Reflections on the Virtual Society?

1. Reflections on the Virtual Society? Steve Woolgar ESRC Virtual Society? Programme Saïd Business School University of Oxford www.virtualsociety.org.uk ICUST 2001, Paris, 12-14 June 2001

2. Reflections on the Virtual Society? • The context • The Virtual Society? programme • Results: four rules of virtuality • Reflections • Conclusions: future directions

3. Reflections on the Virtual Society? • The context • The Virtual Society? programme • Results: four rules of virtuality • Reflections • Conclusions: future directions

4. The promise of the new technologies: cyberbole • Recent developments • dot com failures; market slow down; end of bubble; but underlying growth continues? • Assumptions to be tested • Technology has definitive effects/capacity • Access is advantageous and desirable; have-nots want access • Access leads to (meaningful) use

5. Reflections on the Virtual Society? • The context • The Virtual Society? programme • Results: four rules of virtuality • Reflections • Conclusions: future directions

6. Reflections on the Virtual Society? • The context • The Virtual Society? programme • Results: four rules of virtuality • Reflections • Conclusions: future directions

7. Virtual Society? - the problem • Massive growth of new electronic technologies, but social context of use still poorly understood • Fundamental shifts in how people behave, organise themselves and interact as a result of new technologies? • Significant changes in the nature/experience of interpersonal relations, communications, social control, participation, cohesion, identity, trust? • Is a Virtual Society possible?

8. Virtual Society? - the Programme • 1997-2001: 22 projects in 25 UK (and 4 EU) universities • 76 academic researchers; HQ at Oxford • wide range of application areas • counter-intuitive results: “interesting if true” • PROFILE 2000 and website

9. Some key analytic themes • Effects of technology are socially constructed not determined • Users are configured: development of technology is a process of defining, enabling and constraining the user • Reception and use are socially distributed; delivery does not follow a linear model • Detailed ethnographic studies of actual usage

10. Reflections on the Virtual Society? • The context • The Virtual Society? programme • Results: four rules of virtuality • Reflections • Conclusions: future directions

11. Reflections on the Virtual Society? • The context • The Virtual Society? programme • Results: four rules of virtuality • Reflections • Conclusions: future directions

12. Four Rules of Virtuality • Impact and use of new technologies depends crucially on local social context • Current rate of straightforward rapid expansion may not continue. • Fears and risks associated with new technologies are unevenly socially distributed • New technologies tend to supplement rather than substitute for existing practices and forms of organisation • The more virtual the more real!

13. 1: Patterns of Access and Use of Internet (Wyatt et al) • Growth conceals marked shifts in nature and consistency of usage • Evidence of a strong drop off in usage among sub groups • People stop using Internet because • become bored • loss of institutional access • too difficult to use • too expensive • intrusion of advertising

14. 2: Experience of Internet Use (Lea et al) • Does Internet usage engender isolation and loneliness? • US evidence (CMU) that Internet can cause depression, loneliness, sense of isolation, anomie • Lea et al show visual anonymity enhances identification with group, and reinforces existing social boundaries

15. 3: How much public access is there to the Internet? (Liff et al) • Attracts a much broader cross section than in overall population of Internet users • Access points augment rather than replace home ownership • The policy gap: infrastructure of telecommunications cost and access; but little support for projects on the ground • Social space facilitates/constrains use by different groups: access is a social rather than technical problem

16. 4: Technology, work and surveillance (Mason et al) • Use of surveillance capacity depends on local context • Little evidence that employees fear threat to privacy • Positive circumvention rather than “resistance”: borrowing PIN numbers • Workers use surveillance capabilities to their own advantage

17. 5: Virtual community care? (Burrows et al) • Huge growth and scope of wired welfare globally • Internet as knowledge base for middle class welfare • Self organising structure of cyberspace • Problems of status of knowledge obtained on the Internet

18. 6: The virtual consumer (Lunt and Moor) • Importance of shopping (not just transaction) for household structures and activities • “It’s just typing not shopping”: preference for reproduction of existing shopping arrangements online • Retailers don’t reproduce shopping experience online • E-commerce is boring (lack of issue engagement)

19. 7: Groupware and the mediation of memory (Brown and Lightfoot) • Designed for the preservation of organisational memory • “Political” uses of email: copying in; prolonging exchanges; public flogging • Hording and storing email as accountability strategies • Email as a highly formal and politicised space (cn the promise of informal communication).

20. 8: Where the virtual meets the real (Hughes) • The move to “virtual organisation” in banking: need for radically new skills and working practices? • Preserving the normality of the interaction and maintaining customer confidence • Making the new technology at home within existing working practices

21. Four Rules of Virtuality • Impact and use of new technologies depends crucially on local social context • Current rate of straightforward rapid expansion may not continue. • Fears and risks associated with new technologies are unevenly socially distributed • New technologies tend to supplement rather than substitute for existing practices and forms of organisation • The more virtual the more real!

22. Reflections on the Virtual Society? • The context • The Virtual Society? programme • Results: four rules of virtuality • Reflections • Conclusions: future directions

23. Reflections on the Virtual Society? • The context • The Virtual Society? programme • Results: four rules of virtuality • Reflections • Conclusions: future directions

24. Counter-intuitive results • The temptations of revelatory irony • the value of social scientific research! • “the results are counter-intuitive!!” • But what has happened to our intuitions? • Intuitions derive from visions of technology which are top down, synoptic, summarising, clumping • government policy pronouncements, supply side visions, advertising rhetoric, media polarisation

25. Counter-intuitive results • Media treatment depends on contrast between definitive versions of what the technology can do • eg the media storm • The appeal of counter-intuitive/ironic outcomes; the inversion of claims about definitive effects • eg tele-shopping depots

26. Mundane experiences of technology • None of this pays attention to mundane experiences of T • Practical day-to-day usage does not depend on synoptic, definitive versions of what the technology can do • Our mundane experiences are more characterised by ambivalence. Technology is: • good/bad • love/hate • works/does not work

27. Revisiting the research rationale • “Virtual society” is one example of the recent profusion of epithets • Epithets are synoptic, top down, claims to novelty, change • Epithetical visions should be understood as part of wider processes of change and accountability • These visions to be treated as agonistic claims • Hence the genealogy of the “?” in Virtual Society?

28. Reflections on the Virtual Society? • The context • The Virtual Society? programme • Results: four rules of virtuality • Reflections • Conclusions: future directions

29. Reflections on the Virtual Society? • The context • The Virtual Society? programme • Results: four rules of virtuality • Reflections • Conclusions: future directions

30. The New Agenda • New policy context/agenda: post hype deflation of dot.com bubble; evidence of partial saturation • New emphasis: from access to use

31. From access to use • Promises of universal access are unrealistic (cf telephones) • Access does not guarantee use; use does not require access (cf Trinidad); meaningful use requires building upon (existing) social relations

32. The New Agenda • New policy context/agenda: post hype deflation of dot.com bubble; evidence of saturation • New emphasis: from access to use • Need to work from mundane, bottom up experiences • Emphasise situated context of use, inter-media and on-line/off-line relations • New forms of sociality: rethinking central concepts of social theory: information, power, organisation, discourse, knowledge

33. Conclusion: principles for future analysis • Anti-clumping: dis-aggregate, dis-aggregate! • Focus on mundane experiences: ambivalence • Analytic scepticism • technography: an anthropological/ethnographic perspective on actual experiences of use • beware cyberbole! - institutionalise the “?”

34. Reflections on the Virtual Society? Steve Woolgar ESRC Virtual Society? Programme Saïd Business School University of Oxford www.virtualsociety.org.uk ICUST 2001, Paris, 12-14 June 2001