Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 430.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 07:11:21 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: the Internet made me do it!
In Humanist 13.426 Einat Amitay kindly forwarded notice of the Jakob
Nielsen article entitled, "Does the Internet Make Us Lonely?", commenting
on a preliminary version of the "Study of the Social Consequences of the
Internet" published by the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of
Society, for which see
<http://www.stanford.edu/group/siqss/Press_Release/internetStudy.html>.
There is much of interest here, but I want to focus on one thing only: what
happens between the carefully planned and executed "Study of the Social
Consequences of the Internet" and the question "Does the Internet Make Us
Lonely?". I am tempted to yell, DON'T ANSWER THAT QUESTION -- because if
you do you, whatever your answer, you accept the assumption in the
question, that "the Internet" can "make us" do or be anything. Ok,
attentions need to be grabbed sometimes, but the question of how a human
invention affects its inventors is an important and complex one, and we're
not helped at all by the invitation to surrender our freedom to something
we've made. This is of course an old story -- the Wheel of Fortune and the
Book of Life are examples Northrop Frye used to cite to make the same
point. In the context of computing (a specific case of the automaton), it's
a particularly important point, yes?
Speaking of social science methods, I wonder also how one gets from
findings such as are reported in the Stanford study to a more than
anecdotal form of the truth behind one's own experiences? Ellen Ullman's
Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents (San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 1997) is one way -- making a really quite interesting, even
compelling story from all the messy, intimate bits of a life lived under
heavy influence of computer-mediated communications. (She reports on her
experiences as a consultant who works at home.) Are there any deep studies
of the conduct of long-distance love affairs by the Internet, or better
yet, by that medium in combination with others? It seems to me that if one
studied the highest stress, most hermeneutically intensive, even
tending-to-paranoid human situation involving our cherished medium, one
would get interesting results. I'd assume the method would consist largely
of interviews, but with all that e-text preserved, needing considerable
metatextual commentary, text-analytic work would certainly be prominent.
Yours,
WM
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dr. Willard McCarty, Senior Lecturer, King's College London
voice: +44 (0)171 848 2784 fax: +44 (0)171 848 5081
<Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk> <http://ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/>
maui gratia
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