Critical Anthropology Now: Unexpected Contexts, Shifting Constituencies, Changing Agendas

8 Worlding Cyberspace Toward a Critical Ethnography in Time, Space, and Theory

8 Worlding Cyberspace Toward a Critical Ethnography in Time, Space, and Theory Michael M. J. Fischer ABSTRACT …the growing realization of the inherent dangers of technology as such—not of its sudden but of its slow perils, not of its malevolent abuses which, with some watchfulness, one can hope to control, but of its most benevolent and legitimate uses…our actions have opened up a whole new dimension of ethical relevance for which there is no precedent in the standards and canons of traditional ethics. —Hans Jonas For philosophical or political reasons, this problem of communicating and receivability, in its new techno-economic givens is more serious than ever for everyone; one can live it only with malaise, contradiction, and compromise. —Jacques Derrida Cyberspace is (check one; if reading this on the Web, click on one of the underlined links): (a) a game of finance and corporate maneuver ; (b) an undoing of the legal system of intellectual and economic property rights, patents and copyright, secrecy and military export laws, and community standards for moral codes, as well as an undoing of several other traditional intellectual arenas of distinctions such as the economics of (free) speech versus (commodifiable) texts, and materialities of (patentable) machine versus (copyrightable) text (software); (c) a hardware technology of jerryrigging together computers, satellites , copper and fiber optic cables, and perhaps soon silicon to neural 245 tissues, with uneven coverage into the Third World, and also in the First World, but with potentials for providing access around traditional deadened schools, local censorship, and bureaucratic stonewalling; (d) a conceptual space of connectivity, information, assorted desires for escaping or enhancing the body or material world, new paralogical language games for creating selves and socialities; (e) a research space of postliterate, graphic, self-organizing, and experimental models, simulations , and constructions; (f) a cultural-ideological, even ritual, space of (con)fusion, at least in America, between a “cowboy-hacker-individualist -anarchist-libertarian” ethic and a series of market and political mechanisms for restructuring labor in new forms of manufacturing and services; (g) an object world with which to think about the changes of the late twentieth century that go under the name of the postmodern , poststructuralist, or second-order cybernetic; and an arena productive of humorous, fertile, and mind-shaping metaphors for dealing with; (h) a historical phase, most intense in the 1990s, from the use of utopian and colonizing talk of the electronic frontier to the gradual coevolution and integration of the Internet with other institutional worlds; (i) all of the above. There is a pervasive feeling in many fields touched by cyberspace that things are beyond traditional control, that realities have outrun our usual conceptual categories. And the very rhetorics of cyberspace make claims for the new: both that there are new realities and that cyberspace provides tools for handling interactive complex realities beyond traditional disciplinary vocabularies or methods. Cyberspace is chronically “under construction,” rapidly changing, expanding, and mutating among technologies and populations. Ethnographies, to keep up, must themselves become more open textualities, with “ports” to many dimensions and connections, without succumbing to incoherent fragmentation. Ethnographies must attempt simultaneously to unveil the underlying “constricted potential of a combinatory grid that is both exhausting and indefatigable,”1 and to publicly screen emergent social and cultural configurations. Ethnographic fieldwork provides tools of investigation, but those tools are challenged by cyberspace to maintain insider-outsider critical and comparative perspectives—not to become absorbed—and to adapt writing strategies that can map voicMICHAEL M. J. FISCHER 246 ings and tonalities, locate people and their social structures, and thereby articulate critical sites of constraints and openness. Ethnographies of cyberspace need to deal in theory, time, place, languages (and cultures), institutions (legal, economic, psychological, scientific), and with the reconfigured knowledge-power nexi involved in all of the above. They are challenged to do so both substantively and in their own forms and force of writing. Even more than a multisited ethnography, an ethnography of cyberspace presents a topological challenge for a multidimensional approach that is able to bring into sharp juxtaposition the contradictory elements of cyberspace’s political economy, cultural elaborations, liberating and subjugating potentials, new information-based sciences, alternative engineering designs, and their social implications. Ethnographies, in their traditional forms of writing, may seem, now increasingly subject to the pressure of a growing cyberspace pedagogical regime, to operate under the anxiety of being endangered, the anxiety of being already...