Introduction: culture in, culture out.

Introduction: culture in, culture out. Here are three essays dealing with computers. I intend that tosound sort of like "here are three essays dealing with ritual"or "here are three essays dealing with kinship"--to sound asif it were entirely unsurprising to open up a copy of AnthropologicalQuarterly and see three essays about computers, alongside three onsocial organization, religion, or pragmatics and ideology. It should beentirely unremarkable by now that computers are involved in the socialand cultural life of the people and processes anthropologists study,everywhere in the world (digital divides notwithstanding). It should beclear by now that the interactions and uses by which people makemeaning, act, or build societies is as inextricably linked to software,networks, computers, devices, and infrastructures as we insist it is tokinship or social organization. In all honesty, we should be well pastthe time when we need labels such as "digital life" or"the anthropology of the virtual" or "onlinesociality" as if they helped to clarify something. On the one hand, it will not do to simply suggest that computersmake no difference to the social and cultural lives of humans, and thatwe ought to go on as if information and communication technologies aresimply a diacritical mark on otherwise fundamental features of humanlife. On the other hand, it cannot change everything. The requirement tosay what difference computers make to things like sociality, knowledge,language, or human life in general is not met by appending the word"digital" to whatever noun or verb commands more immediateattention; but nor can the difference be approached as if it were oneproblem among many, parceled out after the fashion of area studies, ordivvied up as if it were one qualifying field exam alongside others(which we nonetheless know to be a frequent occurrence). Often such a problem can only be addressed by demonstration, andthis is what makes the three essays gathered here so valuable. Each ofthem is, in its own subtle way, struggling with exactly this issue: howto maintain a classical orientation towards anthropology, yet bring itto bear on a problem whose significance is widely felt, over-analyzed,and poorly understood. The essays collected here do not seek to forge anew subfield, or to simply apply anthropological concepts to new objectslike Facebook friends or cell-phone users; they do not seek to radicallyreinvent the methods, fieldsites, or topics of anthropology; and despitebeing written by people immersed in the technical details of softwareand networks, they are not any more inter- or trans-disciplinary thanmany other anthropological studies underway today. Instead, what they do is something that should be familiar to anyanthropologist: they form concepts out of rich empirical fieldwork andtry to rectify them against those realities. They criticize approachesto problems and concepts forged in other places and in other times; andin doing so they leave open the possibility for future criticism thatmight take account of the changing technical conditions of our world(Strathern 2006). Each delivers good ethnographic value, explicating andorienting readers to very specific worlds and ways of being, andexplains in each case what difference the difference engine makes. Thisis not special or new in any threatening sense; rather it is simply whatanthropology looks like today. These three essays each take on one of the peculiar burdens ofanthropology: the ongoing remediation of the concept of culture.Culture, as a concept and as a feature of anthropological thought isboth broken and yet impossible to leave behind. Within the discipline,it has been through so many changes, so much re-use and modification,and so much critique, that it seems impossible to see in it thedistinctive form it might once have had; and yet, there are no otherserious nominees for the position it holds. Even more burdensome is the fact that all around anthropology,other disciplines wield this concept (and the associated claim toinvestigate it via ethnography) with abandon. Much of this work isconducted without much awareness of its peculiar failings, difficulties,and critiques. In information studies, in management, in consumerresearch, in public health, and so on, "culture" has asalience and a power it seemingly no longer possesses for scholarstrained in the heart of anthropology. But even more troubling, verylittle of this work shows a grasp of the particular strengths of theconcept either. Analyses of the "culture" of computing or theinternet, to say nothing of its appearance in every microlocation fromcorporations and gymnasiums to gorilla troupes and hair salons, seemempty of theoretical force, barely distinguishable from norms andcustoms in some 19th century sense; such analyses certainly almost neverattain the heights of systematicity or recursivity we associate with theexemplary works of the discipline. The burden these essays bear is therefore a double one: first, toshow that the objects of study chosen are adequate to some concept ofculture, and second, to transform that concept in ways that will (onehopes) influence and remediate the ways neighboring disciplines employand rely on this complicated notion. These articles all try to preservethe cultural at the expense of cultures--by finding diverse ways tospecify the cultural, as James Faubion has put it, "as aconstitutive dimension of human life, as one of the planes--an openplane, to be sure--of which it is always composed" (Rabinow et al.2008:106). But they also raise the stakes for this concept by strugglingwith the question of how to work over the manifest importance ofsoftware, networks, and computers without going too far. There is obviously no shortage of work on this topic: the range ofdisciplines and methods brought to bear on the topics of informationtechnology, computers, software, and networks is disturbingly large. Oneshould ask: why is there so much written on this topic? Then one shouldask: why is so little of it any good? In part, the answer is that, forsome reason--call it a cultural reason--we are driven to seecomputerization and its incumbent technologies and social formations asso profoundly cutting-edge, so new, so revolutionary, that we lose sightof what might really be new about them. The predictable reaction--thatthere is actually nothing new about them but scale and speed--is just asmuch a part of this cultural reason. Both the Californian enthusiasm ofthe technophile and the Edwardian reserve of the technophobe seem tosignal the disappearance of any sufficiently rigorous concept ofculture--even as the repetition of the term and the proliferation of itssites seem to go on unhindered. Or to put it differently: why are bothcomputers and cultures everywhere today? In anthropology, studies of online interaction, virtual worlds, andcomputer-mediated communication have, over the years, made various movestowards thinking through the concept of culture, but not muchtheoretical work has emerged. There are the widely read reviews byEscobar et al. (1994) and by Wilson and Peterson (2002), and seminalworks by Miller and Slater (2000) and Hine (2000); and there is anincreasingly large set of works in media anthropology that focus on theuse of discussion, online interaction, and communication as part oflarger issues like diaspora, migration, and new forms of distributedcultural conditions (Axel 2004; Barker 2008; Bernal 2005; Larkin 2008;Lysloff 2003; Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002). Of the theoretical works in anthropology that provide a basis forrethinking the concept of culture, Michael M.J. Fischer's article"Worlding Cyberspace," more than any other, attempted to movethe discussion towards worlding as a way to distinguish it from boundedspace and place-based versions of culture (Fischer 1999). The essayshere continue what Fischer initiated, especially Golub'scontribution, which very clearly positions its approach as a generalattempt to understand how worlds of any kind form, in order to gainpurchase on the question of what difference the computer makes to thisprocess. Beyond this limited list there are plenty of contributions tothe "ethnography of online communities"--but few I wouldsuggest that push forward the theoretical and conceptual challenges ofunderstanding both the proliferation of studies of computing, and theirinability to account for this proliferation culturally. The three essays collected here should therefore be read asattempts to change this state of affairs. All of them emerge from theheart of anthropology (all graduates of the University of Chicago noless), and all of them are erudite, widely read scholars with extensivefieldwork experience in more than one area. That they have turned theirattention to the issues explored here is no doubt connected to thegeneral cultural desire to understand the meaning of computers, but italso emerges from a deep engagement with some of the central strengthsand weaknesses of the anthropological analysis of culture. It is worthtrying to bring these out a bit more sharply here. There are a series of moves towards specifying the role of thecultural addressed in these essays. There is a first move involved intrying to achieve purchase on these new phenomena, and that is toliterally make up a new culture. This is something to which Golubobjects in studies of the "virtual worlds" where the successof past anthropology is used to legitimate the treatment of virtualworlds as bounded wholes--places with local everyday life, preferablyincluding exotic practices that demand explanation for an audience thatis not there. Such a move is not wrong methodologically--however, itcreates an expectation, or hypothesis, that these worlds are bothseparate from and similar to the real-clothes worlds we have alwaysstudied. This move generally excuses researchers from having to lookclosely at the distributed inhabitants in their real-clothes bodies(which is admittedly time-consuming and painstaking work that does notfeel very new) and also from the necessity of engaging with thetechnical and economic conditions of possibility for these worlds (whichit must also be admitted, can take some of the fun, though not theinterest, out of researching them). Rather than seeing virtual worldsand online environments as built on top of or extruded from existingworlds, organized in particular ways, much of the work in onlineethnography both inside and outside of anthropology prefers to make up aculture instead, often implicitly, without giving it much thought. Only Tom Boellstorff's recent book makes an explicitexperiment of this move, reflecting on the implications of doing so notjust methodologically, but theoretically as well (Boellstorff 2008). Andit is in making an experiment of it that it is possible to attempt tohold apart the methodological decision from the epistemological (orontological) claims that might be made about these worlds. A great dealof non-ethnographic work, for instance, relies on just this kind ofconfusion in order to treat online worlds and games as"laboratories of human behavior" (e.g. the work of EdwardCastronova). However, as Golub points out here, virtual worlds are builtout of existing ones, and the previously existing actual worlds arenecessary but not sufficient grounds for the emergence of the new"virtual" worlds--which is to say, they are not a simplemirror or iteration of general human culture. And despite the manifestexcitement with which scholars have approached these cases as novel andinteresting, few seem to have actually taken on the task ofcharacterizing this novelty--this supplementary or extra"worlding" that takes place--and instead have treated it as avariation of (or repetition of) the worlding we already know. There is a second move in the analysis of online, networkedcultural life, which is to return to behaviors and practices asthemselves constitutive of a fieldsite. Here, it is not the boundednessof space or place that gives meaning to everyday life, but the nature ofmediated interaction itself. In part, this is what Coleman attempts tocapture through the analysis of hacker sociality. This move happens inopposition to the first one, invoking the necessity of looking at thedual sociality created by mediated communication--both online and inperson--as that which makes it distinctive. In this respect, the campsand conferences that are a frequent feature of hacker's lives (andwhich are spreading to other domains as well) are an effect of this dualsociality and not a face-to-face practice that precedes it. The"cultural" plane of hacking therefore is not place/space-basedbut a zone of pragmatic stability that emerges out of multiple modes ofinteraction. These stabilities of practice are sustained and repeated inconferences, camps, online mailing lists, and the multiple modalities ofcommunication and collaboration involved in creating software andnetworks. Hence, the object of "hacker sociality" comes tolook similar in form to objects like rituals, carnivals, or feasts (andthus the turn to theorists like Turner and Bakhtin as resources forunderstanding them). The question remains, however, what difference doesonline software-mediated interaction make to this formation of pragmaticstabilities? Coleman answers that it is the very details of technicalpractice--hacking, coding, designing, tinkering, writing licenses--whichprovides the content of these ritual-like pragmatic stabilities, andhence remediates the cultural as something endemic to (and located onlyin the practices of) this community of individuals. Finally there is a third and lateral move, which is away fromculture and towards "social imaginaries." A focus on socialimaginaries (especially those such as the public sphere and the economy)at first rejects the "cultural" as a meaningful word, butwithout sacrificing the complex combination of ideal and materialpractices that the word once signified. However, rather than manycultures (each distinct), social imaginaries come in only a handful ofhistorically ramified forms tethered to global secular modernity of thelast 400 years or so (Taylor 2004, Kelty 2008). A focus on "socialimaginaries" as a replacement for culture can then be employed toanalyze public spheres, democratic deliberation, and diasporicidentities, both in person and via new media technologies. Such a movecan push analysis so far beyond the question of information technologythat it disappears or ends up making little or no difference to the caseunder consideration. Frequently this leads people to ask, for instance,whether the Internet is a public sphere (usually in the sense given byHabermas) or whether new forms of political speech (blogging, chat, IM,Twitter) change the dynamics of mass media politics, frame issues in newways, and include, or exclude, people in new ways. Such questions areobviously productive, but they ignore the specificity--the culturalspecificity--of the contemporary and its technical configurations. However, as Dominic Boyer's piece demonstrates, the analysisof social imaginaries really only gets interesting when some version ofthe cultural is retained. Understanding the production and movement ofsocial imaginaries itself requires a cultural analysis of the people,practices, places, and techniques that make them go. Practices ofjournalistic knowledge-making are a crucial component of the formationof imaginaries and are themselves under assault from the veryproliferation of information technologies, software, and networks. It isthe cultural features of journalism that structure the way an imaginaryof the public sphere takes shape--not just the content that circulates,as we say, "in the public sphere." New technologicalpossibilities, disastrous financial arrangements, and new forms ofwriting, blogging, tweeting, and chatting are all transforming theorganizations, the life-worlds, and the practices of the people who makejournalistic knowledge and make it circulate. It is therefore incumbenton us (anthropologists, as well as the journalists in Boyer'saccount) to ask how this reformed consciousness determines being: ourpublic sphere is transformed not only by the words that circulate, or bythe (recursive) technological layers that give it form, but also by theself-understanding of the actors who occupy it. What at first might seem a contradiction--that social imaginariesreplace the concept of culture, yet analyses of social imaginaries areonly interesting when they retain a cultural analysis--is in myunderstanding a response to the other two moves: making up worlds andtreating embodied techniques and practices as the site of culture. For acultural analysis to work, there must be more at stake in understandingthe role of networked information technologies than simply treating themas one more kind of place where human behavior occurs, or as one moreform of life among many. Rather, the technical and epistemic practicesof well-chosen groups of people--journalists in Boyer's case--mustbe explored if one wants to understand the difference that newtechnologies make to human behavior. Indeed, it is Boyer who comes closest to embarking on a culturalunderstanding of the ubiquity of attempts to explore the "cultureof computing." The "cybernetic-informatic consciousness"that he uses to link journalists and anthropologists together opens adoor to understanding why computers and cultures are equally everywheretoday--and maybe for some surprising reasons that have a lot to do withthe mid-century successes of both cybernetics and anthropology.Cybernetics' fortunes look a lot like culture's--overused,diffuse, heavily critiqued, yet nonetheless compelling in their mostrigorous forms. Cybernetics' dissemination looks a lot likeculture's--taken up across nearly every discipline, attenuated bycirculation, unpoliced by classic disciplinary modes of ownership andexclusion. One might re-think, therefore, the critiques of ethnographicauthority in the 1980s through this lens. They can be read not ascritiques of the culture concept, or of the pretensions to scientificity(they certainly were in some quarters), but as critiques of theauthority of the concept of culture (or of science more generally). Whatthese critiques proposed was the impossibility of authoritativeknowledge about the social world; what they brought about was the slowmotion destruction of the impossible, though up to that point real,authority of the concept of culture. It is for this reason that these essays should be seen as part of aproject of reconstruction--not only of the concept of culture, but ofculture and computers together. If some analysis of the cultural isstill central here--both to anthropology and to a rich understanding ofthe transformation of the world by information technology--then it mightjust be that these essays are at the cutting edge, not for their focuson technology, but for their stubborn insistence on saving and refiningthe concept of the cultural itself. What is also clear, however, is thatsuch a task is intimately tied to the practice of anthropologicalfieldwork and that each of these papers in different ways seeks todemonstrate the difficult work that is necessary for the concept ofculture to be of any use at all. There is, for instance, a difference between really studying thelife-world of hackers, as they live and breath, and simply treating themas cloistered, adolescent, pale libertarians (unless of course they are,which is nonetheless both very interesting and not easy to elicit).There is a difference between playing an online game once or twice andwriting an essay about that experience, and spending two years creatingtwo level 80 healers, raiding on weekends, and developing strongemotional bonds with a collection of other game-players in order tounderstand the nature of action and worlding. There is a differencebetween reading a bit of Habermas and loudly proclaiming the epochalchanges wrought on our public sphere by the decline of newspapers andactually talking to journalists about their practices. Golub's contribution, for instance, does not shy away from thedetails of World of Warcraft, the way many articles by lawyers do (justto pick on those who can take it). Legal analysis of these games eschewsdetailed description, either because it seems way too geeky to do so, ormore likely because it is seen as irrelevant to the argument being made(which in many circles of legal studies today is a deliberately thin"norms+customs" version of culture). By contrast, Golub mustdemonstrate the details of this lifeworld in order to make his case thatplayers in WoW deliberately break down and limit the sensory aspects ofthe game in order to achieve other goals. What he demonstrates therebyis not the sensory realism of these games, but their social realism--theways in which the game facilitates, and perhaps transforms, affectivelyintense social bonds. Coleman's contribution does something similar, by showing indetail the nature of hacker embodiment and sociality across both thelived experience of the conference or hacker camp and the everydayinteraction online. This analysis of conferences as an innovation ofvirtuality, not something that precedes them, has general applicability.It has long been true of scientific and scholarly fields (DianaCrane's famous "invisible colleges" and the essentialrole of the scientific congress and yearly conferences), but is now alsotrue of many other fields, from security guards to struggling musicians,where people develop social bonds according to professional and workaffinities, not geographical or personal connections. All kinds of folksuse conferences, congresses, and festivals to enhance their careers andmake new relationships, to experience fun and exhaustion, and to enhancestorytelling and history-making. It will be only a matter of time beforeFacebook conferences emerge in the same fashion--not as a re-connectionof old friends, but as a new form of cultural life. Do we still need a"digital" anthropology to understand such a transformation?Yes and no. In the end, it may be that (as Boyer suggests) anthropologists havebeen thinking through these issues along--at least since Gregory andMary were invited to the Macy conferences, if not beginning with Boas.Computer programmers are fond of the saying: "Garbage in, Garbageout." It's a way of saying that no matter how carefully orprecisely one focuses on the computer itself, if one puts bad data in,one will get bad data out. The same might be true of anthropology. Ifthe problem of culture and the cultural remains anthropology's mostlasting, detailed, and problematic kernel, then maybe "Culture in,Culture out" should be our mantra and our warning. REFERENCES Axel, Brian Keith. 2004. "The Context of Diaspora."Cultural Anthropology 19:26-60. Barker, Joshua. 2008. "Playing with Publics: Technology, Talkand Sociability in Indonesia." Language & Communication28:127-142. Bernal, Victoria. 2005. "Eritrea On-Line: Diaspora,Cyberspace, and the Public Sphere." American Ethnologist32:660-675. 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