Jennifer Daryl Slack & J Macgregor Wise. Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs. Editor: Leah A Lievrouw & Sonia Livingstone. Sage Publications. 2002.
Relating technology to culture—an admirable, if elusive, pursuit—has a long and rich history. For decades, at least, scholars and policy-makers have argued against approaches to technology that posit it as a mere technical tool and for approaches that acknowledge technology in relation to culture—‘in context’ as it is often put. The difficulty is of course that the relationship between culture and technology is every bit as much a theoretical problem as it is a task of description, and technological practitioners are often unaware of the work performed by their own theoretical assumptions. A particularly pervasive tendency when discussing new technologies (including new communication and information technologies such as satellite, cable, digital broadcast and narrowcast, the Internet, the World Wide Web) is to treat them as if they were completely revolutionary, capable of (sui generis as it were) changing everything and likely to do so. Cultural studies is especially suited to revealing and critiquing the work of tendencies such as this and to positing an alternative way of understanding and shaping the relationship between technologies and culture.
Cultural studies’ emphasis on the radical contextuality of phenomena under study and its use of articulation as both analytic tool and model of practice put it in a position to critique the assumptions embedded in technological practice and to contribute to the ongoing development of a more dynamic approach to new media technology. In this chapter, we sketch the most salient components of a developing cultural studies approach to technology and culture. In doing so we draw as much as possible on work on new media that, as we clarify below, ‘counts’ as cultural studies. But because explicit cultural studies treatments of technology are few, we focus as much on the implications for thinking about new media from a cultural studies perspective. Our treatment of the issue, then, folds in several purposes: first, to utilize a cultural studies perspective to show how contemporary issues involving new media are embedded within (and against) a long genealogy of issues and debates; second, to characterize an emerging cultural studies approach to technology; third, to draw attention to scholarship that contributes specifically to a cultural studies approach to new media; fourth, to consider problems that a cultural studies of new media faces; and finally, to speculate on directions for further research.
What Counts as Cultural Studies
Cultural studies is not and never has been one thing, but that does not mean that it is anything and everything (Hall, 1990: 11). It is, rather, like an ongoing conversation: a series of regroupings and revisionings, issues considered, questions asked, responses offered, topics explored, risks taken and directions tried. Because the conversation takes place within changing historical moments, the shape of the conversation is connected to historical events, political realities, institutional situations and theoretical and intellectual influences. The longer and/or more intensely a participant has engaged in the conversation, the more likely they have become part of it and the more likely they are to understand its nuances. Cultural studies is thus more like art than science. In the same way that an artistic movement is shaped loosely by the goals, concerns, challenges and interests of the participating artists and evolves along with the changes they instantiate, so too is cultural studies shaped loosely by the participants in the conversation, evolving as the conversation changes. In the same way that questions designed to clarify what constitutes belonging to a particular artistic movement are most difficult at the ‘edges’ of what seem to be (conjuncturally) central to definitions of the movement (‘is this piece cubist or surrealist?’), so too is it difficult to discern at the edges exactly what is or is not cultural studies.
That having been said, there are a number of worthwhile positions explaining what cultural studies has been. As long as one understands that these positions are themselves only a part of the conversation, they are instructive. They can help us envision what ‘counts’ as a cultural studies approach to technology generally and to new media technology specifically. Nelson et al.’s (1992) Introduction to Cultural Studies is one of the more helpful as it offers an excellent bibliography to the definitional task (pre-1992), is widely read, and remains historically close to crucial dynamics of the ongoing conversation. Nelson et al. point to the following:
Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and sometimes counter disciplinary field. (1992: 4)
Cultural studies is … committed to the study of the entire range of a society’s arts, beliefs, institutions, and communicative practices. (1992: 4)
Culture is understood both as a way of life—encompassing ideas, attitudes, languages, practices, institutions, and structure of power—and as a whole range of cultural practices: artistic forms, texts, canons, architecture, mass-produced commodities, and so forth. (1992: 5)
Its practitioners see cultural studies not simply as a chronicle of cultural change but as an intervention in it, and see themselves not simply as scholars providing an account but as politically engaged participants. (1992: 5)
[An] emphasis on contingencies is central to contemporary cultural studies, to a theory of articulation, and to models for carrying out conjunctural analysis—analysis, that is, which is embedded, descriptive, and historically and contextually specific. (1992: 8)
The last requires additional explanation. An emphasis on contingency suggests that cultural theorists understand what something ‘is’ as constituted in a particular historical conjuncture. Thus, as opposed to having an essential, independent identity, what something ‘is’ is contingent on a particular configuration of relationships. This ‘radical contextuality’ insists that a context is not something ‘out there’, independent, into which other independent things move, are inserted or removed. Context and phenomena are, rather, mutually constitutive. The analysis of any phenomenon is precisely the act of contextualizing it. This mode of analysis is termed ‘articulation’, which points to the double-pincered work of describing the connection (following Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, we refer to this as ‘tracing’) as well as the act of drawing or making the connection (again following Deleuze and Guattari, we refer to this as ‘mapping’).
The distinction between tracing and mapping is a crucial one, because radical contextuality and articulation theory recognize that theories, methods and practices are always embedded in, reflective of and limited by their historical circumstances. Theories, methods and practices are seen as particular ways of engaging and giving shape to these circumstances. The act of theorizing is not therefore a case of getting something right or wrong, and cultural studies does not purport to advance one correct theory (or even the idea that there can be one correct theory), or one correct methodology, or even one correct political practice. However, this is not a theoretical, methodological or political relativism; one theory, practice or method is not just as good as any other. Instead, cultural studies works to understand the embedded contexts of theories, methods and practices and their institutional and disciplinary specificity, at the same time that it undertakes analysis of the specific phenomenon under investigation. Cultural studies thus demands the ongoing work of theorizing in relation to the ongoing analysis of changing historical conjunctures. This makes cultural studies work tremendously difficult when done rigorously.
Drawing on these broad parameters, we can say that the analysis of culture necessitates at some point an analysis of technology, since technology in some form will always be part of the context of everyday life. Historically, understanding the role of technology in culture seems particularly pressing as: (1) new media technology plays a central role in changing global political economic configurations, (2) new media technology contributes to defining a new organization of knowledge, the information age, and (3) new media technology plays a conspicuous role in popular culture.
Theoretically, cultural studies works with and against a series of problematics that have shaped understanding of, and debate about, the relationship between technology and culture. The problematics that have most dominated work on culture and technology are as follows:
- The question of causality. Does technology drive cultural change (technological determinism)? Or is technology a neutral tool, its effects and politics determined solely by its uses (‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’)? At the heart of this issue is not only the direction of causality (culture versus technology), but the nature of that causality (absolute determinism, relative determinism, expressive causality, etc.).
- The question of technological dependence. Have we become so dependent on our tools that we have created a de facto technological determinism? Have we become slaves to our own machines?
- The question of progress. What is the relationship between technology and progress? Technology has become central to discourses on progress and development. The pervasive sense is that technology is instrumental in moving cultures inevitably and inexorably toward a state of perfection. By this logic, more technology equals progress equals a better life.
To say that these problematics are ‘worked with and is to mitigate against simply dismissing them as ‘wrong’, worthy only of being discarded. Instead, in ‘working with’ these problematics, cultural studies recognizes and critiques their power in shaping a role for technology. In ‘working against’ these problematics, cultural studies recognizes that the role of technology can change—in part—by changing the terms of the debate. To put this very concretely, we (those of us who study culture and technology) have long since accepted that technology is not neutral, that technology does not cause cultural change (or vice versa) in any simple way, that the relationship between technology and culture is contingent not determined, that neither we nor technology are slave to the other, and that technological development is not necessarily progress. Okay, so what then? Where do we go after that? There is a pressing need in this technofetishistic culture to cultivate an understanding of technology that insists on theories that challenge current practices, that give us somewhere to go and provide us with direction. Work in the cultural studies of technology is finding its way there.
These problematics, then, as the discussion below illustrates, are being transformed by what we take to be four major problematics of cultural studies: agency; genealogy; identity, politics and power; and social space and corporeality. Each of these has important applications and implications for understanding the relationship between culture and new media technology.
In the process of discussing the work that makes these advances, we acknowledge that we have chosen to see and represent that work as an emerging cultural studies approach to technology. In this way we add not only to the discussion of new media technology and culture but to the discussion of what—theoretically—constitutes cultural studies. Readers may note that from time to time we draw on figures (such as Bruno Latour and Langdon Winner) from the social studies of technology (SST) or science, technology and society (STS) approaches prevalent in many of the other contributions to this collection. The commonality of these works points to articulations between sociological and cultural approaches to the study of technology. However, in citing them here we often rearticulate their theories and case studies, drawing them into the context of cultural studies. Differentiating a cultural studies approach to technology from an SST or STS approach entails more than the observation that one focuses on culture and the other on society. Indeed, the distinctions between what constitutes ‘culture’ and what constitutes ‘society’ have always been a source of contention, if not significant overlap. Rather, what differentiates the cultural studies approach to technology from the SST or STS approaches is the radical nature of the contextuality that cultural studies foregrounds and the deep commitment to theory as an essential part of the analysis, as we have outlined above.
From Causality to Agency
Questions of causality—in many guises—have haunted the study of technology throughout history. Although the questions have been formulated in many different ways, the underlying problematic has been ‘what causes what’. Perhaps the oldest formulation assuming that technology has effects—Plato’s exploration of the effects of writing technology—dates this concern at least as far back as the fourth century BC. The delineation of effects (and side effects) has occupied much contemporary work on new media technology, in studies by the Office of Technology Assessment for example. The delineation of kinds of side effects has been taken almost to the level of absurdity by Edward Tenner in Why Things Bite Back (1996). Conversely, the position that technology is a neutral tool that merely responds to (is an effect of) the needs and desires of the culture permeates treatments of technology. There have been many ways to characterize the causal possibilities, all of which tend to suggest the operation of a binary distinction: autonomous versus non-autonomous technology (Winner, 1977); mechanistic versus non-mechanistic causality (Slack, 1984); substantive versus instrumental theory (Borgmann, 1984; Feenberg, 1991); and technological versus social determinism (Wise, 1997).
The binary distinctions fail on two counts. First, the binary cannot adequately explain the complexity of either everyday discourse about, or mobilization of, technology. What is, perhaps, most interesting about the theoretically rigorous attempt at making binary distinctions is the fact that in everyday life we tend to rely on atheoretical, opportunistic combinations of claims about causality as the circumstances demand: technology is treated as both a neutral instrument and a powerful cause of cultural change. Second, the binary is inadequate to the task of explaining the theoretically acknowledged complex imbrication of technology and culture. The history of debates in technology studies, philosophy of technology, SST and STS points to the fact that the causal relationship between technology and culture is neither one way nor the other. The fundamental mistake seems to be the fact that the binary assumes that technology and culture are separate phenomena. The theoretical problem is, rather, to find a way to understand the role of technology, acknowledging that technology is always already a part of culture, not a cause or an effect of it. At the same time the challenge remains to distinguish the ways in which technology is effective, for it clearly does make a difference which technologies we use.
Both of these failings have been recognized by virtually all contemporary critical and cultural theorists studying technology. In place of the constricting binary, theorists have developed a variety of figures designed to comprehend technology as effective, but as irreducible to either cause or effect. Raymond Williams, in his pivotal book, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1975), introduces the notion of a ‘community of selected emphasis and intention’ (1975: 18) in order to argue that new media technologies (television in this case) emerge within a configuration of emphasis, interests and intentions, as part of that configuration. The configuration, or complex, that contextualizes the emergence of television for Williams is ‘mobile privatization’, in which the technology serves ‘an at once mobile and home-centered way of living’ (1975: 26). Interestingly, Williams’ model for understanding the emergence of new media technologies never really generated studies in its image. In part, this may be because it took far longer for cultural studies to accept widely the importance of studying media technology (as opposed to media content). Further, when cultural studies finally directed its attention to technology, it moved beyond Williams’ expressive causal commitments (Slack, 1984: 73-8).
The new direction is paved, instead, by Winner’s (1986) idea of technology as forms of life; Slack’s notion of technology as articulation (1989); Latour’s (1988; 1996; Callon and Latour, 1981) and Haraway’s (1992) conceptions of technological agency; and Wise’s (1997) technology as assemblage. Each of these figures resists the common-sense equation of technology with ‘things’, with the comforting sense that the boundaries of what any particular technology is can be clearly delimited. For example, cultural theorists resist studying the computer as if it was simply the hardware, the software and the networks that connect the computer to other computers and other media. Rather, they are drawn to understanding the technology to be a form of life, an articulation, an apparatus or an assemblage within which agency flows.
One way to characterize the shift is to see it as a change from focusing on ‘what causes what’ to attending to ‘how things happen’. The shift blurs the vision of the ‘whats’: technology, culture, effects. Instead the mechanisms of stasis, resistance and change, not categories of identity, become the objects of study. Langdon Winner’s ‘forms of life’, though never widely adopted, was an early formulation of this shift. He argued that as the devices, techniques and systems that we commonly understand to be technology ‘become woven into the texture of everyday existence’, they ‘shed their tool-like qualities to become part of our very humanity’. They become ‘[d]eeply insinuated into people’s perceptions, thoughts, and behaviour’. They become, in short, ‘an indelible part of modern culture’ (Winner, 1986: 12). It becomes impossible to talk about the effect of one on the other, since earlier innovations are both reflections of culture and the conditions of further cultural development. Drawing on the Marxist conception that the forms within which we live our lives define who we are, Winner focuses on how technologies embody ways of engaging the world: of making it, reproducing it, changing it. Indeed, Winner points out the danger of separating technology from the culture and society: it allows one to be easily swayed by the rhetoric of revolution that accompanies new media technologies (a belief he terms ‘mythinformation’, 1986: 105) and allows for serious misconceptions about the possibilities for democracy with new technologies such as the computer. Rather, he argues, new technologies tend to reinforce the overall power structure, not overthrow it. Winner, however, does not offer a theoretical approach, model or method sufficiently developed to go much beyond acknowledging that technologies are forms of life and that they do tend to reinforce existing structures of power. Also, persistent in Winner’s formulation is a tendency to characterize technologies as ‘things’. Winner’s work illustrates how difficult it is to move beyond our cultural habit of understanding technologies as things, even in the act of arguing against it.
Following Stuart Hall (1986), who formulated one of the earliest and most influential accounts of the concept of articulation, Jennifer Daryl Slack argues that technology can be understood as an articulation, as ‘a nonnecessary connection of different elements that, when connected in a particular way, form a specific unity’ (1989: 331). If technology (she uses the example of the personal computer) is itself an articulation of elements (hardware, software, network, etc.) that can be connected in different ways with other elements (economics, ideology, politics, policy, gender, etc.), then technology as a generic term and any specific common-sense technology (such as the computer) are contingent rather than determined, dispersed rather than discrete. The question of the relationship between technology and culture is thus reframed to foreground the connections that constitute technology.
A still more dramatic shift away from the problematic of causality occurs when the idea of agency is taken up and radically transformed. Those most responsible for developing this concept in relation to technology are Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway and J. Macgregor Wise. Latour begins to transform the idea of agency by revisioning what it means to be an actor. An actor for Latour is not limited to humans as agents, but is ‘any element which bends space around itself, makes other elements dependent upon itself and translates their will into a language of its own’ (Callon and Latour, 1981: 286). The resulting aggregate of elements is an ‘actor network’. Agency, it follows, is the ability to achieve effects either through physical contact or through non-corporeal means (Wise, 1997: xv). Agency structures movement; it distributes and organizes entities (human and other than human), spaces and places. Latour was particularly influential in introducing the notion that, in this sense, technology is an actor or agent that exercises agency (Latour, 1988; 1993; 1996). Technology can bend space around itself, render other elements dependent on it, and translate the will of others into a language of its own. Technology structures movement; it distributes and organizes entities, spaces and places. A dramatic example is the electric eye door opener, which allows people to move from one place to another. If a person is too short, the electric eye will not sense them, the door will not open, and the short person’s movement in space will be restricted (a form of discrimination). If the electricity is shut off, the door will indiscriminately prohibit movement through that particular space (see Latour, 1988, for a parallel example of an automatic door closer, which we will return to below). Latour goes so far as to give technology a voice: in Aramis, or the Love of Technology (1996) (Aramis, a failed new transportation technology, speaks of the reasons for its own death.
Donna Haraway, influenced by Latour’s actor-network theory, links the notion of actors with the concept of articulation. She writes that actors ‘take provisional, never-finished shape in articulatory practices’ and observes that ‘humans and unhumans’ (technology, for example) ‘articulate … in a social relationship’ (1992: 313). Rapidly receding here are the once comfortable notions that technology is an identity with identifiable boundaries, that there is a clear-cut distinction between technology and humans, and that only humans exercise agency. Consequently the binary problematic of determination (what causes what) begins to recede. Not entirely, however, for the ‘thingness’ of actors sneaks back in the guise of the construction that actors exercise agency. For example, Haraway works with constructions such as ‘jaguars, among other actors’ (1992: 313) and Latour works with statements such as ‘Humans and nonhumans take on form by redistributing the competencies and performance of the multitude of actors that they hold on to and that hold on to them’ (1996: 225). This return to ‘actors exercising agency’ seems always to reintroduce the seductive and familiar distinction between things (technologies) and culture, and hence the causal problematic.
The cultural studies conception of technology does finally move dramatically away from the ultimately binary conception of ‘thingness’ under the influence of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Lawrence Grossberg (1996), drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, asserts that agency is not a property of an identity, an agent. Rather, agency is a flow that circulates through and produces a sense of agents. Grossberg puts it this way: ‘Agency is the product of diagrams of mobility and placement which define or map the possibilities of where and how specific vectors of influence can stop and be placed’ (1996: 102). It is the work of agency that lets abstract identities stand as identities: human; animal; technology in general; specific technologies, etc. Each abstraction is produced in relations of agency.
Macgregor Wise (1997) develops this Deleuzoguattarian sense of agency in Exploring Technology and Social Space. He argues that ‘machinic assemblages’ (in lieu of technology) are articulations of physiochemical, organic and enunciative strata. Likewise, ‘assemblages of enunciation’ (in lieu of language) are also articulations of physiochemical, organic and enunciative strata. These assemblages articulate (taking the form of a double articulation) to ‘mark the territory’, that is, they delineate ‘how things happen’ as well as ‘what does not happen’ (1997: 57-80). Agency in this conception ‘is not a given, but is distributed, differentiated, and territorialized. The resultant actor-network can thus be understood and critiqued without falling back on the problematic notion of a rational network builder’ (1997: 70). Agency, in this sense, works to avoid the conundrum of the binary that adheres to the problematic of identity. From this Deleuzoguattarian perspective, technologies—particular artifacts or services—are seen as ‘habits … contractions of action, substance, and thought, a condensation of technology and language’ (1997: 71). While grasped as wholes (what Deleuze and Guattari term ‘molarities’), they are in fact abstract, differentiated assemblages.
The language of Deleuze and Guattari used by Wise and others (for example, Elmer, 1999) is difficult to be sure—and therefore a decided disadvantage if the goal is to develop a broad-based cultural studies approach to new technology. But it is hardly surprising that a challenge to the tenacious articulation of technology as ‘thing’ existing in a binary relationship with culture would be a difficult link to sever and that it would take radical language and thought to challenge it. Jonathan Sterne (1999b) has pointed directly to the difficulty of applying such an approach to specific new media technology such as the Internet. The difficulty, as illustrated for Sterne in Wise’s work, is that one ‘focuses more on discourses about and around the Internet than on attempting a description of the Internet itself’ (1999b: 275). However, the real challenge for culture theorists, as illustrated in Sterne’s own complaint, is a deep-seated loyalty to ‘the Internet [or any new media technology] itself’ (emphasis added). As if there were such a thing.
From the Inevitability of Progress to Genealogy
Cultural studies’ conception of technology deeply undercuts the common-sense cultural commitment to the equation of progress with the development of new technology. Just as attention to articulation moves the understanding of technology from causal terms to a conception of agency, so too does it displace conceptions of inevitability and progress. Inevitability is supplanted by contingency; progress with genealogy; and idealist conceptions of freedom with an understanding of responsibility as defined and distributed within differentially structured terrains.
It has long been the case that Western (and now increasingly global) culture has equated the development of new technology with progress. The progress ‘narrative’, as described by Nisbet (1980), holds that the human species—by nature—is developing steadily toward increasing perfection here on earth. And technology has long been seen as a marker of that progress—as its (causal) agent (see Smith and Marx, 1994). For example, international development projects beginning in the 1940s have often used new media technologies as indicators of degrees of ‘civilization’ (Lerner, 1958). So deeply held is the assumption that new technology and progress are linked that David Noble (1982) once claimed that it was ‘heretical’ to even ask the question: is it so?
The concept of technological progress depends on a unidirectional, evolutionary model of change (Berland, 2000), a teleologically driven conception of history where origins are decidable and origins determine endings. But cultural studies is in some sense predicated on the idea that origins do not determine endings (Carey, 1975/1989), that there are no ‘guarantees’ (Hall, 1983), and that connections, outcomes, effects are always ‘contingent’ rather than determined. Hall, in his widely quoted interview on articulation, emphasizes the role of contingency:
An articulation is thus the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made? So the so-called ‘unity’ of a discourse [or any abstract identity, such as technology or progress] is really the articulation of different, distinct elements which can be rearticulated in different ways because they have no necessary ‘belongingness’. (1986: 53)
Indeed, the interventionist commitments of cultural theorists of the new media technology lead them, on the one hand, to trace significant articulations and, on the other hand, to unhinge them, so to speak, to map or rearticulate them. For example, Charles Acland, in tracing the articulations of IMAX (large-format cinema technology) in Canada, insists that it must be seen ‘as a multiple articulation of technological system, corporate entity and cinema practice invested in the notion of expanded cinema, or what Andre Bazin … called the myth of total cinema’ (1998: 431). For Acland, this particular configuration is a symptom of a general shift in patterns of leisure toward the reintroduction of a technologically mediated form of the tourist gaze, about which he is obviously critical. Although Acland does not map explicit directions for change, one cannot read his argument without considering what might make it possible to rearticulate this configuration.
Often, cultural studies of new media technology are timid in exposing the intent of their work as mapping the need (if not the direction) for rearticulating the terrain. It is sometimes a frustrating weakness of these studies that superficially they profess only to describe (trace) a developing historical conjuncture when, theoretically, they really are mapping strategies. It is almost as though cultural theory has developed in powerful ways a bit beyond our ability to exploit it. Our work is often—perhaps merely (though not insignificantly) for local political reasons—tamed. Dare we be explicit about the fact that not all technological development is progress? The terrain of study of new media technology is rife with criticism of those who suggest too much that might be taken as negative. Jill J. McMillan and Michael J. Hyde’s (2000) case study of the pressure to adopt a technological progress narrative at Wake Forest University illustrates the difficulties of challenging particular technological developments, and even of posing questions that might be considered critical of technology. This is the conjuncture, after all, where appropriate political rhetoric includes positions taken by President William Clinton in his 1996 State of the Union Address announcing ‘America’s Technological Literacy Campaign’, where the goal is ‘to make every young person technologically literate’, the assumption being that this will ‘provide all our children with a greater opportunity to learn the skills they need to thrive into the next century’ (America’s Technology Literacy Challenge, 1996). The ‘politically correct’ position to take with regard to technology in this conjuncture is, ‘yes, it is inevitable; yes, it is the way forward; we just need to be smart enough to use it for good not ill’. As if the effects of technologies were only about the use of things—after the fact.
Methodologically, cultural studies has an affinity with the practice of genealogy, as it has come down to us from Nietzsche, via Foucault. Genealogy is explicitly opposed to the progress narrative. It does not assume a single, evolutionary direction; it does not assume that ideas or practices retain their logic. It looks instead to the way in which multitudes of elements careen, crash, invade, struggle, plunder and play, such that complex and changing arrangements characterize an apparatus (for Deleuze and Guattari, an assemblage) within which we would understand technology to be disbursed. The task of genealogy is, as Foucault puts it, to record the singularity of events outside any monotonous finality; it must seek them in the
most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history—in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts; it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles. Finally, genealogy must define even those instances where they are absent, the moment when they remained unrealized. (1977b: 139-40)
A genealogical method thus displaces the ‘object’ of study away from an analysis of things (such as a particular new media technology) and toward a patient tracking of the apparatus within which things take on particular meanings and play particular roles. Thomas Tierney’s The Value of Convenience (1993) provides an example of this method. This is not a book about particular technologies; it is about the context within which particular kinds of technologies are produced and consumed. It is about the emergence of a notion of a need for convenience (a need to overcome the bodily limits of time and space) and the way that particular kinds of technologies are sought after, used to fill that need, and contribute to it. Tierney does not depict a linear, evolutionary path to explain technologies in any reductionist or essentialist way. Instead, this is a book about conceptions of privacy, the economic work of consumption practices, the settlement of the American West, changing modes of transportation, the devolution of Protestantism, the development of the idea of labour as a calling, the ‘death’ of God, the fear of death, etc. But yes, it tells us an enormous amount about why, for example, we simply have to have cell phones or faster computers, and why we have to teach our children certain kinds of literacy skills as though those were the skills that ensured their survival into the twenty-first century. There are things in Tierney’s account, but interestingly they are not the point.
Genealogy is hard and frustrating work: never complete, and always open to revision and contestation. It is not about objects that stand still for scrutiny. It is, like cultural studies generally, a conversation, a mapping project, in which the exploration of possibilities for rearticulation is the point.
Identity, Politics, and Power
The issue of identity has always been central to cultural studies work, from its disputes with Marxism’s class determination of identity to the importance of the idea of identity to culture (and culture to identity). Marxist positions suggest that the individual is determined by class position, but it has been cultural studies’ argument that such relations are non-necessary, that is, they are articulated. The connections between class, culture and identity are the result of struggle; they are not natural but can be rearticulated with work. This, again, is not a relativism. Individuals and groups construct their identity within and against unequal structures of power. As Marx once wrote in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: ‘Men make history, but they do not make it just as they please’ (quoted in Feuer, 1959: 321).
Cultural studies also argues against essentialist positions on identity. Rather identity is the product of social relations and experience. Following Williams (1958/1989) in ‘Culture is ordinary’, identity is formed in the relations among traditions and heritage and a whole way of life, that is, in the living of that heritage and the negotiation of the challenges that experience raises to that heritage. From this we can identify two problematics of cultural studies work. The first is the question of identity: how is identity created? The second is the question of reproduction: how are social relations—and especially social inequalities—reproduced? What is the role of cultural practices in the reproduction of social relations?
Technology interjects its role in these problematics in three ways. (1) How is technology a constituent of identity? (2) How is technology a cultural practice (part of the broader theme of this essay)? (3) How do technologies reproduce social inequalities; in other words, how are technologies political and how do they factor in issues of power? Though we can identify work on gender, race and class bias of technologies, little work has been done within a cultural studies approach to technology and identity apart from the more Foucauldian notion of technologies of the self (though this work is important) (Foucault, 1988; Probyn, 1993).
When talking about the politics of technology, at least two things can be meant. One is the more generally circulated argument around the political uses of technology. Often these debates rely on a neutral view of technology, that a technology’s politics are determined by its uses. However, Winner (1986) has persuasively argued that we should consider that the technological arrangement itself, prior to its specific use, not only reflects but imposes a social order. His examples are by now well known: the bridges on Long Island were designed by Robert Moses to be too low for buses to be let through, thus cutting off access to the island to the poor and minorities who were more likely to use public transport; campuses were designed (and redesigned) to make it difficult for students to organize after the student protests of the 1960s; expensive industrial machines were installed in Cyrus McCormick’s reaper manufacturing plant in order to replace workers and force out the unions (the machines were taken out after the unions were defeated); the mechanical tomato harvester developed by University of California researchers favoured large farms over smaller farms and had a significant impact on farm labour in California and also on the types of tomatoes grown; buildings are designed that discriminate against the disabled; and so on. Technologies, Winner argues, are ways of building order into the world, and design decisions can affect populations for generations. In addition, he argues that some technologies are by their very nature political in that they tend to favour centralization or decentralization, egalitarian organization or non-egalitarian organization, or tend to be repressive or liberating. His example here is nuclear energy, which by the truly dangerous nature of its material demands security, elite control and centralization. Winner acknowledges that the level of determination varies on a case-by-case basis. Some technologies require certain social conditions and arrangements to work (for example, a ship at sea in a storm cannot be run via participatory democracy), and some technologies are more or less compatible with different social systems (for example, solar energy is potentially more democratic than nuclear energy). Iain Boal argues that all technologies have a ‘value slope’, that is, ‘they conduce to certain forms of life and of consciousness, and against others’ (1995: 12).
In writing about communication technology, Harold Innis (1951) introduced the idea of the ‘bias’ of a technology: bias towards centralization or decentralization of power. For example, Eric Michaels (1989), in an essay on the Aboriginal Australian use of television, notes that broadcast television is by its nature highly centralized (one-to-many broadcasting) and prone to elite control. It is also prone to homogenization and the imposition of values from one location on a broader area. ‘The bias of mass broadcasting is concentration and unification; the bias of Aboriginal culture is diversity and autonomy’ (1989: 13). Aboriginal culture, which values time, locality and kinship, runs at odds with the standard broadcast model that threatens Aboriginal culture.
When we discuss bias we mean tendency; these are not absolute determinations. It is very possible to have democratic television (for example, public access, low-power local stations, as the Aboriginal Warlpiri developed) or radio (for example, pirate radio stations which often cover only a few blocks), but such uses are discouraged (and are often illegal).
When we talk about the bias of electronic communication technologies we should, of course, immediately think of new media such as the Internet and World Wide Web. These technologies are biased towards decentralization, though as Andrew Shapiro (1999) points out, democracy on the Internet—despite its bias—is not a sure thing. We hear from proponents of these technologies many of the same promises for democracy, equality and world peace which were proposed for the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, etc. Indeed, cyberspace itself has its roots in the nineteenth century. Jon Stratton (1997) argues that its origins can be found in attempts to speed up the circulation of commodities. Drawing on Carey’s (1983/1989) germinal work on the cultural and social impact of the telegraph (especially on markets), Stratton places the origins of cyberspace within capital’s processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Electronic communication technologies are fundamentally associated with industrial and finance capital’s attempts at control (cf. Beniger, 1986). Public space, that of either the imagined community, the public sphere or the mass audience, is structured to ensure general passivity on the part of the public (the public is represented by others and therefore becomes a spectator to democracy as well as television). Stratton writes that the fragmentation of the mass media through new technologies of cable, satellite and video, plus the global flows of people, technologies, ideas and so on (described by Appadurai, 1996), plus the increase in interactivity, result in a ‘qualitative shift’ which works to undermine the old mass media (and political) model of centre and periphery. This shift is being countered, and the democratizing potentials constrained, by the rearticulation of the Internet into the information superhighway in which the Internet becomes another mass media delivery vehicle (with portals such as Yahoo! replacing networks). In addition, Stratton writes that frequent appeals to the trope of community in relation to the Internet hark back to a narrowly ideological and culturally specific view of what constitutes a community. The lesson to draw from Stratton is not that these technologies are inherently one way or the other, but that the Internet is the site of political struggle among (at least) information technology’s value slope, capitalistic institutions, and the cultures through which it is developed and disseminated.
The political biases of technology have frequently been addressed through the lens of gender. The work on gender and technology is fairly extensive, including work on new media (for example, Balsamo, 1996; Cherny and Weise, 1996; Haraway, 1985; Miller, 1995; Rakow, 1988; Stone, 1995). That technologies have a gender bias is evident from Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s work, More Work for Mother (1983). This classic study found that so-called labour-saving household appliances actually increased the amount of time that women were required to do housework and reinforced the social roles of women in the household and men out at work. Laura Miller’s (1995) influential essay, ‘Women and children first: gender and the settling of the electronic frontier’, illustrates that technological gender bias has political uses. She argues, for example, that the depiction of cyberspace as a realm biased against, if not overtly hostile to, women serves the political function of increasing broad regulation and control over the Internet.
Beyond questions of gender bias and its political uses, cultural theorists have raised questions of gender identity as well. MUDs, MOOs, IRCs and other text-only media do not display a user’s gender, thus allowing for passing or gender-bending online, about which great numbers of both academic and popular essays have been written (for example, see Spender, 1996; essays in Cherny and Weise, 1996; and essays in Jones, 1998). The ability to elide or bend gender has the potential to be politically empowering by evening the playing field. For example, the usual gendered tactics of dominating a conversation can be lessened, and ideas can be more readily evaluated on the basis of their merit rather than on the appearance of the speaker. Online gender-bending throws into question the nature of gendered identity and enters into debates over essentialist versus anti-essentialist frameworks for understanding gender. Basically the questions become: can a person mask their gender effectively online? Can a man successfully masquerade as a woman, and vice versa? Or will gender always out? Dale Spender (1996), for example, drawing on decades of research on language, believes that a user’s gender will eventually make itself known. This argument tends to fall back into an essentialist position, but not necessarily. It could be seen as recognizing the point that one cannot so easily shrug off years of socialization. For Miller, these arguments lead her to question how ‘adequate those [gender] roles are to the task of describing real human beings’ anyway (1995: 57).
Similar issues arise in relation to race and online environments. Though works on the racial bias of new media are not as extensive as those on gender, these issues are being addressed under the phrase ‘the digital divide’, a phrase taken up by the Clinton administration in the spring of 2000 to discuss the wiring of inner-city schools, native American reservations, and other ‘have nots’. Issues of racial identity online have been addressed only recently (Kolko et al., 2000; Nakamura, 1995). The starting point of these discussions is the alleged erasure of race in cyberspace (accompanying erasures of gender, class, ability and so forth). An MCI advertisement entitled ‘Anthem’ (discussed in Kolko et al., 2000: 15, 134, 180) sets out the utopian scenario: ‘There is no race. There is no gender. There is no age. There are no infirmities. There are only minds. Utopia? No, Internet.’ Though we may wish for a utopian society where, to echo Martin Luther King, Jr, we judge people at last by the content of their character and not the colour of their skin, a world where prejudice does not play any role in our reactions, interactions and exchanges, the reality is something different. When the trope of ‘no race in cyberspace’ is not only established in discourses about the Internet but also built into the architecture of the system itself (there often isn’t even a command in virtual environments to indicate race), the elision of race only serves to support the culturally unspoken dominant: whiteness. When one’s race is not mentioned, the default assumption is that one is white. Tara McPherson (2000) labels this a version of ‘covert’ racism where race is simply ignored, but segregation nonetheless ensues. This reinforces the point that cyberspace exists not in a vacuum but in a particular social and cultural conjuncture. As Kolko et al. write:
You may be able to go online and not have anyone know your race or gender—you may even be able to take cyberspace’s potential for anonymity a step further and masquerade as a race or gender that doesn’t reflect the real, offline you—but neither the invisibility nor the mutability of online identity makes it possible for you to escape your ‘real world’ identity completely. Consequently, race matters in cyberspace precisely because all of us who spend time online are already shaped by the ways in which race matters offline, and we can’t help but bring our own knowledge, experiences, and values with us when we log on. (2000: 4-5)
One limitation to approaching technology in terms of the bias or value slope of a technology is that, careful as they are, these accounts are still haunted by the spectre of technological determinism, in that social problems tend to be seen as technology’s ‘fault’. What is needed is an approach which exorcizes this ghost. For this, cultural theorists of technology turn to Latour. Latour’s work explains how effectivity occurs in the parallel processes of delegation and prescription. Delegation occurs when a task is assigned to someone or something. Latour offers the example of a door. For a door to work effectively, that is, to keep undesired things out and to permit desired passage through, it needs to be consistently shut after it has been opened (or else why have a door?). The task of shutting a door can be delegated to humans: either hire someone to stand there and open or close the door, or train people to shut the door behind them. Neither option is completely foolproof (one may hire a fool or have foolish people pass through one’s door, leaving it standing open). One could delegate the task to a machine: an automatic door closer (or groom) which does the task quietly, efficiently and consistently. In this way we delegate tasks to non-humans (stoplights instead of traffic cops, etc.). Technologies are our lieutenants; they stand in place of (in lieu of) our own actions.
However, we cannot consider the process of delegation alone. To do so would be to fall into a naive social constructionism, as though technologies merely embodied social desire. This is naive because once technologies are in place, they prescribe behaviours back on us. The door closer will work in a certain way (too fast, too slow, too stiff) and we must adjust to the properties of this particular machine (just as we know which copying machine to use and which jams more frequently, or which elevator is faster). One must be able to push on a door with a certain amount of force and then hold it from slamming back. Further, technology prescribes behaviour back on all those who encounter it, not just those who initially delegate the task (for example, designers, city planners, engineers and so on). Those who delegate and those who are impinged upon can be (and often are) quite disparate groups of people (Star, 1991). In this way Latour argues that technologies are moral. They impose ‘correct’ behaviour and foster ‘good’ habits. ‘In spite of the constant weeping of moralists, no human is as relentlessly moral as a machine, especially if it is (she is, he is, they are) as “user friendly” as my computer’ (Latour, 1988: 301). In addition, the technology may be discriminatory, making it difficult for small children, the elderly, or the physically challenged to move through the door.
The impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on the nature of the labour market as a whole is enormous (Aronowitz and DiFazio, 1994; Dyer-Witheford, 1999). No one feels the prescription of new ICTs more than those who are forced to work with them every day and whose livelihoods depend on them. Data-intensive work can lead easily to physical effects, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, eye strain and so on. New ICTs provide myriad opportunities for surveillance, such as the counting of key strokes. The emphasis on speed is a means of extending management control over the workforce. As Andrew Ross has put it, ‘let’s not forget that for every one of us who wants our PCs and software to go faster, there are fifty others who want them to go slower’ (1998: 20).
But the process of prescription should not be taken on its own either. This leads straight to technological determinism, because it only considers how technology affects society. Rather, Latour emphasizes that we must grasp both processes. The politics of technology goes in both directions: what is delegated and what is prescribed. This is not to suggest that the equation of power balances out. Rather it is to suggest that the same care that has been taken when examining the ideology, politics and power of cultural texts needs to be extended to cover technologies as well. But to do so we need to develop a subtle enough language which can adequately describe these processes.
Social Space and Corporeality
A more recent concern of cultural studies has been that of social space (Grossberg, 1993). When this problematic is applied to technology it means more than saying that technology is social or that the impact on society is socially determined. The social in this approach is inherently and predominantly spatial; the spatial dimensions of technology are social. Historically, arguments along these lines have fallen into a technological determinism. For example, Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979) argued that the printing press changed the shape of European society. But a spatial approach is not necessarily deterministic. Cultural studies approaches technology as a contingent social agent in everyday life.
One approach to this view of technology has been through the nexus of time-space orality and literacy. Drawing on the work of Carey (for example, 1989), Eric Havelock (for example, 1982), Innis (for example, 1951), Marshall McLuhan (for example, 1964) and Walter Ong (for example, 1982), this general approach examines how the characteristics of communication technologies shape the experience of the users and even mould society itself. For example, Innis has argued that communication technologies have a ‘bias’ not only towards either centralization or decentralization, but more crucially towards space or time. Carving on stone is a more permanent medium and serves to maintain a society longitudinally through time. Papyrus, though less permanent, is lighter and much more portable, and therefore has a bias toward space. The choice of medium, then, has consequences for the political shape of that society. Time-bias media focus on maintenance of community in time: space-bias media focus on control over space, and therefore promote empire. Yet, space-bias media also hold forth the possibility of the democratization of society. More recent scholars, such as Berland (1992) and Carey (1989), have argued that modern electronic technologies are space-biased and therefore fundamentally concerned with control. From the promises of global connectivity of the telephone companies to the ‘World’ in the World Wide Web, new media discourses emphasize space over time. This control of space is perhaps both exacerbated and foiled by the electronic language of new media that, as Mark Poster (1990) points out, can no longer be located in space and time. With its ‘time-space coordinates undermined’, electronic language ‘is everywhere and nowhere, always and never. It is truly material/immaterial’ (1990: 85).
The characteristics of a medium may have psychodynamic effects as well as social effects. For example, Ong (1982) discusses the physical characteristics of sound and sound reception and how these characteristics shape an orally based culture. Likewise, with limited extrasomatic resources, an oral society is dependent on mnemonics, repetition and ritualized questioning to create and pass along knowledge. The invention of writing and the printing press allowed for deeper, more unique thoughts and ideas to be expressed, though these also emphasized linear thought (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967). Recent cultural studies work has followed through on this thread, noting that social space is not just a visual space, but an aural and oral space as well (Sterne, 1999a).
Social space, in this cultural tradition following Innis, is both a sphere of politics (community versus control) and a phenomenological space (living in an oral, or print, or electronic world). Contemporary cultural studies has begun to address issues of technology and social space in terms of agency and corporeality in an attempt to avoid the latent determinism of the earlier tradition. Following Deleuze and Guattari, Wise (1997: 57-82) has identified two types of agency, corporeal and incorporeal; the first is termed technology, and the second language. Key to understanding these concepts is the relation between them. Technology and language are articulated and presuppose each other. Human social space is the result of this articulation and is always made up of both language and technology and a particular, contingent relation between them. For example, discourse on new media, especially in the United States, tends to emphasize linguistic agency over the technological. This is the foundation of democracy, the ability of the free citizen to instigate change through non-corporeal means: the vote. Indeed, trends in new media emphasize the democratic possibilities of the new technologies. With the power of language, we control machines that might otherwise overpower us. It is often made to seem as if new technologies are themselves incorporeal: the mere bits of cyberspace (for example, Mitchell, 1995; Negroponte, 1995). However, to the extent that social space is increasingly permeated by technologies (especially those of communication), we need to realize that these technologies also operate in the realm of corporeal agency, despite the seeming ephemerality of the digital.
Approaching technology in terms of corporeality involves considering the materiality of the technology itself, the system itself, the linkages and connections of the physical infrastructure. For example, if we consider virtual communities, non-corporeal agency involves the exchange of ideas, and the notion that these communities involve only the meeting of minds. But virtual communities are more than this; they are organizations and networks which have materiality. A virtual community is a network of corporeal procedures. We need to consider the effects of that corporeality on the communication within, the actions of, and the shaping of the network itself. Harrison and Stephen (1999) write that technologies, especially virtual communities, are embodiments of ideas. It is not just the ideas themselves which shape virtual communities, but how they are embodied in technologies which impinge back on the user and system, making corporeal demands of their own.
One of the key sites of corporeal agency, and a focus of postmodern treatments of technology, is the body itself. As Slack wrote a decade ago, one question cultural studies of technology might/must ask is how technology articulates in/with postmodern culture:
What is the pleasure of using a PC? Are the techniques pleasurable (for example, the techniques of writing or bookkeeping)? Is the pleasure tactile, aural, visual? How does the body challenge/engage/disengage/control/master/command the PC? What is the nature of that interaction? Does the body become superfluous? (1989: 343)
Affect, we are arguing, is a corporeal aspect of new technologies. Affect is often cited in discourses around new technologies (especially work on virtual communities, for example, Rheingold, 1993) as a certain intensity of purpose behind new technologies. As Rheingold has written, virtual communities need to be more than simply virtual if they are to be more than merely ersatz communities (1993: 23). This means not just adding in physical meetings (picnics, get-togethers) to the composition of a virtual community, but considering affective responses to online activity as an embodied response.
Anne Balsamo’s Technologies of the Gendered Body (1996) is an exemplar of a contemporary cultural studies approach to issues of the body. Though the book does spend time analysing the representations of body and how bodies signify (aspects of incorporeal agency), it also examines non-signifying aspects of the technocorporeal articulation. Balsamo asks, ‘how is the body, as a “thing of nature”, transformed into a “sign of culture”?’ (1996: 3). The body is both a product of social forces and a process of identity creation. Her book concerns a range of new technologies from bodybuilding to cosmetic surgery, pregnancy to the plugged-in cyberpunk.
Information technology is accelerating us, Mark Dery argues, to an escape velocity. In Escape Velocity (1996) he describes subcultures caught up in the techno-transcendentalist movement that pushes the body to its limits, ultimately attempting to abandon the body in the pure space of cyberspace. Examples are numerous in writings on cyberculture where material structures (especially the body) are abandoned and subjects are left to play in ‘the city of bits’ (Mitchell, 1995; Moravec, 1988; Negroponte, 1995).
Decorporealization has its dangers, however, and it definitely has its blind spots. It ignores many of the effects of power and politics outlined in the previous section. For example, Brook and Boal have written:
The wish to leave body, time, and place behind in search of electronic emulation of community does not accidentally intensify at a time when the space and time of everyday life have become so uncertain, unpleasant, and dangerous for so many—even if it is the people best insulated from risk who show the greatest fear … But the flight into cyberspace is motivated by some of the same fears and longings as the flight to the suburbs: it is another ‘white flight’. (1995: ix)
The focus on corporeal agency has other implications. Much of the work on technology, and not only in cultural studies, focuses on representation and the processes of signification: what technology means; how it is represented; what it represents; and so on. These questions are meant to get at the cultural aspects of technology. But a version of culture that deals only with representation and signification is a limited version of culture indeed. Culture is much more than simply signifying practices. Lefebvre (1991) argues, using a model of social space, that there are non-signifying aspects to space and culture.
In The Production of Space, Lefebvre presents three ways of thinking about space: spatial practice, representations of space, and representational space (or, more briefly, space as it is perceived, conceived and lived.) Spatial practice ‘embraces production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation. Spatial practice ensures continuity and some degree of cohesion. In terms of social space, this cohesion implies a guaranteed level of competence and a specific level of performance’ (1991: 33). Representations of space are abstract, conceptualized space, a plane of concepts (for example, modern social space is constructed around concepts of efficiency, newness/revolution, technicism and so on). Representational space (or, better and more literally, spaces of representation) is ‘space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of inhabitants and “users”’ (1991: 39).
In terms of technology, then, we need to consider technology as a spatial practice, and technology’s effect on spatial practices. We could consider the rearrangement of the work environment, even the dissolution of the work environment, into a virtual office. We could also consider the way devices such as personal stereos, pagers and ankle trackers articulate space. Changes in representations of space are particularly evident with new media, with new data-mapping technologies on the one hand and new geographies of cyberspace on the other (Elmer, 1999). Finally, spaces of representation present new media technologies as a new frontier (cf. Rheingold, 1993), a neighbourhood mall, a salon or café, and so on (see also discussions in Jones, 1997; 1998).
One of the more recent and, we believe, important articulations or discourses around the idea of social space comes from recent work in urban geography which brings together the spatial disciplines of geography (for example Massey, 1994) and the more corporeal/material approach of urban studies that considers urban space. An exemplary work in this area is the book Telecommunications and the City (1996) by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, which looks at the idea of city space from a variety of perspectives, taking into account the telecommunications infrastructure (that is, in this case, the telephone system), the changing nature of the urban landscape, urban planning and economics, and Latourian notions of agency, plus how such things contribute to the construction of space, the construction of private and public through new media technologies (see also Droege, 1997).
Approaches to technology and social space overlap approaches to technology, politics and power in the issue of surveillance. Graham and Marvin write, ‘telecommunications, combined with computers and media technologies, are at the most fundamental level control and surveillance technologies’ (1996: 213). Such control technologies ‘have allowed large and complex industrial societies to develop’ (1996: 214). While acknowledging the dystopian spin that is often placed on issues of surveillance and control, Graham and Marvin rightly point out that surveillance is not one singular thing but occurs in a variety of contexts, and the diverse means of surveillance are not yet centralized.
Deriving from the work of Foucault (especially 1977a), the principle of surveillance has been used to talk about a number of issues, for example how architecture (including streets, schools, prisons and so on) can be structured under the idea of the gaze. This is a visual model of surveillance. Demanding consideration is work that puts surveillance in a historical context, as Foucault did, but which is sometimes forgotten, with the effect that surveillance is used as a more universalist principle. Some of the last writing of Deleuze (1995) was on new forms of surveillance and control, outlining a regime of control that differs from the more institutionally based disciplinary society of the nineteenth century which Foucault delineated. It is also important to note nonvisual aspects of surveillance, especially the management of personal data and new organizations of, and linkages between, previously disparate databases of information to create superprofiles. The idea of consumer surveillance, for example, has most prominently been discussed from a political economy standpoint (Gandy, 1993). But there have been other attempts to discuss both the social effects of surveillance (Lyon, 1994; Poster, 1990) and the cultural effects of surveillance (Bogard, 1996; Staples, 1997).
In terms of Lefebvre’s notion of social space, we can see surveillance as articulating a spatial practice (the construction of public/private space), the changing nature of representations of space (the wavering line between public and private) and representations of space. Surveillance is a practice that creates a physical setup (arena, panopticon, practice) that assesses representations of space (video monitors of a public square) according to ideologically loaded presumptions of criminality and identity. Surveillance has moved from watching and then catching after the fact to predicting, then watching, then catching before the fact. This applies to visually oriented notions of surveillance as well as to other forms of data surveillance, including marketing (Gandy, 1993). What is established is a crucial linkage between surveillance and simulation (Bogard, 1996; see also Graham, 1998, response to Bogard).
The question to ask here is, what would a more explicitly cultural studies approach to surveillance look like? Following from our analysis in this chapter, we suggest examining the articulations and stratifications of discourse and technology, what technologies are purported to represent or mean and how they fit in within broader discourses of society. But we also need to think through how surveillance becomes part of culture, how notions of privacy and control articulate to practices of surveillance and the materiality of shaped social space.
In addition to issues of corporeality and surveillance, contemporary cultural studies work on social space also addresses dimensions of everyday life and globalization. The work on everyday life derives jointly from cultural studies’ ethnographic tradition (for example, Hall and Jefferson, 1976; Willis, 1977) and more recently from the works of Lefebvre (1991) and Michel de Certeau (1984). Yet except for studies of technology in the home (particularly television, see Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992; for IT in the home, see Noble, 1999), technology remains absent. Perhaps a cultural studies of everyday life inflected via Latour’s notion of technology as social actors might prove generative in future studies. If nothing else, the Y2K computer issue (the so-called millennium bug) pointed out the ubiquity of technology in the daily lives of industrialized countries, as people worried about their toasters not working after New Year’s Day 2000.
Most work on globalization focuses on political economy, though more studies are addressing the cultural aspects of the process (Bird et al., 1993; Tomlinson, 1999; Waters, 1995). Few, however, have addressed globalization in terms of both culture and technology. Stratton (1997) is an exception, though his essay ends up being more political economy than culturally oriented. Most discourses of globalization fail to engage issues of culture and technology despite the fact that most accounts of globalization do not fail to note that globalization is dependent upon new media, communication and information technologies connecting financial markets, factories and so on. The area demands further work.
Conclusion
To undertake cultural studies of new media technology is neither exact nor scientific. It is always provisional. This makes the question of responsibility decidedly tricky. If we do not conceive of easily identifiable agents who (or that) exercise agency in any easily identifiable way, how can we hold anyone or anything responsible in any way? The risk of disbursing agency (especially across both humans and non-humans) is that it becomes possible to so disburse responsibility as to create either paralysis or the total denial of any responsibility. However, even though the self and subjectivity are in a sense abstractions, different conceptions of self and subjectivity enable and constrain possibilities with potentially enormous consequences in relations of power. As Grossberg explains:
Obviously, within cultural studies, the question of agency involves more than a simple question of whether or how people control their own actions through some act of will. In classical modern terms, the issue of agency raises questions of the freedom of the will, or of how people can be responsible for their determined actions. But in broader cultural terms, questions of agency involve the possibilities of action as interventions into the processes by which reality is continually being transformed and power enacted. (1996: 99)
There is a pressing need in cultural studies to link these theoretical insights to practical decision-making, with, for example, decisions regarding the new media technology. There is a need to consider dimensions of agency, politics and space in the design, implementation and use of new media.
It is always easy to make these suggestions or critiques of other people in other places (designers, policy-makers, the public), but if we are to hold on to the conjunctural aspect of cultural studies we must also address our own practices which most often are within the context of higher education. As it has aptly been put by Calvin O. Schrag, ‘A university that does not respond to the technological developments of the current age can be said to be both nonresponsive and irresponsible in the moral sense’ (quoted in McMillan and Hyde, 2000). We are commanded to respond responsibly in ways that cultural studies has not yet determined how to do. Sterne, like other cultural theorists, is characteristic in claiming that ‘Cultural studies’ usefulness to Internet research should … be measured by the degree to which it can get its readers to think beyond the technophilic-technophobic dichotomy, beyond the rhetoric of millennial [now in 2001, we can substitute revolutionary] transformation’ (1999b: 282). Okay, but what then do we do? And what sense do we make of the construction ‘we do’?
A cultural studies that ‘lets us off the hook’ is antithetical to the impulses that still articulate to the motivations of most of its practitioners. Yet, quite honestly, because cultural studies (in North America at least) is so firmly ensconced within technophilic and corporatizing universities, it is difficult to find a theoretical and practical path that does not result in the identification of the cultural theorist as technophilic, technophobic or opportunistic. There clearly is work yet to be undertaken.