Cyberspace: Sociology's Natural Domain

Abstract

WILLSAM SIMS BAINBRIDGE National Science Foundations technologies of e mail on the contrary, they lend themselves rather readily to monitoring. States have active interests in communications on an array of sensitive topics from military technologies to drug dealing. With such inter ests in mind, the Clinton administration has forcefully (if not yet effectively) sought to block cheap, effective encryption ofprivate elecS tronic communications. At the time of this writS ing, this particular administration seems to be losing this particular struggle, but the issue is by no means resolved. On other fronts, efforts have been made to require that pornography sold over the Internet be purchased by credit card-supposedly to preS vent minors from taking advantage of these new informational opportunities. And state security agencies in a number of countries are said to be perfecting new surveillance mechanisms that will make it possible to scan literally millions of e mail communications per day for specific words or phrases. In short, the rush ls on in cyberspace. How the social landscape will look when it is all over is not something that can simply be read off the inherent characteristics of the technologies involved. Indeed, processes like this should remind us of the tenuousness of ascribing effects to any technologies, apart from their social contexts. In this case, those contexts are rich in conflictual and innovative possibilitiesso much so that anyone who claims to foresee with certainty the long-term outcomes of these innovations surely does not deserve to be believed. In exchange for such unreliable cerS tainties, sociologists have something of vastly greater value: the richest of opportunities to assess the scramble for advantage triggered by cyberspace and to anticipate the new lay of the land to follow in its wake.