Untitled - socium.ge

Reflexive Internet? The British experience 135undertake a straightforward evaluation of the claims is to align oneself withone or other constituency or version of (a particular) social order. On the otherhand, the lofty disdain traditionally associated with an academic perspective istantamount to the loss of engagement with these constituencies.How, then, to give space to moderate assessments of the situation to besustained alongside, and on an equal footing with, the cyberbole? 5 At an earlystage of this research venture I was presented with the draft specification forthe program. The opening rationale for the research program closely followedthe points already listed. My immediate reaction was that the stated rationaleboth vastly exaggerated the likely effects of the new technologies and boughtinto an unsophisticated form of technological determinism. For example, itincluded the passage: “all these technologies are set to modify the nature andexperience of interpersonal relations …” And my first instinct was to set aboutredrafting the text so as to introduce large doses of academic caution: “wemight anticipate that perhaps some electronic technologies might have someimpact on certain aspects of interpersonal relations …”?!The dramatic effect of this introduction of modalities was to downgrade theconfident facticity of declarations about technological impact (cf. Latour andWoolgar, 1986: 75ff). This progressively gave rise to my feeling, as the redraftbecame replete with modifiers and hedges, that the central urgency of theresearch was becoming lost. The production of such texts involves input from,and attention to, many different (and often competing) interests and views.The end result is a compromise, or better a composite, of elements designedfor different constituencies. So a recurrent mistake of those who respond tocalls for research proposals is to imagine that there is a single, straightforwardobjective and audience in mind. I realized that my attempt at redrafting waseffectively an attempt to redefine the audience, to reorient the program towarda singular implied reader, captured perhaps in the persona of the cautious academic.The effect was to diminish the urgency, edge, and provocation of theoriginal draft, clearly oriented to a variety of other audiences, not least thosewho should be sufficiently impressed by the drama of potential technologicalimpacts to support the allocation of funding for research into the actual effectsof these technologies.At this point, my dilemma – how to make the draft more friendly to thecautious academic, while retaining the pragmatic value of its cyberbolic overtones– was effectively finessed by the ESRC. I was advised that extensiveredrafting was not possible because the draft had by then already beenapproved by the appropriate committee. In other words, the text alreadycarried some measure of institutional approval of the reader constituencies thatit performed. The solution was to retain (in large part) the given form ofwords, but to inject a question mark into the title. From that moment theVirtual Society research program became the Virtual Society? research