Erin Janulis's Seminar Blog

Today's Question:

Miller & Slater have elaborated four cross-cutting, non-exhaustive "dimensions" or "dynamics" that mark the Trinidadian Internet, and perhaps the Internet everywhere. Choose one of the four dynamics introduced in chapter 1 (Objectification, Mediation, Normative Freedom, Positioning) or a sub-concept within one of the dynamics (expansive realization, expansive potential). Analyze how the dynamic manifests in the ethnographic material presented in chapter 3 (Relationships) or chapter 4 (Being Trini). You might consider: What does the dynamic mean? How is the dynamic analytically useful? How is it applied? How is its use related to the method employed here, or the assumptions?

My Response:

In Chapter 1 of Miller & Slater’s book I was captured by the principle of “expansive realization.” The idea being that the internet is best understood as “helping people to deliver on pledges that they have already made to themselves about themselves” (11). The most straightforward example which is mentioned both in Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 is the way in which Trini’s use the internet to maintain familial contact. There seems to be the sense that previous options for communicating with overseas family were unable to capture the essential family conversation which is “mundane, everyday, intimate in a household way, in both style and content” (57). This statement makes a number of major assumptions. First, that there is a normative type of family conversation that is in some way central to maintaining a true connection with family members. Also, that this type of conversation is more desirable than other kinds of conversations. As a more empirical quantitative person my initial urge when hearing this claim is to want to get to the bottom of things. Are these logical assumptions? But instead Miller and Slater ask us to consider the way in which Trini’s perceive and understand how the internet influences their lives. In some ways the idea of “expansive realization” is a very relative and personal concept. It requires an individual or group to have a sense of what should be and examine technologies as a way of helping make this come about. What I find particularly interesting is that this lens tends to overlook the technologies or constraints that bring about this disjuncture in the first place. The focus is on overcoming obstacles rather than eliminating them. In some senses this pairs a very utopian view of technology with a more cynical view of an individual or groups present circumstances.

Posted by ejanulis at 01:34 AM | Permalink

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Today's Question:

When scholars write about communication technologies, they often focus on successful technologies. Successful technologies, in turn, are usually described as ever-expanding or "diffusing" throughout society until they are widespread. In this context, Fischer's analysis of the decline in rural telephony in Chapter 4 is remarkable and unusual. Please evaluate this argument in chapter 4. You might comment on his evidence for the decline, his analysis, or his explanation of it. Is the explanation convincing? You might compare it to discussions of other technologies we have read. Does this analysis demonstrate a strength or weakness in his method? (Or, Why did he find this decline when other scholars rarely if ever highlight any declines?)

Response:

Instead of focusing on the merits of the argument which Fischer makes (which I agree with many of my classmates contains a number of flaws), I have chosen today to focus on Fischer’s choice to focus on this issue. It seems almost odd to have such a significant chunk of this book focused on a decline in use of a specific technology. It seems even odder for the author to go searching for an alternative explanation of this decline beyond a major economic downturn in the country. Yet this passage seems to accentuate strength in Fischer’s method.

Fischer is quite clear early on that the book is to be “concerned with the manner in which turn-of-the-century technologies made a difference to North American’s way of life, in particular to community and personal relations,” (5). This focus requires him to go beyond what the technology was capable of doing, or how the businesses attempted to sell the technology, but instead to examine the ways in which people actually interacted and utilized the technology. With that in mind it is extremely important to be able to track the ways in which different social groups such as rural and urban populations handled the technology. It is then also significant to acknowledge the pervasiveness of the technology at any given time in order to establish how universal these changes were. While this decline was only temporary and would be easy to gloss over if the focus were on the actors and forces that guided the technology to its height (as seems to be the case in Douglass’ work), Fischer’s focus on community and personal impacts requires us to examine the ways in which use or lack of use altered the pace or impacts of the technology itself, and as a result, requires a better understanding of the reasons the decline may have occurred. By focusing on both rises and declines in the utilization of the technology it enables us to have a more accurate view of the process that the telephone went through as a consumer product, and as a result make it easier to provide a context for how many consumers lives it altered at a particular historical moment.

Posted by ejanulis at 12:03 AM | Permalink

Today's question:

Douglas has written an explanation of the social construction of radio in order to avoid technological determinism. The "constructors" proposed in this book are inventors, the press, amateur operators, the military, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and others. One sure way to avoid "determinism" is to advance a narrative that contains more than one possible outcome. Can you use the materials in this book to propose a plausible alternative way that radio might have developed in the U.S.? If yes, explain the alternative. If not, discuss what information you would need in order to propose an alternative (that is, information that you don't have in this book).

Response:

In her book “Inventing American Broadcasting” Susan Douglas relates a narrative story of the development of the radio in the United States. While Douglas, herself, never explicitly offers an alternative route for radio to have been developed her emphasis on individual personalities, business interests, and social forces offer the reader a lot of “what ifs” that keep one wondering if this was the only way things could have turned out.

While these “what ifs” work skillfully to keep “determinism” at bay, Douglas does not supply her readers with all the information possible to truly develop a “plausible alternative” to the way that radio was developed. I think that the main barrier for a more tangible alternative is actually one of the features that made the book most enjoyable to read, the focus on telling a historical narrative. This narrative has a tendency to place a heavier emphasis on the paths that were taken as opposed to the paths that were abandoned. There are however many moments, where we are able to individually postulate on how things could be different. What if Marconi had been successful at his first attempt to sell the entire wireless system to shipping companies? Would he have been as concerned about advancing a policy of “nonintercommunication” if he were not leasing the machines? (69-71) Or later with the U.S. governments first began requiring ships to possess and utilize radio technology? (220) What if they had simultaneously enacted laws that would organize the use of certain frequencies for certain activities? This system could have been very different than the one enacted as a reaction to the Titanic disaster. Any of these changes could have had long lasting implications for the way radio works in the U.S. today, but ultimately these were not the strategies employed and as a result we are only left to wonder about the possibility that things could have been different. Douglass’ method of casting doubt is limited mostly by the historical record itself, with its bias toward what was as opposed to what could have been.

Posted by ejanulis at 09:28 AM | Permalink