Virtual Society? Get Real!
Opening Plenary - Sarah Green

Opening Plenary

Sarah Green (University of Manchester)

(pre-publication draft)

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(a) Where have we got to?

Getting Somewhere (anywhere)
One of the questions Steve Woolgar suggested I address is "Where have we got to?" That particular phrase intrigued me, because such metaphors of travel pervade discussions of information and communications technologies, which I'll call ICTs from now on. With these technologies, we always have to be getting somewhere.

This is the first point I want to make, and it draws on the results of the Virtual Society? project in which I was particularly involved, with Penny Harvey and Jon Agar, called The Social Contexts of Virtual Manchester.

What we have phrased 'the connection imperative' - the urgent political and commercial insistence that everyone must connect to ICTs, and must do it now, is heavily loaded with this idea of getting somewhere. Connection is represented as an objective and inevitable truth about today's world: those who do not connect will not get anywhere – socially, economically and, increasingly, it seems, politically - and as a result will be excluded.

Connection, though, to what? Many things, but most of all, connection to a network of connections, with no centre and no fixed hierarchies - a flat network; a network that is rapidly becoming a web-like lattice around the globe.

It is interesting to note here that two hundred and fifty years ago, there was a concerted attempt to accurately measure another lattice around the globe, regarded at the time as equally revolutionary: an accurate measure of longitude position would, literally, globalise trade, transport, manufacture and distribution. And just as that revolution was regarded as a technological one – solved by the development of an accurate clock which would keep correct time on a ship – so this revolution is also a technological one.

However, in neither the longitude nor the ICT case did the technology simply appear out of nowhere. In the case of longitude, there was a long-running offer from the British government to pay a huge reward to anyone who solved the problem; but it became a problem in the first place because of the expansion of international trade and colonial holdings. It was not the longitude clock that revolutionised global connection: it was pre-existing networks of relations which caused the clock to come into existence. The same, we would argue, is also true of ICTs.

The point, then, about where we have got to: in European history over the last three hundred years or more, greater connection has almost invariably been associated with a technical fix: technology that literally changes the world, most especially in terms of overcoming the world’s perceived physical barriers and obstacles. In imperatives to connect, you always have to be getting somewhere, and progressing beyond where you could get to before. And that involves going beyond, getting around or even erasing physical limitations. The development of ICTs may have occurred during a postmodern age; the thinking behind what they are supposed to be able to achieve is firmly grounded in the modernist premises of ideal escape from material constraints, of the objective progress of mind over matter, and of technology emerging to cause these things to occur.

Yet many of the Virtual Society? projects have found, as Steve has just outlined, that place and location - where you are in the world when you embark on your journey to get somewhere using ICTs - still matters a very great deal. It would be rather naïve to say that nothing has changed in the world since the introduction and exponential increase in the use of ICTs. But the 'reality' of what that means emerges as a multiplicity of realities being simultaneously and inevitably generated along with the technologies and their uses; and in this, the messy, particularistic world in which we live continually intervenes and interweaves with the way ICTs become involved in people's lives. The challenge for Virtual Society? researchers has been to keep in mind the continual generation of these realities while investigating the conditions and processes involved in daily experiences of ICTs.

When so many suggest that ICTs generate their own, completely new contexts - a somewhere else - it is easy to imagine that there can be no archaeology of knowledge here in Foucault's terms: it is easy to imagine that we have been asked to dig up what is still being built, and that as we dig, something is built over it. In such circumstances, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish our analytical tools from the objects being revealed. But it can be done, for in practice, ICTs turn out to be no more context-resistant or history-resistant than any other technologies.

(b) Reality and Virtuality
And that brings me naturally on to the second point I wanted to address: the question of reality itself. In the course of many of the Virtual Society? projects, researchers frequently came across powerful rhetoric about the potential of these technologies to alter reality as we currently know or experience it. A good deal of this rhetoric seemed to demand a suspension of disbelief: in the information revolution itself; in virtuality; even in the newness of it all: the idea that there was nothing like it that had happened before.

Here, the work of some of my colleagues in the Virtual Society? programme has been most illuminating. I will draw on two projects: the one on groupware and memory, carried out by Steve Brown and Geoffrey Lightfoot (Groupware: computer mediated meetings and the mediation of memory); and the Silicon Alleys project, carried out by Scott Lash, Celia Lury, Deidre Boden, Dan Shapiro and Andreas Wittel. In very different ways, both were exploring the implications for reality in the use of ICTs.

The groupware project looked at, amongst many other things, the way people working in commercial organisations used and stored emails. To their astonishment, they found that most staff kept almost all the emails they had ever received or sent, and what's more, they classified them through storing them in a variety of directories and sub-directories. Further, they would frequently retain the entirety of previous email interchanges as part of the email they were currently sending in continuing the conversation; they would selectively send copies of emails to other members of staff so that the original recipient knew others were witness to the conversation; and they would quite often select extracts from previous emails to support their perspective when there was a disagreement about some past event, usually to establish who was at fault for an error having been made.

In effect, this use of email constitutes the continual creation of a kind of collage of reality: cutting and pasting bits of past email conversations to reconstruct the past in the interests of current political positioning. But perhaps as importantly for my purposes here is that certain individuals never became involved in emails at all - in fact, these individuals often did not have an email address. These were the executives at the very top of the companies concerned.

The issue here is this: it seems clear that memory within organisations appears to be under reconstruction through email practices, and that accountability is taking on new forms; however, it is worth asking what such reconstructions are reconstructing, in terms of hierarchies and relations within organisations. For whom is a new reality being created?

The Silicon Alleys project took on the issue of reality in a very different way. Again amongst many other things, that project focused on the development of a software game, one version of which was being designed for use in a financial services company to help in employee training. Celia Lury, in her paper, "Loyalty/Loyaltoy: the game of virtual society?" describes the game as generating a 'real virtuality', a way in which the game, when played, made the contexts in which it was played: it generated the reality in which people playing the game participated. But there were several games going on: the negotiations between the makers of the software game and the potential clients; the design of the game itself and who would ultimately get control over this; and the engrossing characteristics of the software game itself. Lury uses the notion of virtuosity, gained through continual reiteration and participation in the game(s), to draw out how hierarchies and levels emerge out of an apparently even, or flat network; and she argues that this ability to lift people up or out, to create levels within an ostensibly flat network, generates a porous boundary between games and seriousness. Real virtuality, in which games generate hierarchies, and the serious business of running e-commerce companies becomes a somewhat fantastical game, as we have seen in the stock market lately, is possibly altering the reality in which we live. But it does not do this by generating closure, by forcing us to play by its rules; on the contrary, it is in the sieve-like qualities between play and seriousness that the changes are occurring.

During the joint workshop between these three projects, other questions about playfulness came up: participants wondered whether the porous boundary between play and seriousness was also associated with the increasingly porous boundary between working hours and leisure hours, in which people are using telematic connection to be available for work whether they are at home, in their car or in the office. These kinds of realities of virtuality do need to be considered; and I will leave you with this final thought: one of the key questions that emerged from the Social Contexts of Virtual Manchester project was this: in this exponentially increasing level of connection, what becomes disconnected?