers as well as by the larger social, economic and political ecology outside the household.
The culture of everyday life extends out into numerous forms of households and patterns of living the everyday. In a culture of everyday life influenced by neo-liberalism - whether embraced, managed or resisted -individuals negotiate the sodo-technical environment creatively in relation to the specificity of their lives. These negotiations are diverse and produce distinctive fabrics and flows to the everyday. For example, different patterns emerge in diverse studies of a small seaside town in North County Dublin (Ireland) in an established community (Ward, 2005); in Trondheim (Norway) amongst mobile cosmopolitan scientific researchers (Berker et al., 2005); and in the management of travel in everyday life and mothering
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(Haddon, 2004). Another pattern of everyday life is that of those living in diasporic communities where communication is intrinsically linked with the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. These transnational communities have always been reliant on networking to communicate with, and maintain their relationships with, dispersed friends and relatives from around the globe (Georgiou, 2005). Apart from the Irish example, these contexts, in differing ways, show how communication extends domestic ^space, traditionally understood, to a range of public and semi-public spaces and publicly accessible media outlets.
The study in Ireland shows how the residents of the town" are learning to integrate the Internet into existing routines and media consumption mainly by using it in a structured and targeted way (Ward, 2005, p. 107). Households appropriate the affordance of ICTs and shape them into local and private cultures, which are also reshaping the relationship and interactions between their private and public spheres. Principally, this means that the Internet is incorporated into family cultures, especially those families with children. Although parents recognize that part of the pressure to engage with ICT is ideological, they nonetheless say that take-up of ICT in the family home is triggered through the demands of education, with many parents feeling that they need to be Internet literate to support their children's schooling. Parents also feel that lacking access to ICT and not being ICT literate is increasingly restricting their capacity to participate in public life. This is because access and information about public events are increasingly being made available via ICT such as the provision email addresses on the radio for public events for booking tickets and getting details of an event. However, the use of ICT, in this established community, is largely privatized, in that the influence of family cultures extend in shaping ICT use through many of the families wanting to maintain communication with friends and family who live in Australia, South Africa, America and Canada. Family cultures in this community setting are influential in shaping the Internet, and they temper any rapid, and potentially disruptive, innovation of ICT in the patterns of the everyday.
A rather different pattern of use emerges in Trondheim amongst geographically mobile researchers living within a condition of cosmopolitanism (Roche, 2007). Their condition in particular highlights the dynamics of public and private spheres, and how the blurring of these spheres is managed in contexts of internationally situated work (Silverstone, 2005). The life of scientific researchers can involve time working in foreign universities because international and transnational networks are common in the production of knowledge (Berker, 2005). In this situation, workers who are away from 'home' configure ways to use the Internet to mitigate senses of displacement, to keep in touch with family and friends as well as maintaining their professional links with researchers worldwide. The
researchers' use of the Internet as a research tool in their work setting is relatively unproblematic. In contrast, however, researchers experience difficulties in negotiating personal and work based ICT for their own private communication. Researchers learn how to utilize ICT within the personal sphere and work spheres by manoeuvring social spaces and time boundaries to carve out time and communicative resource to contact distant friends and relatives. They combine personal and work technologies such as mobiles, PCs and wireless technologies to communicate and bracket pockets of time in the day when they know they can contact their relatives and friends.
The context for this is that these researchers are living their personal lives in internationally dispersed households (with partners and family in other countries) and networks of local and international researchers, but have little contact with local people in their geographical place of residence. This means that notions of a daily routine in which activities that can be conventionally done 'in work' times and 'in home' times are blurred. However, to secure their senses of self in these contexts, they reflexively construct routines of communication with their families using ICT, whilst keeping their research networks alive through the same online communication tools. The separation between non-work communication and networks and work-related networks and communication means that the researchers have to negotiate and mediate different lifeworlds in trans-local and local spaces. Most researchers hope that one day they will find a secure job and place and, in the meantime, ICT is a resource they manage to live an everyday life of extreme flexibility (ibid.).
A key part of everyday contemporary life is travel, in its many diverse forms. The recent rise of travel is often termed 'hypermobihty' (Adams, 2000), which marks the increase in journeys, including linking journeys taken in everyday life as well as global travel. This increase occurs despite the earlier belief that ICT would enable people to engage in local everyday life by working from home with tele-access in configurations of tele-cottages and in so doing reduce travel (Richardson and Gillespie, 2003). Other dimensions to this trend include the rise of mothers working and commuting and also the ways in which young people increasingly organize their own leisure activities. This aspect of travel illustrates the extension of the domestic space into public space and highlights the relationship between the two, namely how the use of communication technologies is important in managing travel. For instance, children use fixed-line phones to organize meetings with peers (Buchner, 1990), a practice also undertaken by young adult friends in France (Manceron, 1997). Adults use email to plan events at relatively short notice, such as arranging to meet up after work - although delayed or lost emails can be problematic (Haddon, 2O00). Mobile phones and mobile devices such as Blackberries are a popular
uiauuauiuig meir professional linJss with researchers worldwide. The
Understanding the Internet
technology whilst travelling because they enable users to communicate whilst mobile, and thus micro-coordinate travel (Ling, 2004). Examples include arranging to pick up or drop bff children whilst travelling between work and home and teenagers confirming meeting times and places when out enjoying leisure time. Another example is that of women using mobiles to be available to their children even when they are not physically present, which is referred to as 'remote mothering' (Rakow and Navaro, 1993). Mobiles therefore enable individuals to manage their private affairs whilst away from home and extend the meaning of the domestic sphere, shaping ICT to fit into late modern lifestyles (Haddon, 2004).
For diasporic communities, the everyday has distinctive characteristics. In particular, the fabric of the everyday is. weaved from the dynamics of inclusion and participation in highly mediated society (Georgiou, 2005). One defining characteristic of the experience of a diaspora is that the perspectives within it recognize the ways in which identities are transformed through relocation and cross-cultural exchange and interaction (Gillespie, 1995). These populations rely on, and benefit from, communication technologies to maintain links with their networks across the globe. A key aspect that these communities face in their everyday lives is that, on the one hand, they actively participate in distinct communities (across local, national and transnational contexts) whilst, on the other hand, they face constraints in their efforts to participate (Georgiou, 2005). The use of the Internet in this context is located within the broad range of media used by members of diasporic communities (see Chapters 7 and 10).
However, the Internet plays a particular role in the communication ensembles in diasporic experience and sensibilities. This is because communication via the Internet helps to sustain cultural identity through the exchange of the ordinariness of culture shared across the everyday, as well as cultural distinctiveness shared through language and politics. The. availability of online communication, primarily email, has increased communication between members bf communities across transnational, local and national networks. Members of diasporic communities report that they regularly share everyday experiences and mundane news with those in other positions in the diaspora network (Georgiou, 2005). In sharing news, they also exchange intimate email attachments, such as family photographs. This sharing ofthe mundane, the intimate and the common routines and practices of everyday life (De Certeau, 1984) foster feelings of belonging to a community and extend the possibilities of imagined sharing (Georgiou, 2005). A further element that sustains the culture of everyday life is the development of diasporic cultural projects (ibid.), which utilize the web to sustain language and dialects and to exchange music and cultural knowledge. The sites for these activities tend not to
Mobile phones and mobile devices such as Blackberries are a popular
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be in domestic spaces; because many diaspora members do not have the resource to access the Internet privately. Instead, they use Internet cafes, community centres, local shops and minority media centres. Therefore, the intermediation of the everyday for diasporic communities is across public and private spaces, interweaving the richness of cultures in the exchange of everyday news via online communication, In this way, these groups participate in local and transnational everyday life, but need public access to the Internet to do so.
The above examples show how ICT is appropriated into a range of routines and cultures of everyday life. They also show how the culture of everyday life - whether of established communities in coastal towns or that of transnational diasporic communities - shapes the ways in which the Internet becomes a communicative tool in the expression of shared experience, whether ordinary or extraordinary. The examples show the ways in which individuals, each with his or her own role and identity, actively engage with the Internet to configure forms of communication to manage the flexibility of their everyday lives, which they do reflexively. A key characteristic of communication and the everyday is the idea and form of the network and networking, which is embedded within each example; even amongst settled residents in Ireland who use the Internet to communicate with networks of relatives. What is significant, however, is that each of these networks is institutionally shaped - and their distinctiveness is shaped through the cultural engagement of actors within those institutions. These engagements and negotiations are performed creatively in the ongoing flow and fabric of everyday life - it is through the everyday that the Internet finds its forms and its meaning.
Conclusion
This chapter has shown that it is through everyday life and communication that the shape of social experience is formed, performed and expressed. The culture of everyday life is interacting with changing social forms, such as the emergence of networks and networked individualism. Although the Internet can underpin and facilitate social networks, the institutions of everyday life give such networks and networked communication meaning. Distinctive characteristics of the contemporary culture of everyday life such as its populism, fragmentation, informalization and multiculturalism inform the ways in which actors engage with the Internet as a communicative and media technology. Through popular understanding of parenting practices, of cultural performances of diasporic communities and of flexible work patterns in the cosmopolitan condition, social actors appropriate
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ICT, shaping it, as well as the fabric of the everyday. The custmctiveness of everyday engagement in social life means that networks are made meaningful through the institutions that constitute them.
One important process in the ways in which ICT gets taken up, or not, is domestication. This shows how the social relations of the household and narratives of family life shape the participation in communication, including through the Internet. However, given the mobility of contemporary everyday life, whether via journeys, communities or work, the relations of households extend into public spaces in which actors integrate the public and the private in communicative forms such as remote mothering. All of these practices show that actors in late modern everyday life are reflexive in the ways they integrate ICT into their lives. Although producers can try to configure the user, real life continues to fight back, with cultural and social forms questioning a simplified reading of networked individualism— rather, we are situated in webs of meaning which shape our communication and its tools.
2. Also seeT.996 paper by Marshall van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson.
3. Also see Chapters 8,9 and 10 far more details.
4. Fuchs argues from a Marxist view that the class relation is based on an exploiting class and an exploited class or classes. The exploiting class excludes other classes from ownership and appropriates the resources they produce, using hierarchies and unequal distributions of power and skills.
5. These dimensions are covered in the remaining chapters of the book.
6. For further discussion and expansion of these themes see Chapters 5,6,8 and 9.
5  Work and the Internet
1. Taylorism or 'scientific management' is a theory of management that analyzes and synthesizes workflow processes, improving labour productivity. Taylor (1903,1911) believed that decisions based upon tradition and rules of thumb should be replaced by precise procedures developed after careful study of an individual at work. Taylorism pushes the division of labour to its logical extreme, with a consequent deskilling of the worker and dehumarosatioxi of the workplace.
2. Gramsci (trans. 1971) used the term Fordism to describe a form of production characterized by an assembly line (conveyor belt factory system) and standardized outputs linked to the stimulation of demand brought about by low prices, advertising, and credit Fordism, exemplified by the mass-production systems based on the principles of Taylorism used by the car maker, Henry Ford (1863-1947), gave workers high wages in return for intensive work.
3. The development of portfolios in the work place and in career strategies is also part of a broader trend of a 'dossier society' (Laudon, 1986),
4. There is a further business dimension to marginalizing women, which is that firms will fail to tap into potential new markets by not understanding women as consumers and therefore not intelligently targeting products and services to them (Dutton, 2001; Cunningham and Roberts, 2006). Cunningham and Roberts (2006) point out that women make 80% of purchasing decisions in Western economies.
6  Public Policy and the Internet
1. Bagguláy (1994) modifies Esping Andersen's (1990) three models of welfare (liberal, conservative and social democratic) in order to identify a restructured welfare regime - one which is comprised of layers of welfare forms: past, present and in the process of formation. Both Baggnlay and Williams's points add the dimension of human agency and non-class-based collective action to a post-Fordist account that posits a 'dual society' driven by technology and the processes of recommodification.
2. The countries include Finland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Hungary, Portugal, Italy, France and Luxembourg, Australia, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Japan) South Korea, Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan and Sri Lanka.
3. Cost reductions were often predicated on shifting services fromhighercostcharinels(e,g. face-to-face) to lower cost channels (such as telephone call centres or the web). However, the need to maintain established channels, while simultaneously developing new channels, has increased overall costs. At the same time, the opportunities to make savings on established, high cost, face-to-face channels have been limited as this is widely seen as potentially unpopular with many local authority client groups who, for various reasons, prefer a face-to-face assisted service.
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4. This section of the chapter is based on three research projects: 1) the EU ATTACH project (1995-1998), a project that addressed the innovation of Telematics in seven sites across Europe including the East End of London. 2) The 'Learning School' project, which was part of the European Schoolnet Multimedia project (1998-2000), funded by the EU and 20 ministries of education that focused on die integration of ICT in education. 3) The EU project 'Webatclassroom' (1998-2001). The three research projects are international multi-site case studies. The methodology for each was surveys, qualitative interviews, observations, focus group and evaluation of the developments.
5. One way in which the differences between the two can be delineated is a choice between a good that is voluntary (Internet) and one where there is a degree of coercion to join (NHSnef). A case for the Internet is that NHSE doesn't need to be the network regulator, which would enable GPs to create their own space and select the services they want to access. The case against the Internet involves the fact that it would be voluntary, which means there will be a co-ordination problem because a critical mass of GP users will be needed, before it is worthwhile to participate. It is difficult to say which is better, but the Internet will affect the debate by offering a 'real' alternative (Keene et aL, 1998).
6. Note: the term 'community' is here used as shorthand for care in home-based neighbourhood environments. The term 'community' has been borrowed from policy rhetoric, with an avrareness of the sociological debates about community.
7. In the context of services for disabled children, one of the key themes of the National Service Framework (NSF) External Working Group on Disabled Children is participation. The NSF document states that disabled children and their parents need to be involved as active partners in making decisions about treatment and care. The involvement of parents and children extends to the actual shaping of all aspects of services, which includes the use of ICT in the delivery of services and provision of infoirnation. See www.dh.gov. uk/PolicyAndGmdance/HealthAndSocialC^
8. Currently there are still debates about defining key working and key workers - see Mukherjee et aL (1999). However, here key workers are defined as welfare professionals with health and social care backgrounds who are working in multi-agency services.
9. This is an approach to designing technology which includes the technology's users as participants in the design of new systems and appliances. Participant Design has strong roots in Scandinavian research - see Dittrich et al. (2002).
7  Exclusion, Inclusion and the Internet
1. Madanipour argues that the spatial aspect of social exclusion (SE) is societal in that wider changes in society are worked through to form what living in place contributes to human flourishing (1998, p. 17). He! characterizes five themes that contribute to the experience of what living in a place meains: 1. the role of social partners in different systems; 2. the role of non-state agencies; 3. the division between central and local responsibilities; 4. the social construction of reciprocity and deviance; and 5. the role of residence. National welfare systems play a role in transmitting and shaping the impact of wider changes on those people who find themselves excluded.
2. Senker (2000) argues that the development, application and use of ICT have stimulated economic growth in numerous countries. In advanced countries, the ICT industry has fostered growth in employment of highly-skilled workers. This trend, however, is leaving less qualified people vulnerable to the steady erosion of demand for lower-skilled workers as quality thresholds rise. As noted previously in this book, ICT has played a major role in the globalization of financial markets (they have reduced the costs of communication and increased its speed). The low costs of transport and communication make it economic for companies to relocate some aspects of ICT production to developing countries. Demand for skills is rapidly growing in East Asia where ICT is an important
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element in generating competitiveness and growth (ILO, 1998, pp. 33-41). Software markets are attractive prospects for developing countries including Chile, India, Singapore and Taiwan. These countries have entered the low-value segments of the international software market with the expectation that cheap labour will secure them competitive advantage (Millar, 1998). Although Senker (2002 in Wyatt et aL, 2002) argues that ICT production in the 'tiger economies' of Singapore, Hang Kong, Taiwan and South Korea has significantly reduced poverty, this is not the case for all developing countries. He also argues that ICT is not the only technology that should be considered, since: 'information is only one of many needs. E-mail is no substitute for vaccines and satellites cannot produce clean water' (UNDP, 1999 p. 59). Furthermore, international companies interested in large profitable markets often use technologies of agriculture, genetic engineering and pharmaceuticals which benefit the wealthy first world but exploit the third world and rarely addresses those nations' needs in terms of agricultural necessities and health care (Senker, 2000 in Wyatt et al., 2000).
3. This approach is also extended to 'information' which, likewise, seeks to go beyond technical interpretations, to assert that it is also a social relation. It is therefore necessary to consider how the new cyber culture relates to prevailing power relations (Robins and Webster, 1999, p. 2).
4. Chris Freeman addresses the relationship between technology, economic development and social policy using ideas from Schumpeter (1939), who drew onKondratieff to identify waves of innovation and cycles of economic growth. For example, tife industrial revolution using mechanization processes with resources such as cotton and water power; the Victorian Boom with steam engine railways and cheap coal and iron; the Belle Epoque of heavy engineering (civil, chemical, electrical) using cheap steel; the Keynesian Boom based on mass production involving automobiles and durable goods; production of weapons and petrochemicals with the key resource of cheap petroleum; and a question of the next boom based, perhaps, on flexible production, information technology for equipment, goods and services founded on cheap microelectronics (Freeman in Wyatt et aL, 2000, p. 158).
5. The groups are: 1. elite category which covers omnivores, connecters, lacklustre veterans and productivity enhancers; 2. middle-of-the-road category which covers mobile centrics and connected but hassled; 3. the few assets category which covers inexperienced experimenters, light but satisfied, indifferents and off the networks (Horrigan, 2006, p. iD.
6. Omnivores are active participants in shaping cyberspace, particularly by taking, sharing and downloading video content (Horrigan, 2007).
7. Connectors surround themselves with technology and use it to connect with people and digital content. They value their mobile devices highly and participate actively online (p. 12).
8. Mobile centrics are strongly attached to their cell phones and take advantage of a range of mobile applications (p. 21).
9. Early developments towards an information society were detailed in the 1993 EU White Paper 'Growth, Competitiveness, Employment the Challenges and Ways Forward in the 21" Century'. This White Paper set an agenda for using ICT as a tool to foster economic growth and improve levels of employment. However, the 1994 Report of the Members of the High Level Group on the Information Society: 'Europe and the Global Information Society: Recommendations to the European Council' set a broader strategy for the development and use of ICT. The report stated that the widespread use of ICT had the potential to 'build a more equal and balanced society', "reinforce social cohesion* and provide a 'wider choice of services and entertainment' (1994, p, 6), (Wessels, 2009).
10. Signed on 11 June 2006 by 34 European countries.
11. For example, historically, the rise of Nazi Germany's regressive inclusion (based on perceptions of race) is an example of extreme exclusionary politics. Inclusion, therefore, needs to be framed in an open society (Steinert, 2007, in Steinert and Pit gram 2007).
Ills!
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12. Participation in cyberspace is, by its very character, semi-public and privacy is therefore threatened (Bromseth, 2007; Bakardjieva and Feenberg, 2004).
13. A further dimension is the control of public space via CCTV (Lyon, 2001b), which has the potential to create differentiated spaces of inclusion and exclusion, leading to fragmented cities (Graham, 2004).
8  Culture, Everyday Life and the Internet
1. To recap, the Internet is part of the broader category Information and Communication Technology' (ICT). Dutton defines ICT as: 'all kinds of electronic systems used for broadcasting, telecommunications and computer-mediated communication' (2001, p. 7). He also gives examples such as: 'personal computers, video games, interactive TV, cell phones, the Internet [and] electronic payments systems (p. 3).
2. As Haddon (2004, p, 1) notes the concept of everyday life has an intellectual heritage stemming from the work of Lukacs, Lefebrve and de Certeau in Europe and also in the work of the Chicago School, Goffinan and Garfinkel in the US.
3. The way in which the Internet is shaped through the activities of everyday life means building on the discussions in Chapter 3 of culture and meaning in the development of technology and communication and Chapter 4 of the social environment of the Internet and the debates surrounding the concept of an information society. As discussed in Chapter 3, there are a various perspectives on culture. In general terms, deterininist approaches to culture in which the material and social aspects of life determine culture leaves little rqom for creativity and for the ways change is contested. Interpretive approaches to culture allow more scope for human agency in modes of institutionalized knowledge, material practices and forms creativity that constitute social experience and cultural life.
4. Forms of life, which become meaningful through culture, are often imbued with moral force, seen mainly in traditions as well as beirig constitutive of group identity.
5. Creative industries refers to a set of interlocking industry sectors, and are often cited as being a growing part of the global economy. The creative industries focus on creating and exploiting intellectual property products such as music, books, film, and games, or providing business-to-business creative services such as advertising, public relations and direct marketing. Aesthetic live performance experiences are also generally included, contributing to an overlap with definitions of art and culture, and sometimes extending to include aspects of tourism and sport. Cultural industries are an adjunct-sector of the creative industries, including activities such as cultural tourism and heritage, museums and libraries, and sports and outdoor activities, through a variety of 'way of life' activities that arguably range from local pet shows to a host of hobbyist concerns. The difference between the cultural industries and creative industries is that the cultural industries are more concerned with delivering other kinds of value to society than simply monetary value, such as cultural wealth or social wealth.
6. The first age of the Internet dates from its inception to its commercialization around 1995. The ethos of this time was one of excitement about its 'newness', which was seen in both positive and negative terms.
7. The danger of the taken-for-granted aspect of current Internet use is that it might be ignored as a focus of research. This, however, should be guarded against, as its very boringness and routine-ness makes the Internet important - because this shows that it is being pervasively incorporated into people's lives.
&. This marks a move away from a detenninist position looking at the use of the Internet in the ways it impacts on existing behaviours. Rather, Wellman and Haythomthwaite (2002) and their contributors start to explore the way in which the use of the Internet is integrated with behaviour. They develop this position, from research in Computer
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10,
Mediated Communication (CMC) and on-line behaviour that identifies differences between computer-mediated and face-to-face communication. They argue that the research done within this approach is important, the focus on CMC versus face-to-face, on-line versus off-line, virtual versus real has perpetuated a dichotomized view of human behaviour, which needed to be questioned. Furthermore, such either/or dichotomies pit one form of CMC against another - for example, synchronous versus asynchronous communication (e.g. chat versus email), text versus graphics, as well as one category of human endeavour against another, such as computer use at work versus at home, on-line content for adults versus children and computer and Internet users versus non-users.
In 2002, people in the US were spending the following time on-line: 19-55 yrs 9hrs a week; 25-35 yrs llhrs; 12-15 yrs 6hrs; and over 65 yrs 7hrs. In the UK, time on-line was lower by 1-3 hrs across all age groups (Wellman and Hayfliornthwaite, 2002). Internet users spend approximately 4,6 hours watching television per week (ibid.).
11. Managing the Internet at home requires defining boundaries - both temporal and spatial - so that users and their work or learning activities can be cordoned off from the activities and presence of others. Learners and workers at home actively construct a barrier to social interaction because it is not so obvious to others that the individual is 'at work' (ibid.).
12. To recap: Silverstone and Hirsh (1994) define the 'moral economy' as'_. households are conceived as part of a transactional system of economic and social relations within the formal or more objective economy and society of the public sphere' (p. 16). The technology is shaped through a system of relations that consists of four non-discrete elements or phases — appropriation, objectification, incorporation, and conversion. Silverstone and Hirsch (ibid.) also point to the 'double articulation' of ICT, which means seeing the media on the one hand as a medium through which public and private meanings are mutually negotiated; and, on the other hand, the media are products themselves through consumption, for example, the television is both an object and a medium, one which can provide a basis for 'education' as a competence in all aspects of culture (p. 21).
Domestication also involves decisions about where to put televisions, telephones and PCs, which influences how and when they are used. The television can be a centrepiece that the family gathers around to watch or a bedroom fixture. Another example is the way the single telephone in the hallway has given way to multiple fixed and cordless phones that permit calls from anywhere around the household (ibid.). 14, The use of ICT is shaping the design of homes. The use of CAD packages in home design-is another example of the way in which ICT can change the relationship between consumers and designers.
For example, the negotiation between children, teens and adults for TV access, often seen in the aptly-named 'politics of the remote control' has resulted in the notion of 'two TVs' per household, then VCRs and then multiple televisions. Families negotiate when and where TV is watched, as well as what programming is suitable for children, using devices such as cable lock-boxes and V-chips to control viewing. Hrst generation Internet use and users is understood in the context of the emergence of the Internet. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 4, the discourse in those early times addressed the ideas of how the Internet would transcend existing social and cultural mores (Baym, 1998; McRae, 1996; Watson, 1997; Jones, 1995a). Some commentators were optimistic, arguing that the Internet would draw in a new emancipated and participatory society (Plant 1995,1997). A range of writers address the virtual in this context such as Featherstone and Burrows (1995), Shields (1996), Porter (1997), Heim (1998), and Young (1994) - see Chapter 9. However, writers such as Hine (2000), Dodge and Kitchin (2002) and Slevin (2000), alongside Castells (2001) and Silverstone (1992) argue that the use of the Internet is integrated into ongoing social life, hence positing a 'second generation' and 'second age' focus on the Internet
13.
15,
16.
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9   Cyber Cultures and the Internet
1. Building on Giddens' work on time-space distantiation (1984). 2; See Chapter 2 for Barlow's role in the history of the Internet
3. In fact, the term cyberpunk was first used in a short story by Bruce Bethke called 'Cyberpunk' published in Amazing Stories (November 1983).
4. Moral panics often emerge around immersive virtual reality, such as the media's fascination with cybersex and 'dirty tech'.
5. Jordan (1999) goes as far as to argue that: 'cyberpunk fiction has become a self-fulfilling prophecy in which we understand cyberspace through its fantasies but then we find that cyberspace is in fact like cyberpunk'.
6- Cyberpunk stories are a subgewe of science fiction and are sometimes seen as a distinctly 'postmodern' take on science fiction. Popular authors include Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Samuel Delany, Neal Stepfenson, and William Gibson. 7. The video games culture has promoted moral panics in which the immersive gets rewritten as 'addictive' and interactive as 'anti-social'. However, Haddon's 1993 study disputes this, while Miller and Slater show the sociality of games culture and cybercafes, arguing that there are 'dense relationships around a computer'. Wakeford too uses her empirical studies to assert that users are located in real life while they are in cyberspace. B. The virtual pet emerged from Japanese company and was invented by a Japanese
mother who didn't have enough room for a pet for her daughter. 9. As discussed in Chapter 4, debates about virtual community tend to centre around a split between those who argue that cyberspace re-enchants community, which is perceived to have been eroded in 'real life' on the one hand, whilst arguing that, on the other hand, on-line community is damaging real-life community by encouraging people to withdraw from 'real life' (Wellman and Gulia, 2001).
A bund is an elective grouping, bonded by affective and emotional solidarity inherent in the sharing of a strong sense of belonging.
See Chapter 4 regarding virtual or on-line communities comprising communities based on shared interests. 12. This means a good that can potentially benefit everyone and is openly given, regardless of who has contributed to its production.
See Chapter 2 regarding the role of the gift economy in the history of the Internet, Cheung (2000) draws on Goffman's (1959) development of a dramaturgical analysis of the presentation of self.
See Chapter 3 for a discussion on performance.
Another key theorist on this issue is Sadie Plant, who develops a psychoanalytic approach that seeks to rewire and liberate women by celebrating, in a Freudian sense, the weaving work of women.
LambdaMOO is an on-line community of the variety called a MOO a multi-user system where programs are contributed by any number of connected users. The MOO programming language supports the MOO system. LambdaMOO was the first MOO and one of the most active, with just under 3,000 regular members. Typically, around 100-200 members are connected at any given time. LambdaMOO was founded in 1990 by Pavel Curtis and hosted in the state of Washington, it is operated and administered entirely on a volunteer basis. Guests are allowed, and membership is free to anyone with a paid or institutional email address.
The genders axe male, female, spivak, neuter, splat, egotistical, royal, second, either and plural (Bell, 2001, p. 124). When going online, users post 'desc' before choosing a gender.
Compu-sex is defined as a blend of phone sex, computer dating and high-tech voyeurism (Branwyn in Bell, 2001). 20. Although there is less published research in this area - see Kolko et aL (2000).
10,
11,
17.
18,
19.