ANNOUNCEMENTS
--- Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for Sustainable
Livelihoods: Preliminary Study April October 1999.

ARTICLES
--- Cyberspace as the New Frontier? Mapping the Shifting Boundaries of the
Network Society - Fred Turner

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ONLINE RESOURCES

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For ED-MEDIA 1999, World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia &

Telecommunications, Prof. Robin Mason, The Open University, UK has written a

paper titled as "Global Education: Fad or Fraud", which can be located at

ANNOUNCEMENTS

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INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES (ICTs) FOR SUSTAINABLE

LIVELIHOODS: PRELIMINARY STUDY April October 1999.

AERDD and ITDG are conducting a world-wide research study to identify

current uses of Information Communication Technologies for sustainable

livelihoods with specific reference to small scale producers and

disadvantaged communities in developing countries. A DFID funded study, the

research findings should identify further research priorities for

determining good practice and policy guidance.

- Do you know of anyone using ICTs with small-scale producers and/or

disadvantaged communities in rural areas?

- Do you have any material (published or not) on the information systems

used by these groups?

We are calling for CONTACTS (governmental, non-governmental and private

sector organisations working in the field) and INFORMATION (documented

examples, reports, articles) regarding the actual experience and real

effects that ICTs have on the lives of poor people and in particular on

small-scale producers, enterprises and the intermediary organisations that

support them. ICTs defined as technologies used for the collection,

processing and transmission of information in electronic (digital) format

(e.g. radio, telephone, cell-phone, www, email).

1. Who owns / controls the ICTs?

2. How do other people access these ICTs

3. Who are these people (are they small-scale producers?)

4. Do they pay to access this information?

5. Can they access it many times?

6. What use is made of the information received from ICTs?

7. Does this apply to small-scale producers specifically?

8. When and how did the project begin?

9. What languages are used?

Key Livelihood Issues

- Whether and how the spread of ICTs could result in the further

marginalisation of disadvantaged groups, and what can be done to mitigate

those adverse effects.

- Whether and how ICTs can be effectively used by low income, small-scale

producers to improve their productivity and competitiveness in market

economies.

Potential Users of the Findings

- Policy makers and others planning and implementing ICTs for poverty

reduction

- Ultimately the beneficiaries will be rural, small-scale producers and

marginalised communities, in developing countries.

CONTACT: Clare O'Farrell, AERDD, University of Reading, UK.

EMAIL: c.m.ofarrell@reading.ac.uk

ARTICLES

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Cyberspace as the New Frontier? Mapping the Shifting Boundaries of the

Network Society

Fred Turner

Department of Communication

University of California, San Diego

9500 Gilman Drive

La Jolla, CA 92093-0503

Fturner@ucsd.edu

Paper presented to the International Communication Association, May 1999.

You are welcome to forward this paper electronically to anyone for any

noncommercial purpose and to quote from it for purposes of comment and

review. All other rights reserved.

References to follow. Comments appreciated. 4000 words.

In the last few years, the rhetoric of the American frontier has become one

of the dominant strains in discussions of new computer technologies and

their social effects. From the pages of Wired magazine to the halls of

Congress, academics, industry leaders, politicians and journalists have

metaphorically transformed the many forms of computer-mediated communication

into an imaginary landscape and specifically, into an "electronic frontier".

According to William Mitchell, a Dean at MIT, for example, "Cyberspace is

the new land beyond the horizon, the place that beckons the colonists,

cowboys, con artists, and would-be conquerors of the twenty-first century"

(1995: 110-111). According to industry consultant Esther Dyson and futurist

Alvin Toffler, "Cyberspace is the land of knowledge, and the exploration of

that land can be a civilization's truest, highest calling" (Dyson et al.,

1994: 2).

In the face of such hyperbole, it is hard to remember that "cyberspace" is

not a place at all, let alone a futuristic mirror of the American past. In

this paper, I will ask how and why it is that so many have come to think of

a series of inter-linked computers and the sorts of communications they make

possible as a coherent topography and particularly, as a landscape in

keeping with American myth. Several critics have argued that the rhetoric of

the electronic frontier simply represents the recurrence of classic American

literary themes at a new moment (Miller, 1995; Sobchack, 1996; Healy, 1997),

But I believe that this rhetoric has emerged less from the mists of literary

history than from the deliberate efforts of a particular community of

computer manufacturers, software developers, corporate consultants and

academics. Variously called the "virtual class" (Kroker and Weinstein, 1994)

or the "digerati" (Brockman, 1996), this group has relentlessly promoted a

vision of computer-mediated communication as frontier exploration. Like

other critics, most notably Kroker and Weinstein (1994) and Barbrook and

Cameron (1998), I will suggest that they've done so partly in order to gain

social and economic advantages for their class. But I will also argue that

this emerging elite has drawn on the rhetoric of the electronic frontier in

order to identify and manage a series of anxieties brought about by broad

changes in work practices and personal mobility over thelast twenty-five

years -- changes triggered by and pervasive in the computer and software

industries themselves.

As sociologist Manuel Castells and others have argued, the America of the

man in the gray flannel suit -- a world dominated by hierarchically

organized corporations offering more-or-less stable employment -- has begun

to disappear. In its place there has arisen what Castells calls a "network

society". Where earlier, industrial societies organized their economies

principally around the production of material goods, Castells argues that

the "network society "has begun to organize itself around "the technology of

knowledge generation, information processing, and symbol communication"

(1996: 17). At a practical level, this means that an increasing number of

workers are making their livings not only processing information, but using

information processing technologies (such as computer operating systems) in

order to create new information technologies (such as medical or financial

software). Workers are now using information not only to manage the

production of material goods but to produce information as a sort of "good"

in its own right.

According to Castells, much of this new work takes place within "network

enterprises". These firms may be formally headquartered in one nation or

another, but they carry out their business twenty-four hours a day, around

the world, with the aid of electronic networks of information exchange.

These companies are organized horizontally, in a series of decentralized

units, each of which is linked to all the others and at the same time,

largely self-directed. Thanks to this new form of macro-economic

organization, workers find themselves both more autonomous and less

powerful. On the one hand, writes Castells,"the diffusion of advanced

information technology in factories andoffices" has led to a "greater ...

need for an autonomous, educated worker able and willing to program and

decide entire sequences of work" (1996: 241). On the other, though, the need

for networked organizations to remain flexible in order to respond to shifts

in economic conditions -- coupled with their ability to locate their

operations almost anywhere in the world -- has rendered even the most highly

educated laborers extremely vulnerable. Companies can and often do downsize

their firms, subcontract, use temporary labor, and automate or relocate

certain tasks (1996: 239). As a result, workers at every level have had to

become highly entrepreneurial.

This is especially true in the computer and software industry -- even at the

highest levels of skill and income. Silicon Valley firms must cope with a

variety of "disruptive forces", including "instant success, ill-fated market

debuts, compressed development schedules, sudden product obsolescence,

unexpected and unrelenting competition, unforeseen 'bugs', and disloyal

financial sponsors" (Hayes, 1989:43-44). As a result, firms "insist on

[hiring] flexible constellations of workers and managers" and thus passing

on market instabilities to their workforce (Hayes, 1989: 43-44). At the

bottom of this force, workers must hustle from job to job as best they can.

At the top, the most highly skilled workers often move with the help of

employment agencies or of a network of professional friends. In both cases

though, work in the computer industry demands uncommon commitment in the

short-term and great flexibility over time.

Over the years, some have come to celebrate these demands as sources of

individual self-improvement and industry productivity. Douglas Coupland's

1995 novel Microserfs, for example, tells the story of Dan, a

twenty-six-year-old bug checker for Microsoft who leaves the firmto join a

gang of friends as an equity-partner in a start-up making "virtual Lego"

(1995: 71-72). For much of the book, the start-up threatens to fail, but at

the end, sufficient venture capital appears, and Dan and his friends seemed

destined for wealth. Yet, even as the book lauds the upside of Silicon

Valley mobility, it reveals a fairly grim set of working conditions. As

Coupland's narrator explains, "Time frames are so extreme in the tech

industry. Life happens at fifty times the normal pace" (1995: 355). At the

micro-level, compressed production schedules drive coders like Dan to

program for up to forty-eight hours straight (a practice they call "flying

to Australia") (1995: 110). This in turn causes programmers to lose touch

with their bodies. "Work, sleep, work, sleep, work, sleep...", writes Dan in

his diary. "I feel like my body is a station wagon in which I drive my brain

around, like a suburban mother taking the kids to hockey practice" (1995:

4). Moreover, rapid product development cycles create an industry-wide

demand for young bodies. In his diary, for instance, Dan sets out a series

of maxims for multimedia hiring. They include the notions that a company can

get no more than ten years of complete dedication to the job and that "the

upper age limit for people with instincts for this business is about forty"

(1995: 296).

At a more broadly social level, Microserfs chronicles the disaggregation of

workers that Castells sees as typical of the network enterprise. Coupland

notes, for instance, that the architecture of computer industry plants has

changed over the decades. In the 1970s, firms added showers for employees

who jogged. In the 1980s, they became campuses, offering food and sometimes,

places to sleep. This period, writes Coupland, was marked by a corporate

ethos he describes as "Give us your entire life or we won't allow you to

work on cool projects" (1995: 211). In the 1990s, Coupland explains that

"corporations don't even hire people anymore. People become their own

corporations" (1995: 211). In other words, even as companies have asked for

a greater commitment from their workers they have forced those workers to

become increasingly independent. This independence in turn has led many

workers to become highly mobile. There are only so many places a computer

programmer can find work and as Coupland suggests, programmers tend to move

among them. As a result, these networks of employment tend to replace

previous forms of social cohesion. In Microserfs, Dan's philosophical

co-programmer and girlfriend Karla puts the problem this way:

You have to remember that most of us who've moved to Silicon Valley, we

don't have the traditional identity-donating structures like other places in

the world have: religion, politics, cohesive family structure, roots, a

sense of history or other prescribed belief systems that take the onus off

individuals having to figure out who they are. You're on your own here. It's

a big task, but just look at the flood of ideas that emerges from the

plastic! (1995: 236)

In Karla's comments, we sense the presence of some of the principles that

inform the rhetoric of the electronic frontier: solitude, individualism, the

need for inventiveness and even the hint of a sense of mission. But we can

also see that those principles have emerged out of the destruction of other

patterns of individual and social cohesion, patterns such as the rhythms of

the life cycle and the demands of a social and geographical locale. Days and

nights have disappeared into orgies of coding. Old age is no longer a source

of authority, but a mark of unemployability. One can do computer work in a

variety of locations and in fact, to stay employed one must be willing to

move around. As a result, one contributes little to local social

organizations and one belongs nowhere. No religion, no politics, no family,

no history, no obligations to a particular place -- like a contemporary

version of the Nebraska Territory, the social landscape of the computer

industry is a wide-open plain and its inhabitants are on their own.

In the world of Coupland's fiction, that solitude allows Dan and his friends

to recreate themselves and to get rich. Yet, in her 1997 memoir of her life

as computer programmer and software engineer, Close to the Machine, Ellen

Ullman suggests that in the real world, the transience and solitude of

computer industry work may corrode rather than remake the self. At the age

of forty-six, Ullman has been programming computers since 1971 and currently

works as a freelance software engineer. Some years ago, she worked as an

employee, but her company was bought out. Nowadays, she writes, "My clients

hire me to do a job, then dispose of me when I'm done. I hire the next level

of contractors then dispose of them" (1997: 126). As Castells suggests is

typical in the network society, the pressures of rapid technological and

economic change have driven Ullman into a network enterprise model of work.

She explains that her clients expect consultants like her to assemble a

group of people to do a job, get it done, then disassemble. We're not

supposed to invest in any one person or set of skills -- no sense in it

anyway... The skill-set changes before the person possibly can, so it's

always simpler just to change the person (1997: 129).

Within their task-based networks, Ullman and her colleagues enjoy a

high-pressure form of emotional connection to one another, but no sooner is

the project at hand completed than this now-intimate group must disperse.

These disruptions are painful -- yet the distress they cause pales in

comparison to Ullman's anxieties about her own obsolescence. The

technologies with which she works are constantly changing and if she hopes

to stay in business, she has to keep up. Since 1971, she writes

I have taught myself six higher-level programming languages, three

assemblers, two data-retrieval languages, eight job-processing languages,

seventeen scripting languages, ten types of macros, two object-definition

languages, sixty-eight programming-library interfaces, five varieties of

networks, and eight operating environments -- fifteen, if you cross-multiply

the distinct combinations of operating systems and networks. I don't think

this makes me particularly unusual. Given the rate of change in computing,

anyone who's been around for a while could probably make a list like this

(1997: 100-101).

In her youth, learning these languages was a great deal easier than it has

now become. Ullman has entered middle age, a period she thought would be "a

time for consolidation" (1997: 105). At forty-six, she is tiring. "Time

tells me to stop chasing after the latest new everything", she writes.

"Biological life does not want to keep speeding up like a chip design,

cycling ever faster year by year" (1997: 105).

Yet, given the demands of the industry in which she works, Ullman's

biological life will have to wait. Like Coupland, Ullman depicts a world in

which biological rhythms, as well as the social institutions that used to

organize them, no longer fit the demands of industry. In place of these

things, writes Ullman with more than a touch of sarcasm, workers like her

must carry a handful of rules: "Just live by your wits and expect everyone

else to do the same. Carry no dead wood. Live free or die. Yeah, surely, you

can only rely on yourself" (1997: 127).

As Ullman suggests, the rhetoric of the electronic frontier provides

alanguage with which to map the landscape of work at the higher end of the

computer and software industries. Like imaginary settlers, Ullman and her

colleagues find themselves alone in a wilderness of economic conditions,

conditions unlike any their parents knew or could prepare them for. Cut off

from the civilizing effects of membership in permanent corporate

communities, they drift from employer to employer like hired gunmen in

real-life versions of late-night spaghetti westerns. Their power derives

primarily from what knowledge of technological systems they can carry with

them and secondarily from their networks of professional friends. Their

personal links to one another are tenuous and briefly maintained. They are

lonely. They are cut off from the worlds of those outside their industry in

two ways. First, when they code, they work in a psychologically disembodied

state for long periods of time. Second, because to stay employed they must

move from node to node within the network of sites where computers and

software are manufactured and used, and because to pick up leads for new

work they must stay in touch with one another, these programmers find

themselves living in a social and physical landscape populated principally

by people like themselves. To succeed within that landscape, they must turn

their attention away from another, parallel landscape: the landscape of

local, material things, of town boards and PTA meetings, of embodied

participation in civic life. They must declare and maintain an allegiance to

their own professional network, to its sites and technologies; they must

remain "console cowboys" devoted full-time to roaming their own professional

landscape.

In this context, we can see that the rhetoric of the electronic frontier

works to transform a series of personal losses -- of time with family and

neighbors, of connection to one's body and one's community -- into a

collective myth. In other words, it allows its subscribers to celebrate what

they cannot avoid. At the same time, to the extent that metaphors of the

frontier accurately capture the loneliness and transience inherent in their

work, they permit some consciousness of their suffering as well. Within the

computer and software industries, the rhetoric of the electronic frontier

seems to offer a sort of ideological bridge between hard facts and appealing

fictions. Even as it permits workers a glimpse of their predicament, it

transforms that predicament into a site of potential heroism in the

tradition of American myth.

This would be fine if it were strictly a private matter within the computer

industry. But it's not. Since the rhetoric of the electronic frontier first

emerged about a decade ago, it has served as one of the principle lenses

through which industry representatives, academics, politicians and others

have sought to define the use and regulation of an extraordinary public

resource: the Internet. In that context, the metaphor of the electronic

frontier has not only eased the anxieties of an information elite, but

increased their economic power. I could offer a number of examples of this

phenomenon (andI have, in another much longer paper), but given the time

constraints here I'd like to focus on the ways in which two particular

assumptions embedded within the electronic frontier metaphor have changed

the shape of the Net.

First, consider the notion that the cyberspace, the space of the Internet,

is somehow a place apart from the ordinary material world. As John Perry

Barlow, one of the foremost proponents of this rhetoric, puts it, the

electronic frontier is "a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it

is not where bodies live" (Barlow, 1996: 1). To the extent that computer

industry consultants like Barlow can convince us that the Internet is

somehow "nowhere", they can also make it harder to see that the Internet

relies on real, material networks of cables and switches, antennae and

satellites, for its existence. As a number of political economists have

noted, the corporations who build and distribute this equipment -- including

corporations from which Barlow has exacted high consulting fees -- often

have agendas quite at odds with those of individual Internet users

(Schiller, 1998; Herman and McChesney, 1997; Branscomb, 1994). Insofar as

the electronic frontier metaphor renders the power of infrastructure owners

invisible, it makes it that much harder for individual internet users to

challenge that power.

Second, consider the notion that like a frontier, the Internet is somehow

open on equal terms to all users. Barlow and others argue that because it is

a disembodied world, the frontier allows us to do away with the body-based

systems of distinction that plague our material lives. Anyone, writes

Barlow, can enter the electronic frontier "without privilege or prejudice

accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth"

(1996:1). Yet, if we accept this view, then we must ignore the fact that

large portions of the globe are currently off-line and likely to remain so

for some time. Even in America, in 1995, for instance, some seven million

American homes lacked telephones (Ebo, 1998: 6).; in 1998, some 30% of

American homes lacked access to cable television (Seiter, 1999: 147). It

seems unlikely that these Americans will soon be buying computers and

signing up with America On Line. Finally, the electronic frontier

ideologists' vision of identical, self-sufficient individuals obscures all

the sorts of differences that researchers have shown influence access to

computers and the uses to which they are put. These include gender (Seiter,

1999; Clemente, 1998) and ethnicity (Ebo, 1998; Clemente, 1998), but also

education level and place of employment. With a minimal degree of literacy

and access to a machine, for instance, virtually anyone might learn how to

download a piece of software or order merchandise over the Internet. But it

seems unlikely that they will engage in more complex and empowering forms of

computer-mediated interaction, particularly those that require extensive

programming expertise and nearly constant access to high-level machines.

The question remains, then: If the electronic frontier ideology paints such

an inaccurate picture of the present and future of computer-mediated

communication, why has it become so popular? In part, I believe that the

answer rests with the fact that those who promote it have extraordinary

access to elite terrestrial institutions, including the press, key

universities, and the national government. It is hard to imagine

organizations more central to contemporary debates about technology than MIT

and Wired magazine or spokesmen on these issues more widely quoted than

Esther Dyson or John Perry Barlow. Yet, as the work of Manuel Castells

suggests, the rhetoric of the electronic frontier may also have a broad

appeal at the moment because it addresses anxieties felt by workers in many

industries. It may be the case, as Ellen Ullman writes, that

We virtual workers are everyone's future. We wander from job to job, and now

it's hard for anyone to stay put anymore. Our job commitments are

contractual, contingent, impermanent, and this model of insecure life is

spreading outward from us. I may be wrong, but I have this idea that we

programmers are the world's canaries. We spend our time alone in front of

monitors.... We lead machine-centered lives.... We live in a contest of the

fittest, where the most knowledgeable and skillful win and the rest are

discarded; and this is the working life that waits for everybody. Everyone

agrees: be a knowledge worker or be left behind (1997: 146).

If Ullman is right, then it may be that the electronic frontier ideology

represents not only a form of symbolic self-promotion on the part of the

virtual class, but a temptation for the rest of us. Confronted with forced

transience, rapid job turnover, a decreased attachment to locales and their

histories, and a blurring of all the old boundaries between home and work,

we may well be tempted to see ourselves as pioneers on a new social and

technological frontier. Like the digerati, we may rewrite our lives in terms

of a national drama, re-imagining ourselves as cowboys and astronauts, and

we may buy and use computers in part to sustain that fantasy. If we do

however, we will lose the ability to identify and confront the social,

economic and technological forces that are currently shaping not only

computer-mediated communication, but our lives as a whole.

References:

--- Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. 1998. The Californian Ideology.

www.wmin.ac.uk/media/HRC/ci/calif1.html. Last modified 26-May-98.

--- Barlow, John Perry. 1996. "A declaration of the independence of

cyberspace", Davos, Switzerland, February 8, 1996;

http://members.iquest.net/~dmasson/barlow/Declaration-Final.html; downloaded

11/15/98.

--- Branscomb, Anne W. 1994. Who owns information?: from privacy to public

access. New York, NY: BasicBooks.

--- Brockman, John. 1996. Digerati: encounters with the cyber elite. 1st ed.

San Francisco: HardWired: Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West.

--- Castells, Manuel. 1996. The rise of the network society. Information age

; 1. Ed. Manuel Castells. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers.

--- Clemente, Peter C. 1998. State of the net: the new frontier. New York:

McGraw Hill.

--- Coupland, Douglas. 1995. Microserfs. 1st ed. New York: ReganBooks.

--- Dyson, Esther. 1997. Release 2.0: a design for living in the digital

age. 1st ed. New York: Broadway Books.

--- Dyson, Esther, et al. 1994. "Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna

Carta for the Knowledge Age. Release 1.2". Washington, D.C.: The Peace and

Progress Foundation.

--- Ebo, Bosah L., ed. 1998. Cyberghetto or cybertopia?: race, class, and

gender on the Internet. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.

--- Hayes, Dennis. 1989. Behind the silicon curtain: the seductions of work

in a lonely era. Boston, MA: South End Press.

--- Healy, Dave. 1997. "Cyberspace and Place: The Internet as Middle

Landscape on the Electronic Frontier" In Porter, David, ed. Internet

culture. New York: Routledge.

--- Herman, Edward S., and Robert Waterman McChesney. 1997. The global

media: the new missionaries of corporate capitalism. London ; Washington,

D.C.: Cassell.

--- Kroker, Arthur, and Michael A. Weinstein. 1994. Data Trash: The Theory

of the Virtual Class. New York: St. Martin's Press.

--- Miller, Laura. 1995. "Women and children first: gender and the settling

of the electronic frontier". Resisting the virtual life: the culture and

politics of information. Eds. James Brook and Iain A. Boal. San Francisco,

CA: City Lights Books. 49-58.

--- Mitchell, William J. 1995. City of bits: space, place, and the infobahn.

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

--- Porter, David, ed. 1997. Internet culture. New York: Routledge.

--- Schiller, Dan. 1999. Digital capitalism: networking the global market

system. Cambridge, MA and London, England: MIT Press.

--- Seiter, Ellen. 1999. Television and new media audiences. Oxford

television studies. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press ; Oxford University

Press.

--- Sobchack, Vivian. 1996. "Democratic franchise and the electronic

frontier". Sardar, Ziauddin, and Jerome R. Ravetz, eds. Cyberfutures:

culture and politics on the information superhighway. New York: New York

University Press.

--- Ullman, Ellen. 1997. Close to the machine: technophilia and its

discontents. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

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