James Slevin: The Internet and Society ISBN: 0745620876 Pages: 265

"The impact of the internet on modern culture does not lend itself to a neat inventory of its effects. The ease with which writers of other studies shift from enthusiasm to pessimism, slipping sometimes into indifference, suggests that our theoretical frameworks for understanding the interactional impact of the internet are woefully inadequate. Modern culture is being transformed. But we need to think about this transformation in a different way."

This book is a theory-book for New Media Studies. NMS is an academic field in the humanities department that is mainly concerned with the role of popular interactive media (the internet and data on disk) in modern culture. That is, "Culture" as in art and "culture" as in "the norms and values of people translated into everyday acts".

There are two camps of New Media specialists. While most NM books will contain a chunk of info from both, I have heard that these are meant to be distinct camps, each with a different agenda. Thus, you have the NM theorists on the one side and the NM historians on the other. The historians claim that the theorists who disregard the historians' works, have no empirical foundation whatsoever, therefor their words are mostly hot air. The theorists feel that the historian's approach to studying NM is too conservative and restrictive to their ability to come up with new and exciting ideas. Regardless of what either side says, the hard fact is that there is a lot of crossing over and overlapping, especially when this conveniently suits the specialist.

A deep technological understanding of interactive media is severely lacking in both camps, though the historians tend to score better. The overall attitude toward technology is that of "that is for the geeks". NM specialists honestly believe that they can discuss interactive media without discussing its technological foundation, because their task is not to explain how the machine machine works and how to improve it, their task is to explain what the popular use of the computer machine is, the diversity thereof and possible improvements. Their attention to the human experience of computers is admirable in a time of programmer/manufacturer arrogance that results in intrusive and unintuitive software. But the NM people's reluctances to get their hands dirty on the technology often causes them to come up with absurd and irrelevant ideas.

Slevin is fortunately one of those NM "theorists" that doesn't really want to belong to either camp. He clearly uses from both pools and openly acknowledges this: "Most of my themes...are not new. Their contours were laid down some while ago...". While the book is mostly theoretical, he never loses the historical perspective.

A huge part of Slevin's book is about the theories of a huge number of New (and Old) Media hot shot writers. Castells, Sadie Plant, Turkle, Rheingold, Cliff Stoll, Murray, they are all in here. This book could have been released under the title "New Media In A Nutshell", but O'Reilly wouldn't run it due to the lack of technical information. Nevertheless, these are all theories and people you *must* make sure to namedrop in order to have your NM papers taken seriously ("Bluff You Way Into New Media"...).

Slevin does more than mere namedropping. He draws most heavily on the works of John Thompson, Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens and uses their work to demonstrate the ongoing debate issues in NMS, offering "to develop a constructive and systematic critique of these [theorist's] accounts", which hopefully "might open up the debate on [these] issue[s.]".

...Right. As if there isn't enough debate on these issues already. *Seas* of ink (bytes?) have been spilled on these issues, with barely any Real Life outcome or results that I can think of. Because of this lack of influence on the RL situation, these NM debates tend to come across as mere academic popularity contests. The valuable insights they offer -and Slevin offers many- get lost in an abundance of papers nitpicking over footnote C and side comment B. Slevin also gives into this type of nitpicking. But that's the methodology of the NMS; lots of conflicting views that peacefully/secular/grudgingly coexist, infinitely commenting on each other. One other thing that both NM camps have in common, is their insistence that there can never be too much debate on an issue.

As with apparently everyone writing a book on the internet, Slevin has his on idea of hackers, which he correlates with the power of owning stored information. Note his interesting use of otherwise standardized terms:

"[T]here are several reasons why the degree of fixation allowed by the internet is till of central importance in understanding its interactional impact...without wishing to downplay the threats posed by 'hackers' and other individuals who ingeniously expose the vulnerability of computer systems, the internet has extended the scope for surveillance."

What I liked about the book? A whole lot, but I also disliked a whole lot more. I am used to reading such books; I take what I can use and discard the rest. It is the only way to read such books without going crazy. Chapter 2 is the historical chapter, very readable. Other chapters are mostly concerned with community building and identity building online. I wish I had read chapter 5 (on organizations using the internet) prior to reading the Bill Gates books; I would have know where Bill got most of his ideas (sans credit BTW). The most interesting (and wholly appropriate) chapter was the last, "Regulation and the internet". Discussing (the failure of) self-regulation, rating systems and filtering, Slevin outlines the dilemma of governing bodies. On the one hand, they have to encourage democratic principles of pluralism and self-regulation, on the other hand they have to lay down the preferences of the dominant culture for the sake of unity of morals and values. A few quotes:

"With democratic nation-states having retreated fromthe day to day affairs of running these media [ie, the older media of radio, tv and printed press], censorship is a rare occurrence. Yet regulatory measures often specify situations where direct control is justified, for example when freedoms are abused or situations occur which threaten state security."

"The problems faced by policy makers in regulating the internet have to do with a legacy of deeply ingrained assumptions about the proper control of communication technology which they have seemed very reluctant to abandon."

"An important source of frustration in facing the problem of internet regulation has been the clash of two distinct perspectives. Governments tend to approach the internet as a technology that facilitates the public circulation of material, and is therefor akin to broadcasting - an for activity which they have developed, albeit through independent bodies, a high degree of content regulation. Individuals, on the other hand, tend to approach the internet...as an extension of media such as the telephone which have been characterized by only a very marginal regulation of content. Neither of these perspectives is helpful on its own."

Slevin thinks that ones interaction on the internet and the fruits of that interaction are strongly linked with ones skills, knowledgability and resources. He traces the conflicting issues of regulation back to the negative attitudes toward technology in our society that result in ignorance, which often goes hand in hand with outright technophobia. Using the words of James Curran and Jean Seaton and his own:

"...The reimposition of censorship in a new form [is] made more dangerous because it is occurring in response to a public mood that owes much to fear of the new technology itself."

"Studying the interactional impact of the internet is not about seeking proof that it inherently contributes to the common good of society, or that it leads to the deterioration of human well-being. It is about finding ways to develop skills to use technologies such as the internet to cope in modern conditions."

"I have... focused on the new kinds of relations which the internet affords and how they might be placed in the service of coping with our modern experience, rather than becoming yet another source of anxiety and fear... We do indeed live in a world of great uncertainty and risk, yet these are for the most part socially manufactured risks. They are part and parcel of conditions to which we all contribute: consequently we all have a shared responsibility to try and do something about them."

This book would have been a truly great book, if it wasn't for one major flaw, one that occurs almost obligatory in every NM paper and book. The back of the book says:

"This accessible and non-technical book will be of particular interest to students of media, communications and cultural studies, and of interest to anyone else concerned with the effect of new technologies on modern culture and society."

This is not true. "Anyone else" type of people, people who are not used to the academic scholarly language often used in the Humanities department, will NOT understand the majority of points made in this book. Large parts of this book are written in an academic jargon that is barely legible to anyone outside the listed fields. I think that terms such as "regionalization", "situatedness", "conceptualizing", "centrifugal tendencies", "according primacy to the social object", "the decentring of the subject" and "mediated quasi-interaction" will either make you cringe or scratch your head in disbelieve at the existence of such terms. Can you read these terms out loud, really fast, confident of your pronunciation?

Another such scholarly and pompous term, one that is central to NMS, is "post-modernism". BTW, NM people will argue for ever that this is not the same as thing as "post-modernity" :-X Slevin doesn't like this term at all. He doesn't believe that interactive media have brought about a new time which is the "post-modern" age. But since almost every other NM theorist is obsessed with this term, he can't avoid discussing it. The huge problem with discussing "post-modernism" is that theorists still have *not* come to an agreement as to what it is. An RFC of Post-Modernism would be handy, but in a field where people insist on endless debates, and RFC of such kind would be impossible to attain.

I mentioned arrogant programmers producing unintuitive software. Reading this book will not change their ways. Hell, even the most open-minded of tech persons will not know what to do with this book, because they will not be able to understand the pompous language. The lack of technical discussion would further frustrate them. Mind you, a huge part of "studying" NM books means "translating them into normal human language". And I must emphasize here that Slevin is relatively easy on the lingo compared to some of his colleagues. Some geeks find ./ 's Jon Katz language pompous. They ain't seen nothing yet... Cyber-feminism anyone? (Yes, that's a very real *serious* field of study. Again, seas of ink have been spilled and still no one can read what was said on those papers.).

I just can't begin to express my frustration at this situation. I can't even begin to assess the amount of valuable and usefull New Media research and insights that are lost on the people who *should* be having a look at it. These people are the technical people, the CS and AI people, the ones that make the technology we all rely on to use the new media. But they will not read this because of the language and mainly because NMS maintain the skewed view that they don't have to look beyond the interface and into the technology beneath it to understand and discuss interactive media. Preaching to the NM converted may get you a grant, but it makes no actual tangible contribution to the evolution of the interactive media. It only contributes to the discussion. Because of this, Slevin's lovely book and those of many others in the NM field will not be read and their insights will not be incorporated to generate something new and usefull. Such a shame.

"Rather than treating computer users as 'digitally challenged', assigning the control over their machines to the realm of 'men in white coats' who overwhelm them with technical jargon, we just need to use the right approach... This will involve getting to grips not only with the technology, but also with the intended and unintended consequences of institutional arrangements and the kinds of relationships that may result from them."

I wish that all NM specialist would follow Slevin's advice given here and would "just" use that "right approach".

Review by: DeeGeneRate

Internet and Society website: http://www.xs4all.nl/~giotto/slevin.html

James Slevin's site: http://www.xs4all.nl/~giotto/

Amazon page: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745620876/ref%3Drm%5Fitem/002-6126160-3764028