The Internet and Society

Alistair Duff

James Slevin. The Internet and Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. xi + 266 pages. $66.95 (hardcover); $29.95 (paper).

In an amusing and occasionally insightful philippic against modernity, the French intellectual Paul Virilio, picking up a thought expressed earlier by Einstein, pronounces that an “information bomb” is exploding all over the world; he worries that it may ultimately lead to “globalitarian” war. Being a Frenchman he naturally blames everything on the United States of America, citing the origins of the Internet in the US military-industrial complex. James Slevin’s The Internet and Society, while covering similar ground—the impact of computer-telecommunications on society—abstains from such rash claims. Instead of speculation or what Daniel Bell once called “star trek sociology,” Slevin aims to strengthen the information society debate by injecting it with a dose of methodological rigor. His point of departure is an understanding of the nature of the modern world shaped by the ideas of two contemporary social theorists, Anthony Giddens and John Thompson. The world of radicalized modernity (not simple modernity, nor postmodernity) is characterized, we are informed, by risk, uncertainty, and dislocation. Slevin’s book theorizes the Internet in that light as a “contextualized social phenomenon” and “modality of cultural transmission,” an effort which involves, minimally, a repudiation of such crudities as technological determinism, but also the formulation of a range of substantive—if, in many respects, very highly nuanced—statements about the way the world is going.

An early chapter charts the growth of the Internet from its beginnings in the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense to its demilitarization and popularization as a consumer amenity, scotching along the way the myth that ARPANET was designed primarily as a nuclear attack-proof communication network. Slevin does good work in setting out some of the axes that have tended to frame the debate on the impact of the Internet. As he notes, commentators have tended to adopt a rigidly affirmative or negative stance, either celebrating the Internet’s advantages for organizations and individuals or else stressing the dangers it poses for social cohesion. Slevin thinks that the Internet is better seen as a means of cultural or symbolic transmission; and, following Thompson, he argues that the three chief ways in which a new medium acts as a modality of cultural transmission are as a technical medium of transmission, as an institutional apparatus of transmission, and as a form of space-time distanciation. These conceptual frameworks are helpfully explicated by concrete examples. Thus Internet Relay Chat is shown to illustrate a particular kind of space-time distanciation among its users, one that contrasts profoundly with the immediacy and simultaneity of face-to-face dialogue (what, disconcertingly, is now sometimes referred to as “f2f”). Slevin is at pains to emphasize, contra the champions of virtual reality and other light-headed enthusiasts, that every mediation that takes place on the Internet is embedded in and constrained by the social structures of the real world. But at the same time he certainly believes that the Internet is transforming society in a multiplicity of ways. Moreover, he, like many others, wants to see in the Internet the potential for a revitalization of advanced cultures, perhaps in the form of an extended “public sphere” of the Habermas ilk.

Subsequent chapters examine the social effects of the Internet from particular angles, each one engaging with the arguments of key commentators. Thus the impact of the Internet on forms of human association is discussed in light of the work of Howard Rheingold and Sherry Turkle. Another chapter views the effects on organizational culture through the lens of Anthony Giddens and others. Slevin also turns his searchlight on the individual and the “project of the self” in everyday existence. Then he takes up again the issue of the Internet’s implications for the public sphere, referring now to the ideas of legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin. The conclusion—“The transformative capacity of Internet use in deliberative processes is dependent on the characteristics of the individuals and organizations involved, their location in time-space, the institutional arrangements within which they act and the means they have at their disposal” (197)—is representative of the guarded, non-committal way Slevin ends his treatment of many topics. Such statements could be seen as verging on the platitudinous if not the evasive. Similarly, where he argues in the following chapter on globalization that the Internet “is a complex technology incorporating dual potentialities,” one hungers for a more dogmatic position by this stage in the proceedings. (The chapter on globalization is also let down by the more or less arbitrary inclusion of several pages of conference abstracts, not one of the modalities of intellectual transmission one would expect to see in a well-drafted scholarly monograph.) A final chapter addresses the issue of regulation, defending what Thompson calls “the principle of regulated pluralism”: such an unadventurous maxim will not please the libertarians, but I imagine that mainstream readers will regard it as a sensible way of securing the future of cybersociety.

There are shortcomings additional to those already identified. The Internet and Society deals too summarily with some of the authors it cites, an example being the short critique on pages 51 to 53 of a set of major claims by Manuel Castells. Daniel Bell, whose work on post-industrial technology has been seminal, is barely mentioned. The book also neglects to deal with socio-technical systems, a concept which has demonstrable explanatory power in the field of computers and society, as authors like Ian Miles and Rob Kling have shown; this omission reflects a preoccupation with the cultural and political realms of society at the expense of the socioeconomic (I will be bold and suggest that the author should read more political philosophy, particularly of the moderate and radical Left). To his mentors Giddens and Thompson, on the other hand, Slevin seems overly attached, with resultant loss of originality. He gives the impression that he could soar on his own, yet he chooses to remain largely a captive of the conceptual frameworks of others (very distinguished others, admittedly).

It is my duty to warn also that the text is stylistically heavy, written too much in the manner of a doctoral thesis. For example, Slevin will not tell us anything until he has first told us what he is about to tell us, and will not move on at the end until he has made absolutely sure that we have read and understood what he has just said. Such outlining is helpful in the lecture theatre but can be tedious for an alert reader. However, these are all actually minor criticisms when set against Slevin’s achievement. One may cavil at his treatment of this thinker or that, this theme or another, but The Internet and Society is still one of the most erudite and rigorously-argued books to have appeared on information technology and society. Without being in any sense the final word, it succeeds admirably in its aim of raising the academic level of the information society debate (or at any rate the information technology dimension of that debate). Bibliographically, it belongs to an elite circle of critical “secondary” works that engage confidently with the arguments of major “primary” authors and schools of thought. It is therefore worthy of a place both in research libraries and in the toolkits of scholars working at the cutting-edge of communication science.

Dr. Alistair S. Duff is a Lecturer in the Information Society at the School of Communication Arts, Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland UK.

Works Cited

Virilio, Paul. The Information Bomb. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2000.