Historical Timeliness?
Considering the various different conclusions Miller and Slater come up with in "The Internet" in contrast to the other books we’ve read earlier in the semester, it seems to me that the essential difference between Miller and Slater and the others has less to do with the authors’ approach and object of study, and more to do with the relative newness of the technology discussed. On one hand, Williams, Douglas, and Fischer all wrote about older technologies that had plenty of time for their practice to become ossified in capitalist production/consumption. On the other hand, Miller and Slater wrote about the internet at a time when many businesses, despite the so-called dot.com revolution, had not figured out how to use the new technology. Hence Williams, Douglas, and Fischer all present histories that describe the capture of the technologies by businesses as they attempted to make their use profitable and banal. In the case of Miller and Slater, that process has not finished, as described in their sixth chapter on Trini internet business practice.
Miller and Slater describe three different approaches to Trini internet business practice that indicate the level of involvement certain businesses have with the technology. The three levels range from creating little more than internet pamphlets to have a minimal web presence, “mid-range ‘catalogue’ websites” that provide a greater level of ineractive buying and selling functions, and “fully functioning interface and ecommerce sites” that represent successful integration of local Trini business practice with globalized business practice. In terms of the other authors, the section of Fischer’s book that relates the uncontrolled spread of telephone companies in the wake of Bell’s patents expiring seems most relevant in comparison. However, whereas Fischer provides a history of unregulated business practice, he still writes his book in a historical moment that finds the world of telephony controlled by giant corporations with little deviation in business practice, and the latter part of his history describes how the telephone giants began to exert their power over other companies by expanding across the entirety of America in a relatively short amount of time. In contrast, Miller and Slater conduct their ethnography just at the moment in time when internet business practice has almost no regulation, despite the presence of giant corporations on the web. The subsequent rise of web 2.0 flea markets like e-Bay and the Amazon Marketplace, I believe, show that the period in which Miller and Slater wrote is still ongoing and morphing into new non-ossified forms of internet business practice. Indeed, the three types of website models that Miller and Slater describe still seem apt to describe the various types of business websites found online at this moment.
When Miller and Slater make the conclusion that Trini internet business practice embodies “frictionless economies” and/or “disintermediation,” (“a free flow of money, goods and desires, as smooth as electrons flowing through a superconductor, and with just as few regulatory hurdles to jump”), they do not seem to be engaging in hyperbole (168). However, if Fischer made the same claims about the early days of unregulated telephony, he would definitely seem like he was being overly idealistic given the eventual corporate takeover of telephone technology practice. The difference lies in timeliness. Miller and Slater write from the recent present to make extrapolations about the future of Trini internet business, whereas Fischer writes about a period many decades in the past to account for the development of telephone practice into its banal corporate form. Perhaps Miller and Slater should temper their conclusions and reign in their internet hype, but they seem to remain hopeful; the specter of a complete corporate takeover of the internet looms, but it has not become manifest yet, unlike with the telephone.