The Ethnography of the Digital World, or How to Do Fieldwork in a “Brave New World”

Abstract

Is the world digital? (Simon 2000) Speed is one of the first words people tend to use when they describe the Internet. well-known French politician Alain Madelin recently echoed this consensus view when he said that electronic communications had brought about a world where it is no longer the big who triumph over the small, but the fast over the slow (Le Monde, July 2-3, 2000). Several years earlier, Paul Virilio (1993) wrote, reality of lies entirely in its speed of propagation. If so, Digital man, Negroponte's (1995) successor to Homo sapiens sapiens, would be distinguished primarily by the speed with which he processed information, not by the content of what he processed. Natural selection, operating to the advantage of the swift, is, according to this logic, in the midst of creating a new species whose new, true, name will be Einstein's famous formula, E=mc2. Predictions that a new era, or even a whole new epoch for humanity would result from new means of collecting, processing, and transmitting began only half a century ago (Wiener 1948). In the 1950s, they indirectly inspired a group of American sociologists to predict the end of the ideology, and the start of a new era of or knowledge in a post-industrial world of participatory democratic society administered by the community of Science (Bell 2000). Already, James Burnham (1941) had envisaged the convergence of the capitalist and communist models within a managerial Less than three decades later, Zbignew Brzezinski (1969) announced the coming of the first world society dominated by communication. In 1994, Vice-President Al Gore officially proclaimed that a new epoch had arrived for the new human family, and one year later, the world's leading industrialized nations, members of the G7, hailed the global society. American self-satisfaction had reached its peak. American society, always open to the flow of and eager to develop better channels for it, stood poised to benefit from its information edge (Nye & Owens 1996). The victory over the Soviet system had thus reached its logical conclusion. The new age that was beginning would no longer mean the end of ideology and history, but rather the age of their rebirth, as Daniel Bell (2000) wrote in the preface to the new edition of his 1962 work. To emphasize the striking but covert symmetry between liberal economics and communist ideology, at least where self-satisfaction is concerned, we need look no further than the fact that Walt Rostow's classic book The Stages of Economic Growth (1960) bore the subtitle A Non-Communist Manifesto. Circumscribing the Unfathomable In electronic space -- as we might expect when we enter a free market zone where Darwinian principles apply -- it is the entrepreneur, whose turf it is, who best understands the rules. Research-oriented intellectuals do not seem to be able to see the forest for the trees (Costigan 1999: xvii), except for those researchers who have recast themselves as entrepreneurs. One such case is Thomas Middlelhoff, head of Bertelsmann, the world's third-largest media conglomerate. In the 1980s, Middelhoff wrote his doctoral thesis on electronic commerce. Businessmen understood sooner and better than researchers and politicians that speed, while it might be an immense asset in computer science, was of little use for making profits unless it was linked to content that consumers would buy. In this light, AOL's recent merger with Time Warner stands out as an example of the importance of content. Similarly, the recent deal takeover of the young delinquent Napster by the very respectable Bertelsmann (BMG) recognizes these young entrepreneurs' ability to realize the enormous commercial potential of the Internet by creating, maintaining, and connecting a virtual community with tens of millions of members. (See Esposito 2000 for a definition of community in terms of the Western philosophical tradition. …