Untitled - socium.ge

Reflexive Internet? The British experience 127work is expressed in terms of trying to distinguish “the effects of the technology”from other relevant circumstances and conditions. How much, for example,is the possible success of e-democracy predicated on getting thenetworked technology right and how much is to do with broader social andpolitical processes which would encourage the very idea of greater participationin the first place (Coleman, 2003)? More recently, researchers in Internetstudies are using terms like “affordance” rather than determinism (for example,Livingstone, 2003; Wellman, 2003). But are affordances just a new kindof determinism smuggled in by the back door? What other aspects of ouranalyses implicitly deploy a form of technological determinism?Third, a notable feature of many recent Internet studies is that they areprimarily organized around familiar themes, issues, and concerns which occupiedresearchers before the advent of the new technology. This is reflected inbook titles such as The Governance of Cyberspace (Loader, 1997), ThePolitics of Cyberspace (Toulouse and Luke, 1998), Digital Democracy (Hagueand Loader, 1999), Cyberpower (Jordan, 1999), Communities in Cyberspace(Smith and Kollock, 1999), and Digital Capitalism (Schiller, 2000). Allowingfor the fact that publishers often influence the marketing of academic research,this trend raises questions about the extent to which research on the Internet ismerely following and reaffirming preconceived theoretical preferences. In thecontext of the history of science this situation has been caricatured as follows.Natural scientific activity is described as involving the fitting of square plugs(observations) into round holes (theories). When this does not work, the standardconventional assumption is that there must be something wrong with theplug (observation), not with the hole (theory). In other words, in the event ofpotentially unconfirming, non-fitting data, the conservative tendency of mostresearch is to find fault with the methods rather than with the theory. Theworking injunction is to hang on to the theory at all costs! It is almost as if thenew phenomenon to be explained and understood is somehow incidental to therenewed articulation of pre-existing analytic frameworks and perspectives.Fourth, an appealing argument for maintaining pre-existing theoreticalframeworks in the face of new technical phenomena is that the new technologiesare massively overhyped. According to this point of view, it is importantthat we revert to the steady application of theories as a counterbalance to thehype. It is argued that we social scientists need to contribute good, solid,empirical work in the face of wild (unsupported) imaginings about the supposedlytransformative qualities of the Internet. However, the downside of thispoint of view is that it can rather discourage theoretical change and development.The theory remains intact as it gets applied to the new (technological)phenomenon. This somewhat conservative (epistemologically speaking) strategywas caricatured in the caustic remark ascribed to Harold Garfinkel thatsociology is, in the main, a “no news, no lose” enterprise. In other words, the