Abstracts of keynote
speakersBy clicking on the title of the paper, you can access their
abstract. The full papers are available electronically and can be accessed by clicking on the
web link at the bottom of the abstract.
The death of virtual reality
Daniel Miller (UCL, London)
The term `virtual reality' is hardly challenged as an intrinsic property of internet use
although it flies in the face of most anthropological and other theories. The problem is
not just theoretical: through an ethnographic study of internet use in Trinidad carried
out with Don Slater (see The Internet: An
Ethnographic Approach), we are able to demonstrate that the term virtual reality bears
no relation to the actual experience of internet use. This paper demonstrates the
importance of situating online experience within the larger context of offline lives
in order to understand the impact of the internet on institutions such as the family,
friendship, commerce, and identity. In almost every respect ethnographic study showed the
consequences of internet use to be other than that predicted: its effects are often
conservative, strengthening local identity and the nuclear family, though at least in this
instance reducing rather than exacerbating class difference. Some more positive theories
as to the consequences of internet use, which could replace the concept of virtual reality
are abstracted from a case-study of internet use by religious groups who clearly
articulate what they see as the advantages of mediated communication for spiritual
purposes over face to face encounters, and also its effects on identity, and the
objectification of values.
Daniel Miller's paper will be closely based on the conclusions of The Internet: An
Ethnographic Approach (co-written with Don Slater).
Performing Virtualities - Liminality on and off the Net
Rob Shields (Carleton University, Ottawa)
What is contrasted in the real versus virtual dichotomy which dominates not only popular
but academic discussion of computer-mediated communication and digital environments?
Drawing on Bergson and Lefebvre, the virtual will be examined against the ideal and
actual; the possible and abstract; the fatalistic and utopian. Only on this basis is it
possible to understand the relationship of the virtual with other performative spaces, and
the achievement of sociable relations, including trust and intimacy, within virtual
environments and via computer- mediated interaction. A longstanding history of performing
virtuality may be identified in range of activities from carnival to risk accounting. What
are the stakes in drawing out the mutual interrelation of material and virtual? The
virtual, for example, appears to have been accompanied by an adjustment of spatio-temporal
categories to create a new ground of action, impacting the territorialization of the
social (as a taken-for-granted plane of immanence) and of society (as an order of power
relations). While one might be sceptical of the journalistic visions of a
‘virtual’ society of telecommuters and net-addicted shut-ins, a more analytic
focus reveals the virtualization of social spaces, action and qualitative shifts in
categories which underpin value judgements in the spheres of justice, politics and
economics.
How then might ‘performance’ be understood not only in the case of the
virtual but as a more general mediating action between the possible and the real? Who and
what ‘performs’? The tenses of this verb and the careful regulation of what is
admitted into the category of acting ‘subject’ of this performance signals a
deep-seated settlement of the terms of agency and causal flows. What does
‘performance’ accomplish? As the spatiotemporal contours of
‘actionable’ domains which support agency change, so changes in agency and
interaction follow. This is not only a matter of action, of performance. If social
settlements of power/knowledge and action are re-inscribed in a new time-space regime -
one in which the virtual figures more prominently that it did in the past - then surely
new social outcomes become possible; or, relatively speaking: a virtual society.
This affirmation will be presented in the anticipation of initiating a conversation
with other presentations and works-in-progress at the workshop.
Background: R. Shields, ‘Virtual Society?’ and J. Van Loon,
‘Organizational Networks and Spaces’ in Space and Culture 4/5 (2000) (available
online)
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Embodied Practices of Engineering Work
Lucy Suchman (XEROX, Palo Alto Research Center, CA)
This paper concerns the work of civil engineering, in particular the production of
exhibits and plans using both Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and paper media. I consider how
new roads and bridges are imaged in and imagined through the conventional graphics and
symbol systems of engineering, in relation to an existing landscape and to previously
built physical infrastructures. I am interested both in how we as analysts can see
engineers shift among the heterogeneous objects of their work, and also in the ways in
which the objects for them are effectively joined, in and through their practice, into a
coherent field of action. That field, moreover, is not simply worked upon but is in
various ways inhabited – imaginatively and corporeally – as a necessary
condition of its effective construction and use. It is not enough, in other words, simply
to read off the appearances of engineering drawings, viewed as representations of objects
in a specialists’ visual language, and act with and upon them as self-referential and
mutually constitutive elements of a technical field. Engineering competency requires, as
well, the animation of its technical objects through practitioners’ embodied
experience – professional and mundane – of activities outside the boundaries of
the materials immediately at hand. At the same time those experiences inform engineering
practice not as private cogitations, but as stories told and made relevant to the work at
hand.
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Handbag.com and other sites of 'real' queerness on the Net
Nina Wakeford (Surrey University, Guildford)
"Handbags - a lifeline for most women. Somewhere to keep everything you
need to see you through the day. Now imagine the handbag of the future, a handbag about the size of a CD. It
will have compartments for your health and beauty products, your diary, personal mail, travel details, career,
car, family...plus you can talk to this handbag and it will give you advice on healthcare,
beauty tips, shopping and even help you with advice on your finances - anything you want!!. It will also introduce you to new
friends and let you 'talk' to women just like you, whenever you want to 'chat'. If
this sounds like an impossible dream, think again. It's here, it's called
handbag.com" - Boots leaflet 1999
In this paper I introduce my study of 'queer' spaces on the Net through the appearance of handbag.com, a portal site aimed at
the 'women' whose desires are signalled by the capacities described above. However I highlight the
highly contested (and often queered) notion of the handbag in popular culture by
drawing on Mark Ravenhill's recent play "Handbag", itself a commentary on the use of new reproductive technologies by
lesbians and gay man through a parody of The Importance of Being Ernest. What are the sites
of 'real' queerness here? I describe the notion of 'cyberqueer' through the appearance of
sites which highlight non-normative sexualities, and draw upon my study of an women's
Internet community in order to look at the kinds of identities which are constituted in such spaces.
Lastly I look at the the use of the 'real' queer technology of the mobile phone (not yet WAP-enabled) on the TV series
Queer As Folk.
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