Expansive Potential?
I found the most compelling section of the first half of Miller and Slater’s Trini internet ethnography to be their brief description of “expansive potential,” a sub-category of “dynamics of objectification,” owing to their preview of a utopian cyber-Catholicism based in computer interconnectivity where the Internet “is the truest image and instrument of God’s purpose for humanity” (13). However, as Miller and Slater’s book unfolds through the first four chapters, the “expansive potential” for Trini internet use does not seem very expansive at all. Rather, Miller and Slater go to great lengths to demonstrate that Trini internet practice seems to reify traditional societal norms already prevalent. In chapter three, for instance, the relationships developed through internet use seem neither utopian nor dystopian, but as the authors admit, “mundane and unselfconscious” (13). As I read chapters three and four, I was on the lookout for Trinidadians “glimps[ing] quite new things to be,” but these “new things” always resembled banal models of already normative behavior, like finding different types of employment and/or enjoying, on occasion, internet anonymity. Thus, given the banality of Trinidadians “novel” use of internet technology, I was not surprised to read that Miller and Slater never reprise the concept of “expansive potential” in the first half of their book.
As a result of their lack of addressing this sub-element of one of their main dynamic categories, I wonder how useful “expansive potential” is for their project as a whole. It seems to be somewhat antithetical to the majority of Miller and Slater’s research in the first half of their book, because they concentrate on depicting Trini internet usage in practice rather than futuristic models of behavior. So, as Miller and Slater highlight family interconnectivity, internet dating practice, liming, etc, none of these practices points toward Trinis becoming anything radically new, whether utopian or dystopian. Life in general for Trinis, as Miller and Slater portray it, seems to go on pretty much as it had before, only with the internet as a novel and important communication technology that replaces telephony and letter writing.
As a result of the lack of empirical support for “expansive potential,” this category does not seem useful and/or applicable to their study in the first half of the book, since the “quite new things” that people/spaces may become are already normative. Furthermore, when speculating about long-term relationships between cousins communicating via the internet, Miller and Slater write: “the time depth of our study is too shallow for confident predictions” (60). If their study lacks “time depth,” then I don’t understand how they can expect to defend a category of analysis that depends on expansive time and speculation about future technology use. Also, Miller and Slater make other claims that seem to disparage any rigorous study of “expansive potential”: “We simply cannot predict the future impact of the Internet except to suggest that the impact is likely to be different in each of these diverse areas [commerce, religion, and nationalism]” (53). Thus, it already seems like Trini internet use, despite its newness, is already “mundane and taken for granted” (14).
The lack of support for “expansive potential” throughout the first half of their book also made me sensitive to how little the two authors reprise the other main dynamics highlighted in the introduction. On occasion, Miller and Slater would point out how a certain aspect of Trini internet use corroborates one of their “dynamics,” but this usually seems more of an afterthought than a guiding principle, which is surprising given the emphasis the two writers put on the dynamics at the beginning of the book.