The e-Connected World: Risks and Opportunities
Edited by Stephen Coleman.
Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003. 138 pp. ISBN 0889119457.
How can the media- and communications-research agenda best frame the changes that are accompanying the increasing ubiquity of digital technologies? This anthology based on papers given at the 2001 Canada-United Kingdom Colloquium examines some of the specific impacts that are being observed in areas such as education, crime, democracy, and social exclusion within a framework coined as an "e-connected world" by editor Stephen Coleman, who is currently Cisco Visiting Professor in e-Democracy at the Oxford Internet Institute.
What does it mean to live in an e-connected world? Look around you. The thesis of this volume - as well as the principle that organizes it as a collection of essays - is that "before we draw conclusions we need to understand clearly the changes that are taking place around us" (back cover). Thus, the table of contents includes mostly experiential accounts from high-level practitioners in areas that have seen significant impact from digital technologies. In addition, there are chapters written by academics, which are either similarly valuable experiential accounts of professors as practitioners (Calvert on e-learning); reports based on extensive prior empirical field work (Deibert); or works drawn from the experience of being closely involved in the subject matter (Coleman on e-democracy).
These chapters may individually present potentially valuable stand-alone resources to researchers working in the specific areas covered (e-learning, e-democracy, and crime on the Internet, for example). That said, this slim volume stakes little claim to providing the sort of encyclopedic approach to the issues surrounding digital technologies pursued elsewhere; for instance, in the Handbook of New Media (Lievrouw & Livingstone, 2002). Ultimately, the contribution of this volume should be measured by evaluating the conceptual value of the "e-connected world" framework. Despite limited utility as a normative concept, the e-connected world engages an epistemological argument that is fundamental to the trajectory of research into digital technologies.
Rather than philosophizing on what it means to "be digital" or to live in a "network society," The e-Connected World reflects an approach that simply questions - by drawing on the experience of those in the know - how things are observably changing as social connections are increasingly being made through digital technologies. Coleman writes that
to speak of the world as being e-connected is to speak of the world - one in which technologies and technical processes are socially embedded and inextricably connected to everything else. The aim of a non-utopian account of digital technology is to release it from reified isolation and to recognize the intimate connections between inventions and uses, machine power and human agency, cyberspace and historical place. (p. 7, italics in original)
The epistemological stance that frames these various empirical studies is that the changes brought on by digital technologies are best approached by investigating the changes themselves, not through revolutionary predictions and futurology. This approach echoes the thrust of Coleman's highly influential work on e-democracy (Coleman & Gøtze, 2001; Blumler & Coleman, 2001; Taylor, Coleman, & van de Donk, 1999), in which he has staunchly sought to ward off a revolutionary future in which the Internet facilitates a more direct form of democracy in favour of utilizing the power of digital technologies to support the fledgling system of representative democracy. One of the contributions of this volume is in fact to ground his work on e-democracy within a broader approach to social questions of the diffusion of information technology.
These epistemological reflections on the never-realized futures that typified much scholarship regarding the Internet in the mid-1990s have been made elsewhere and are gaining increasing momentum within the scholarly community. Hine (2000) makes the distinction between research that approaches the Internet as though it were a culture in and of itself and studies that address it as a cultural artifact; Poster (1995; 1996) argues that the Internet has been approached as both a tool of modern man and as a separate space of postmodern transformation; Miller & Slater (2000) describe this approach as distinguishing exclusively between the online and offline worlds; Slater (2002) sums this up in suggesting that "the new media have been studied less as media that are used within existing social relations and practices, and more as a new social space which constitutes relations and practices of its own. The research agenda from this point of view focuses not on the characteristics of the media as means of communication but rather on the kinds of social life and cultures that they are capable of sustaining" (p. 533).
Nonetheless, the high-level experiential evidence compiled in The e-Connected World presents one of the more compelling applications of this argument. The real contribution of this volume, however, is in extending this epistemological critique to suggest that not only does tension exist within the Internet-research agenda between groundless theorization and narratives of empirical evidence, but that there might be a further distinction to be made: between digital-technology theories that are not based on evidence and theories such as the notion of the e-connected world, that are. The e-connected world implies not only an alternative approach to the Internet as an object of study, but the potential basis for better theories of digital technologies. In this respect, the most significant contribution of this volume is perhaps in its reasoning rather than its execution.
Though the "e-connected world" may be an epistemologically provocative notion, it is doubtful that this volume suggests it as a normative concept and certain that it is problematic when approached as such. For example, by focusing the empirical results of the Canada-U.K. Colloquium on the notion of an e-connected world while using data that represents a bilateral population, rather than a global one, the conceptual framework of this volume is problematized. When viewed within the larger thematic context of this volume, however, one suspects that this reflects less a failure of rigour than a lack of methodological ambition.
Despite a wealth of potentially significant data to draw on, this volume stops itself short by not extending into grounded theory-type analysis, attempting neither to generate theory nor to expand on the idea of e-connectedness. As previously noted, the message of this book is that we must understand the changes taking place around us before drawing conclusions. Yes, we must. But we need to do so not just in an effort to identify, map, and consider those changes; we must also go through the process of establishing exactly what the broader implications of e-connectedness are. If the intention here was to replace flawed and speculative theory with experiential evidence, there is undoubtedly a contribution made by this volume. What emerges from this book, however, is the need to take the next conceptual step and use this experiential evidence as the basis for generating more realistic and useful theory. The notion of the e-connected world as it is presented here remains too intentionally vague to pursue such ambitions. In other words, this book offers a significant potential contribution to a more developed conceptual framework of the e-connected world, or to something along those lines.
References
Blumler, Jay G., & Coleman, Stephen. (2001). Realizing democracy online: A civic commons in cyberspace. London: Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR).
Coleman, Stephen, & Gøtze, John. (2001). Bowling together: Online public engagement in policy deliberation. London: Hansard Society. URL: http://www.bowlingtogether.net.
Hine, Christine. (2000). Virtual ethnography. London: Sage.
Lievrouw, Leah A., & Livingstone, Sonia M. (Eds.). (2002). Handbook of new media: Social shaping and consequences of ICTs. London: Sage.
Miller, Daniel, & Slater, Don. (2000). The Internet: An ethnographic approach. Oxford: Berg.
Poster, Mark. (1995). Postmodern virtualities. In Mark Poster, The Second Media Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, pp. 3-23.
Poster, Mark. (1996). Cyberdemocracy: Internet and the public sphere. In David Porter (Ed.), Internet culture. London: Routledge, pp. 201-218.
Slater, Don. (2002). Social relationships and identity online and offline. In Leah A. Lievrouw & Sonia M. Livingstone (Eds.), The handbook of new media: Social shaping and consequences of ICTs. London: Sage, pp. 533-546.
Taylor, John, Coleman, Stephen, & van de Donk, Wim (Eds.). (1999). Parliament in the age of the Internet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (In association with the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government)