THE RELEVANCE OF “WESTERN” STUDIES OF CYBERSPACE IDENTITY FOR NON-WESTERN SOCIAL FORMATIONS
David Hakken
(STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, USA)
1. Introduction: Sheffield Cyber-Identities
In 1980s Sheffield, England, Barbara Andrews, and I were first alerted to the importance of identity practices in cyberspace. A group of women were talking about what brought them to the municipally-funded Women's Technology Training Workshop:
"What brought me on this course is, like what this other woman said, you could get into "modern." You'd been at home, your kids were growing up, and you start feeling you'd been left behind. It felt like an opportunity to get into the Twentieth Century."
"That's how it is with technology. I think that any change for the better is going to improve life. Computers are a relatively new thing, and there's an opportunity there for women. We're getting in at the beginning of something..." (Hakken with Andrews 1993:18).
2. Identity, Anthropology, and Social Science in the 1980s and ‘90s
In their "identity work,” automated information technologies (AITs) had assumed an important place. These working class women were "presenting themselves” (Goffman 1972), but they were also exploring alternatives—creating their own “third way,” as another put it, neither “working class hero” nor “Sloan Ranger.” This creation was collective, carried out in talk with other people.
2.1 “Western” Identity Anthropology
Identity became central to Western anthropology in the 1980s and ‘90s. This was in response to young, “insurgent,” activist scholars’ demands for disciplinary “relevance” to then emerging “new social movements.” Their perspective is captured in the phrase, “The personal is (also) political.” Especially American scholars focused on a problem at once both practical and theoretical—how to build lasting coalitions. Various additive forms of systems theory—“dual,” “tri,” “quadra,” etc. (e.g., “race and class,” “gender, race, and class,” “sexual orientation, gender, race, and class” )— developed, but these merely reflected, did not solve, the political problem. Instead, North Atlantic-oriented anthropologists worked out an alternative, a cultural theory of identity. Drawing heavily on Bourdieuvian notions (e.g., “habitus” and “distinction”; 1978), they theorized a common process underlying distinct identities like gender, race, class, and sexual orientation (Sussser and Patterson 2001). Movement organizations could be based on specific distinctions, but coalitions would stress the commonalities of the underlying processes (Young 2000).
2.2 The “Non-Western” Identity Issue
Anthropologists from/interested in the non-Western world developed a parallel identity interest in the relative failure of Nationalist social movements. These movements were critiqued in similar ways to the “old” Western movements, for having subordinated the needs of women, ethnic minorities, and lower social strata to the tactical priorities of narrow nationalist elites. Adopting entities different from nations as the relevant unit of analysis fostered new focuses, such as global diasporas—the “ethnoscapes” of Arjun Appadurai—or the well as globalizing media and of culture “at large” as appropriate arenas of struggle and movement building (1996).
2.3 General Identity Anthropology
For such reasons, two parallel questions came to frame anthropology’s intellectual agenda. One looks Western—“Who am I?”—while the other perhaps more “Eastern”—“Who are we?”—, but they are hard to separate. Martin Stokes nicely states this identity focus in his theorizing of music, which
“…is socially meaningful…largely because it provides means by which people recognize identities and places, and the boundaries which separate them. …[M]usical performance, as well as the acts of listening, dancing, arguing, discussing, thinking and writing about music, provide the means by which … identities are constructed and mobilized” (1994:5).
In short, an agenda was set: To study social practices to assess their role in identity formation.
2.4 Cyberspace Identity Change
Our symposium on Internet, Identity, and Anthropology takes place on this intellectual terrain. It also addresses another current “identity crisis,” that of the “Computer Revolution” of my Sheffielders’ period. This period showed enthusiasm over/concern for how AITs—most recently the Internet—impact identity making. A CR implied fundamental changes in the ways individuals and groups co-construct notions of what is characteristic of them, and what separates them from others. Like the related notion that new communities are inherent in “cyberspace,” transformation of identity is a central part of the cyberspace idea, that a broad, new social formation is compelled to emerge when AITs are widely deployed (Hakken 1999).
To evaluate these claims, I found myself, like several other ethnographers, studying cyberspace. Since that’s where most of the computers were, it initially made sense that these studies were mostly carried out in the West,[1] and often from an applied perspective. These two factors gave early cyberspace ethnography a particular tone. For example, ethnographers were employed by corporations to address the “productivity paradox.” That is, the accelerating AIT investment in Western workplaces was statistically associated with an output decrease, rather than the expected increase, well into the late 1990s.
AIT ethnography argued that productivity would only rise when organizations learned to take advantage of AITs’ new identity capabilities, supporting alternative communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1994; Wenger, et. al. 2002), not allowing pre-existing hierarchies to undermine them. Arguing for focusing on organizational culture rather than structure, we promoted an alternative, “cyberspatial” future. Perhaps to free themselves from corporate masters, ethnographers like Landsgaard (1992) and Wynn (1988) allied themselves with the powerful professionalizing project of Computer Science, busily recreating all previous knowledge in its own image. In such ways, many analyses “bought in” to the “Computer Revolution” idea, especially its more personal, identity aspects.
3. The Ethnography of Western Cyber-Identity
Identity themes are so central to “Computer Revolution” discourses that the case for computing’s transformative impact can be said to be substantially based on them (e.g., Batteau 1998; Castells 1989; Cherny 1999; Gatewood 1991; Harvey 1995; Sapir 1991; Turkle 1984 & 1995). My 1999 book, Cyborgs@cyberspace?: An ethnographer looks to the future, examines the entities who/which will carry culture in cyberspace, if and when it comes to pass.[2] The book was intended to help ethnographers “come to” in cyberspace, to examine AITs critically as well as celebrate the potentials of the worlds they re-present, so that all can participate in their construction. What follows is a list of the most common identity themes.
3.1Cyberspace as Generative of New, and More, Identity
When encountering computers, Sheffielders experienced new collective identities; they even called themselves "computer people." Sherry Turkle reported parallel but more individualistic developments among Boston- area middle class American youths. An imaginative early piece (1980) described the "computer as Rorschach," how "computered" youths project onto the computer their dreams, desires, and visions. Computing stimulates so much identity exploration that it becomes The Second Self (1984).
Turkle subtitled her 1990s book, Life on the Screen, “Identity in the Age of the Internet” (1995). Her term "age" implies an “epochal” difference between life before and life on the screen, new personal identities being the key to change. Because they enable "constructing identity in the culture of simulation" (p.10), computers as “intimate machines” are the new central location for identity processes (1984:26).
3.2 More Complex Consciousness in Identity Formation
Moreover, Sheffield workers and Boston youths were addressing identity with more social- and self-consciousness. Reflecting on her own experience, as well as the complex identity practices of multi-user domains (MUDs), Sandy Stone argues (1995) that the declining "rootedness" in any particular identity also indexes a fundamental shift in social formation type. Her stress on change in identity processes complements Turkle’s focuses on content. Turkle offers Microsoft's WINDOWS™ multi-tasking as a metaphor for the “multiplex” self, where "your identity…is the sum of your virtual presences" (1995:13).
3.3 Altered Agency
To “have agency” means both to act in the world and have one's actions treated as legitimate. It is also central to systems like democracy, in which it is supposed to be broadly distributed. In social formations that fetishize the individual and in which power is distributed, determining legitimacy is a central activity.
Cyberspace supposedly holds new implications for agency. Sandy Stone focuses on a central change in how identity practices are, in Habermas’ (1990) terminology, “redeemed.” Older forms of agency required physical presence, but in cyberspace, a represented presence—even a cyborg who redeems through talk—is sufficient. Living on the net means legitimacy is less often gained “in real life”; instead, “…the relationship between agency and authorizing body [becomes] …a discursive one.” Eventually this produces a “…subjectivity that could fairly unproblematically inhabit the virtual spaces of the nets” (pp.96-7). The result is allegedly widespread crossing of identity boundaries.
In Engineering Culture, a book centered on identity among privileged workers(1992), Gideon Kunda critiques this shift in agency. His computer engineers have increasing difficulty locating a boundary between themselves and their organization: they work long hours and have less and less of a "life" away from work. Concluding that they are losing any capacity to think independently, Kunda sees their form of work as a profound threat to democratic agency. Like Mark Slouka (1996), he doubts whether ethical agency is even possible in cyberspace.
3.4 Identity Marginalization: “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog”
Social discourse gives greater voice to those with valued identities (male, white, higher class/caste, and heterosexual). The narrowing of communication channels characteristic of life on-line, including the elimination of non-verbal communication, supposedly mutes this identity effect, famously encapsulated in the New Yorker cartoon with this caption. On-line options for identity manipulation—e.g., gender bending—reinforce the need to evaluate messages in terms of their content, rather than the identity of the speaker. Cyberspace “levels the playing field.”
4. The Ethnology of Cyber-Identity
4.1 The Non-Transformative Character of Western Cyber-Identity
Paradoxically, this last point amounts to a claim that identity is less relevant in cyberspace. Indeed, the argument that cyber-identity is transformative is marked by lapses and contradictions like these—e.g., identity is claimed to be both more and less relevant. Consider also Stephen Helmreich’s (1998) study of “artificial life,” self-replicating computer programs alleged to possess internal developmental dynamics sufficient to justify their being treated with the dignity usually reserved for life forms—e.g., they have a “right to life.” Helmreich demonstrates how the artificial “behaviors” of these cyborgs replicate pre-existing social relations, mimicing familiar white male hierarchies demonstrably, but often unconsciously, “programmed in.” Unaware that they actively transport the old social relations, “artificial lifers” create a false sense that hierarchies of class, race, and gender are "natural." The identity playing field is not leveled; indeed, by “naturalizing” identity hierarchy, old inequalities are made more salient, undermining both identity change and marginalization claims.
In the 1990s, I concluded that the evidence for identity change in cyberspace was not yet sufficient. This conclusion also followed from my own trans-national, comparative studies of computing, which made me acutely aware of how easily diversity correlated with social class and/or geography could be misframed as “new” patterns. The extent of technological enchantment and determinism also made me skeptical, reinforced by arguments that changes like those described above began long before widespread computing (e.g. Giddens 1991).
Turkle implies that children’s projections onto computers "informate" (to use Zuboff's (1988) term) new social agencies. I see this rather differently: that, so far, computers mostly reflect visions from outside the technology itself, creating at most a “secondary self.” Analysts like Pfaffenberger (1988) focus on why the personal computer "revolution" wasn't one, how on-line information systems failed to create substantial new forms of democratic agency. Indeed, once it is accepted that the relationship between culture and identity is complex, evidence of complexity of individual level identity processes is no longer necessarily evidence of change in social formation type. To make the case that cyberspace is really different on identity grounds, one must demonstrate that a substantial difference actually exists, not just its potential. Computing is a medium by and large not yet the message.
4.2 “Non-western” identity change in cyberspace?
My 1999 conclusion was primarily based on Western cyberspace ethnography. Most of those who participate in the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing of the American Anthropological Association do their work in American institutions, perhaps because of the applied orientation discussed above. Similarly, few of those doing community computing in minority communities have chosen to focus on cultural difference as a matter of interest rather than as a source of problems to be overcome. While some take study of techno-science in non-Western nations as a serious topic, their research focuses typically on “traditional” rather than “cyberspace” topics.[3]
Initially, thinking about computing in non-Westerns contexts centered on two questions. One was framed in traditional economic development terms: as computing became even more widespread, would it broaden the “north-South” divide, as a consequence, for example, of less developed telecommunications infrastructures and fewer skilled engineers (e.g., Allwood 1992)? The second question followed: Would AITs have so much of the West built into them that the non-West would be permanently handicapped in their ability to use them (Hill et. al., 1998)?
5. Non-Western Cyber-Identity Ethnography
This second question broadened comparative study of the cultural dynamics of computing and began the ethnography of cyber-identity in non-Western geographic contexts. This ethnography suggests dynamics different from Western ones. Does understanding these differences suggest how to enter cyberspace without replicating, or even increasing, inequalities?
5.1 “Developed” Non-Western Internetting
Daniel Miller and Don Slater analyze Trinidad, a relatively “developed” non-Western nation. According to The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (1999) Internetting was “hot” there during the late 1990s. However, its use is stitched into everyday life, as when Trinis use the Internet to contest the dissolving of relations in dispersed families or to intensify offline relationships (p. 82). Miller and Slater find “…no reason to suppose that these encounters…construct new identities in relation to ‘cyberspace’ rather than projecting older spatial identities through new media and interactions” (p.85).
“[W]e cannot exclude spatial and even national identities from Internet Studies, either on the basis of theoretical assumptions about disembedding or on the basis of extrapolations from exclusively US and European experiences…
“Trini-ness as a project defined and pursued over a particular history,…[T]he Internet is being understood and used to an unexpected extent in relation precisely to those projects that might be understood as …’representing Trinidad.’ …[and are] important to those we studied.”(pp. 86-7).
This notion, that pre-existing cultural tendencies are what non-Western surfers manifest most while on the net, also comes across in Nuria Soeharto’s, “Internet and Indonesia in its Chaotic Period: The Net Makes it Work, the Net Makes it Worse” (2001). The Internet had a crucial, identity role in the nation’s recent political transformation, in that helped dissatisfied Indonesians pursue a common goal: the dethroning of President Soeharto and the destruction of the New Order. At first, this seemed to constitute a unique identity project:
“Because this common goal was held so widely in Indonesia, and because the Internet was a—perhaps the—medium through which this goal was promoted and organized, information posted on the Internet in Indonesia before the resignation of Soeharto was widely regarded as credible and accurate.”
Further, credibility was inversely linked to normal identity markers:
“…[T]he anonymity of the Internet and the fear of the authorities ensured that no one knew the source of the information posted or the identity of its author. The sharing of a common goal generated a degree of trust between Indonesians, and it was this trust that was the foundation of the reputation for veracity that the Internet enjoyed….”
After Soeharto’s resignation, however, the identity project fell apart, and the Internet lost its reputation; “The net made it worse.” In sum, while the “…trust and belief generated between parties via the Internet can carry over into everyday life and motivate individuals to action,” such mobilizability is not permanent.
In “Cyber-Maroc: Uncritical Globalization and Cosmopolitan Desire among Moroccan e-Migrants” (2001), Stephen William Foster identifies another Internet-connected change in identity: “...[A] new generation of Moroccan e-migrants…pursuing transnational narratives and practices of self that suggest an important shift in their historical consciousness…” They spend a great deal of time in cybercafes, “…refiguring themselves and their social milieu beyond significant economic hardship.”
Cyber-Maroc is being constructed by educated but unemployed “diplomes chromiers.” Like Trinis,
“[t]heir avid crossing of national and linguistic boundaries does not sacrifice their identity as Moroccan…Their rhetoric of self participates in a globalization that makes its own expanding inequalities yet allows the Moroccans to represent their mission as ‘rooted’ cosmopolitanism.”
Miller and Slater worry about “idealization“ of Trinidad on the Internet, and Foster has strong misgivings about Cyber-Maroc, where .
“…sociability is being displaced and deflected…[T]his redefinition is being embraced by Moroccans uncritically, not only because it seems to afford more connection and a greater density of interaction, but also because it seems to promise more specific, pragmatic consequences…[They are choosing] a transnational, transactional cosmopolitanism that is less the obliteration of national boundaries or geographical isolation and more a matter of arranging an escape and affording at least the illusion of social repositioning and economic advantage.”