Ethnographers of new media face a challenge nowadays because they write about technologies people love to discuss and about which journalists love to write. They often find themselves writing against myths about digital media users that other digital media scholars, journalists, and even people interviewed hold in common. In the first decade of Internet research, skeptical scholars often wrote against assumptions about how social practices in virtual spaces differed from offline practices (see Dibbell Reference Dibbell1998; Turkle Reference Turkle1995; Stone Reference Stone1996). They were critiquing many of the premises that accompany an understanding of the virtual as “spaces or places apart from the rest of social life” (Miller, Slater, and Suchman Reference Miller, Slater, Suchman, Nissenbaum and Price2004: 77) in which people were supposedly experimenting with new forms of sociality and identity. While these debates continue to haunt more recent ethnographies of virtual worlds (see Boellstorff Reference Boellstorff2008; Nardi Reference Nardi2010; Taylor Reference Taylor2006), critical scholars of new media are now also addressing commonly held assumptions about the Internet when its use is explicitly understood not to be part of a sociality distinct from offline life.Footnote 1 Indeed, the Internet now is taken to be a collection of interfaces for gathering information and conversing with other people—web-based communication can be as integrated into daily life as a phone call or reading a book (for an ethnographic study, see Gershon Reference Gershon2010). This transition from taking the Internet to be virtual to seeing the Internet as a collection of channels of communication has brought with it a new set of widespread presuppositions that ethnography is particularly adept at critiquing.
This is a moment in new media scholarship when the popular press, other scholars, and users often agree on the social categories and social practices taken to be accurate characterizations of digital media use. These days, ethnographers confront a wide range of accounts that appear to be in accord when discussing the existence of digital natives, the freeing potential of the Internet, or a digital generation's ever-increasing inability to distinguish and demarcate public and private information. A handful of scholars are writing against these widely held beliefs, and the authors discussed in this review have all taken on this challenge, albeit with different targets in mind. Sonia Livingstone in Children and the Internet tackles the myth of the digital native, using a mixture of interviews, observations, and surveys to ask precisely how apt is it to claim that most children now traipse through the Internet like fish moving through water. In Out in the Country, Mary Gray addresses the assumptions about place and community U.S. citizens must have in order to view the Internet as the primary liberatory medium for rural queer youth. Lastly, Theresa Senft focuses on camgirls, women who have websites that reveal their daily lives using web cameras they have scattered throughout their homes. Senft's book, Camgirls, discusses the complex feminist negotiations behind this apparent erasure of the public/private divide. In what follows, I discuss the different arguments these authors wield against pervasive beliefs about digital media practices, and outline their shared critiques of neoliberalism.
While each book targets a different set of generally held views on digital media practices, the analyses all share common ground in their particular approach to new media. For each author, while new media may be a starting point for analysis, it can only ever be a starting point. They are well aware that studying a new medium is studying a channel of communication, interactions that are part and parcel of larger social contexts. Conscious that focusing on a medium can limit analysis, all the authors make efforts to locate the interactions they are studying as moments in lives shaped by socioeconomic complexities. In Livingstone's case, she looks at how children are being figured as uniquely vulnerable to new media as well as uniquely deft users largely because of the contemporary social construction of childhood and the “newness” of new media. Gray examines how the widespread narrative of U.S. queer identity as an urban identity overlays the equally widespread narrative that rural queer youth primarily find refuge and support through the Internet. Senft, in turn, explores how women become camgirls as imaginative responses to the gendered requirements of affective labor and ever-increasing surveillance. The authors all share a refusal to confine their analysis to the interactions that occur within a particular medium, insisting that these people's media practices are glimpses into the larger dilemmas of being a marked category in heteronormative capitalist spaces.
Children and the Internet
In turning to children, Sonia Livingstone uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to examine a category of person understood in terms of two often-incongruous perceptions. Children are often viewed as sophisticated users of new media, whose skills far exceed an older generations’ ability to manipulate communicative technology. At the same time, children are also taken to be a particularly vulnerable population, more likely to make dangerous connections as new media allows interactions between people who otherwise would never have met (p. 16). While her research is based in Great Britain, she addresses contradictory perceptions of children that are also widespread in many European, North American, and antipodeal countries. She asks how valid these perceptions are, first examining precisely what Internet literacy entails, and then looking at how children on the web encounter perceived risks. Not surprisingly, Livingstone discovers the story is much more complicated—Internet literacy requires a sophisticated combination of skills and critical assessment that children possess to varied and unpredictable degrees. Risk, in turn, is much more complex to ascertain than simply tracking children's encounters with pornography and pedophiles. In both instances, Livingstone argues that these myths about the children and the Internet create blinders to the larger contexts that structure children's encounters with it.
Livingstone points out that Internet literacy has become a poorly defined fundamental for those seeking to train future workers and future citizens. In the myth of the digital native, simply bringing children to the Internet is enough. Through osmosis, perhaps trial and error, children will become eerily adept technological users, increasing both their employable skills and their political participation in civil society. Livingstone decides, rather than accepting an “if you build it, they will come” approach to the web, to see what precisely children do on the Internet as they try to fill homework assignments, search for entertaining websites, or connect with their friends. She discovers that parents’ assessments of their children's Internet skills are often clouded by this digital native myth. “Indeed, the very difficulty of accessing and using the Internet beguiles many adults into believing that if only they could master ‘clicking’ on links with the mouse, then they—like their children—would be Internet ‘experts.’ This is not a belief that we hold for the pen, else we'd stop teaching pupils ‘English’ once they had learned to read and write; but the child who ‘whizzes’ around the screen seems so skilled that, we conclude comfortably, they know all they need to know already” (50).
Livingstone shows through ethnographic examples that children often need considerable guidance in trying to search for reliable information. Through talking to children about their Internet experiences, it became clear to her that both using search engines and interpreting the validity of information on websites requires competences that the children often lacked. Parents and teachers often did not teach them how to distinguish information that is pertinent and valid from that which is not partly because they presume being a digital native means this form of literacy is already a given.
While the Internet has the potential to be a site of education, it is not inevitably so. Livingstone concludes the first half of the book by pointing out that children primarily use the Internet as a social medium, which does not easily morph into employable skills. According to her study, children will master a limited set of techniques necessary to participate in their social groups and use these repeatedly. They are in part encouraged to limit themselves by “anxious parents, uncertain teachers, busy politicians, profit-oriented content providers” (207). In addition, the Internet itself is changing so fast that specific techniques they learn can quickly become irrelevant or obsolete—Internet literacy itself is a constantly moving target. Finally, presenting educational material on the Internet or in the context of a learning game does not necessarily make learning the material more appealing to children. Livingstone demonstrates that one can use ethnographic methods effectively to determine precisely how children in fact use the Internet, and when they, like many adults, find it too frustrating and give up.
She acknowledges, as do the other authors under review, that new media is often accompanied in the West by moral panics, and particularly ones revolving around how new media might threaten putatively vulnerable populations such as children. While this may be a recurring theme whenever new media are introduced in Europe or North America, the analytical question becomes how new media's perceived dangers articulate with the current historical moment. Livingstone addresses this by pointing out that taking children and parents to be ultimately responsible for hazards is part and parcel of a common neoliberal logic. The second half of her book offers a critique of how the Internet as a medium is framed as risky for children, and it will resonate with readers familiar with other critiques of how neoliberal logics ignore structural inequalities to place all responsibilities on the shoulders of individuals. She persuasively explains that children are expected to be savvy Internet users, and that the Internet literacy she has so thoroughly questioned in the opening chapters is precisely the armor they are supposed to wield to protect themselves from the countless risks the Internet poses. Thus Internet literacy is supposed to justify “a neo-liberal deregulatory policy for the media and communication sector…” (205).
This emphasis on children as digital natives justifies ignoring the structures—both online and offline—which facilitate children's experiences, and frame certain interactions as risky. For example, search engines can be designed so that pornography is not one of the first hits when someone types apparently innocuous terms. Livingstone argues that asking parents and children to be ultimately responsible for what they encounter online is to ignore that “parents, children, and indeed those whose activities might harm children, intentionally or otherwise, all operate within an environment that has been substantially planned for, paid for, designed and institutionally supposed in particular ways, according to particular understandings of anticipated use and in order to further certain interests” (223).
Out in the Country
Mary Gray is also tackling contemporary myths surrounding the web by asking if the Internet does in fact serve its reputed liberatory function for queer youth living in the rural United States. To answer this question, she has to stray far afield from a rigid focus on the Internet, and explores why the Internet, with its associations with a putatively urban elsewhere, is seen as a solution for the quandaries rural queer youth face. She critiques two standard narratives in queer U.S. circles. First, it is a tenet of queer U.S. activists that the only path to achieving queer civil liberties is through visibility—the queer cause requires that everyone come out. This visibility is a declaration of otherness and an insistence on acceptance, captured in the familiar chant: “We're here, we're queer, get used to it.” Yet as Gray demonstrates, declaring difference is counter to how people learn to accommodate each other in various towns in rural Kentucky. In these towns, being a stranger or different marks one as untrustworthy. The queer youth and their local allies make most of their inroads by being long-known friends and family members. As known quantities in their communities, coming out often seems irrelevant to these queer youth—everyone knows that the Birds’ daughter is a lesbian. Sexual orientation was often but one of many widely known but little discussed aspects of identities in rural Kentucky. Coming out as defined by national queer political movements would require asserting a difference that ultimately undercuts how one is expected to participate in rural communities.
Second, Gray criticizes a dominant trend in U.S. queer theory and queer activism toward privileging urban space as the quintessential queer space, an assumption that underpins people's valorization of how rural youth use the Internet. In dominant U.S. narratives of queer lives, coming out is accompanied with a move to the city, the anonymous space in which queer people can live freely. From this perspective, the rural is defined as a space that is not only unwelcoming but even unlivable. While I doubt Gray would argue that queer activists and theorists intend these resonances, this narrative that queer rural youth can only find happiness by getting out of Dodge bears a disconcerting resemblance to the neoliberal attribution of responsibility that Livingstone and others critique. That is, the solution is an individual one; it is up to a queer teenager to transform his or her life, regardless of the continually reasserted prejudices or structural inequalities that contribute to a youth's misery. Yet again, the individual is required to bear maximal responsibility, a neoliberal narrative that limits the range of possible solutions.
The Internet becomes vital to this narrative of urban havens as the medium through which queer youth can learn not only what it means to be queer but also where one can be queer. Gray points out that teenagers often initially experience desire in amorphous ways, and the narratives they encounter on the Internet and elsewhere offer frameworks for these desires. These frameworks provide visions of not only what it means to experience queer desire, but also how to live as a queer. She argues that in the contemporary United States, these visions are urban ones. The Internet is supposed to be the direct conduit to the urban, the principle source of information by which queer youth can learn how to leave their homophobic towns, friends, and family behind. While Gray does not want to discount the dangers of homophobia (in any community), she does question the belief that rural-urban migration is the only panacea, or that the Internet is only a source for connection to disembodied others elsewhere. Her ethnographic findings show that, on the contrary, rural youth will often use the Internet to learn how to live better locally. The Internet does provide rural youth with insights about what it might mean to be queer, but they are insights the youth must interpret, aware of the exigencies of their own circumstances.
Gray also acknowledges, as does Livingstone, that Internet access cannot be taken for granted; although everyone she interviewed had some access through schools or public libraries, this was often hampered by scrutiny and firewalls that curtail the use of certain sites. Even when they manage to avoid others’ surveillance, perhaps because a thoughtful librarian turned computer monitors to face the wall, the youth did not always have the Internet skills to search successfully. Gray makes a strong case that digital access does not begin and end with people's opportunity to sit down at a connected computer—Internet literacy, blocked computers, and circumstantial privacy in public settings also play a role.
Camgirls
Theresa Senft researched camgirls during the early 2000s, interviewing and observing women who placed web cameras throughout their homes to record their daily lives for anyone who cared to watch. Camgirls had a range of motivations; some saw this as an art project, some as a path towards self-acceptance, others as a counter to the barrage of idealized images. Jennifer Ringley is arguably the most famous camgirl, she captured every moment in her Dickinson College dorm room from 1996–2004, and claimed she did so to “show people that what we see on TV—people with perfect hair, perfect friends, perfect lives—is not reality. I am reality” (quoted in Senft 2008: 16). Showing reality—here defined as one's daily interactions at home on the web through constantly updated still shotsFootnote 2—managed to seem so transgressive that this practice puzzled many outside of camgirl circles. Senft found herself constantly responding to variations of the question, often murmured with slightly horrified undertones, “Why would anyone want to do that?” This unease is part and parcel with Americans’ general unease with new media, and many believe that new communicative technologies encourage users to draw the lines between the public and the private in unexpected and risky ways. Camgirls are seen to be ignoring a sensible desire to keep some things private, although Senft counters this perception time and time again by detailing the complex ways in which camgirls delicately and methodically create hierarchies of access, and do so to manage their audiences’ demands for intimacy.
For Senft, asking why anyone would decide to become a camgirl is in some sense the wrong question. The more compelling question is: “What labor and resources are required for someone to sustain being a camgirl?” Senft provides satisfyingly complicated answers to this question, beginning with the economics of being a camgirl. It turns out that being a successful camgirl is a costly enough enterprise that camgirls were often forced to charge viewers, creating a two-tiered access for subscribers and casual visitors. As a consequence, camgirls had to think of how they performed their lives as two-fold, dividing their web interactions into what they could offer subscribers as opposed to what they could offer potential subscribers. They were quite conscious of their audiences, and their micro-celebrity depended in large measure on the affective labor they were continually doing to sustain an audience. Senft argues, “On the Web, popularity depends upon a connection to one's audience, rather than an enforced separation from them” (26). Camgirls had a variety of avenues for interacting with their audiences, from comments on their blogs to chatrooms located on their websites. The sites provided opportunities for substantive and sustained conversations, not just one-way and objectifying broadcasts. This interactive aspect provides an alternative to the pervasive and anonymous surveillance that fills Euro-Americans’ daily lives. A camgirls’ webcam is no security camera. One knows where the camera is located at all times, has control over whether it is on or off, and can interact with those viewing. In a sense, the affective labor required to ensure a continued audience is the counterpoint to anonymous surveillance. Camgirls indirectly question their critics’ complacent assumptions that individuals have full control over how public or private their self-representations will be.
By focusing on camgirls, Senft was not only faced continually with the question of why; she also encountered an apparently inevitable conflation between camgirls and pornography. For camgirls, their experiments with the boundary between public and private presentations of self are always taken to be on the verge of pornography. Their viewers constantly asked them to be sexual. Senft sees this as a logical extension of the ways women's sexuality is commodified, and of the widespread myth that the web is a medium that female exhibitionists eagerly use for male viewers’ free pleasure. She points out the many ways that for-pay porn sites rely on this myth, and discusses the contemporary structural inequalities that allow pornography to take its current Internet form. It is part of her larger feminist critique that camgirls are continually paying the price for being experimental women on the web, a marked subjectivity that constrains how their audiences will respond. Being placed on a continuum with pornography is only one of many examples of this. She writes, “It is small wonder, then, that the camgirl—who traffics in a certain kind of power by violating the space between private and public—will always be equated with pornography at some point in her life” (77). Senft moves from this discussion of camgirls and pornography to musings on what camgirl practices can illustrate about strategies for being ethical in one's Internet practices, as the web's structures encourage users to rethink public/private and stranger/friend dichotomies.
Conclusion
All three authors engage with the Internet first and foremost as a relatively new medium that has become dialogically imbricated in already established social concerns and practices. Focusing on the Internet as a medium has a number of analytical implications. First, as I mentioned earlier, none of these books engage with the Internet as a virtual space. This is fully warranted, since the people written about do not view their online presence as virtual or even markedly distinct from their offline lives. For these authors, the virtual is ethnographically determined, and in these specific cases, ethnographically absent as a concern. This is worth noting, given how much earlier ethnographic work on the Internet has focused on the performed and unpredictable links between online and offline interactions. That what counts as virtual and how that affects people's assessments of each other is irrelevant in all three of these books is a sign of how the field has changed.
Second, all three authors are influenced by media historians, who have insisted that the “newness” of new media is a social construct to be analyzed (see Bolter and Grusin Reference Bolter and Grusin1999; Gitelman Reference Gitelman2006; Marvin Reference Marvin1988). Just as what counts as virtual is based on historically emergent assumptions, so too is what counts as new. Historians of new media have long argued that Euro-Americans tend to respond to new media with equal measures of wonder and horror—wonder at how people can now connect more intimately from a distance and horror at the perceived risks of these kinds of connections. Kulick and Willson (Reference Kulick and Willson1994) pointed out vividly that this is a cultural construct that need not accompany the introduction of media everywhere, when they described how nonchalant and even bored Gapun villagers in Papua New Guinea were upon first encountering films. All three of these authors, however, are writing about Euro-American responses to media when newness is a central issue. For them, the question is not whether the actual practices are in fact new, but rather, how do people's understandings of media as new shape their responses to and stereotypes of new media (and how do these understandings shape their practices). Asking this question in Euro-American contexts entails uncovering how people's interpretation of newness in general contributes to their Euro-American perceptions of a particular medium's liberatory or dangerous effects. To analyze the Internet as a medium is to locate one's analysis in a contemporary moment formed by a long history of previously invented media.
Lastly, all these authors made a conscious methodological decision that served them well: they all interviewed and observed users both on and off the Internet, refusing to limit their analysis only to what takes place on the medium itself. This enabled the authors to place Internet use in larger social contexts and provided them with necessary data to counter overarching myths. In all three cases, confining the research to online interactions would not have enabled the authors to argue against all-too-easy assumptions about digital natives, queer rural youth's inevitable alienation, or camgirls as exaggerated caricatures of fame-obsessed women.
These three authors also provide critiques of prevalent ideologies of neoliberalism. Linking new media to capitalism has many scholarly antecedents, but these authors go a step further by looking at how the ideologies that accompany contemporary capitalist practices resonate with or reinforce people's beliefs, attitudes, and strategies surrounding new media. Here I want to be clear about the dialogic analysis that these authors deploy. None take technology, ideology, or neoliberal capitalism to be determinant. Rather, they explore how widespread neoliberal assumptions intertwine with people's beliefs about technological structures, the designed communicative technology, and people's actual media practices. In the process, all three point to the social costs that differently marked groups end up paying, in part because neoliberal perspectives encourage people to turn a blind eye to structural inequalities and structural solutions, holding individuals maximally responsible for their fates.
Gray, Livingstone, and Senft have begun the challenging analytical labor of linking historically and culturally specific responses to new media to larger capitalist formations. But much is still to be done. Neoliberal perspectives have a relationship to newness that is almost an inverse to widespread understandings of media's relationships with newness. As Carol Greenhouse points out, to understand neoliberal perspectives, scholars must understand anew familiar analytical categories, since there is “a marked tendency for neoliberal political restructuring and resignification to borrow from older social forms, for example borrowing the language of rights to sustain markets…” (2010: 4). Neoliberal logics often affect transformations by cloaking how selves, property, relationships, and socialities are being re-imagined, invoking old forms but with politically charged new formulations. Contemporary media forms aid this process in a number of ways by assisting people in reformulating how to understand property (Kelty Reference Kelty2008), what is public and private (see Papacharissi Reference Papacharissi2010), and what are rights to be protected by governments and rights to be granted by corporations (see Vaidhyanathan Reference Vaidhyanathan2011). How do these reformulations, often made concrete for people through the technological structures they encounter, change people's practices in their daily lives? And how do technologies designed with embedded neoliberal social narratives affect how people communicate?
These books are all interdisciplinary, far more so than, say, historical monographs on the introduction of the telegraph or the postal system. As a result, for readers more comfortable with a particular disciplinary tradition, each book may seem not to do enough in a given direction. The authors engage in a difficult balancing act as they address different academic, policy, and activist audiences. Some readers of Livingstone's book may wish she had more ethnographic accounts of children's Internet practices, or more statistical analysis. Readers approaching Gray's book, having been told it is about queer youth and new media, might expect far more discussion of the Internet in the first few chapters. For me, these varied expectations are an indication of how challenging it is to write about how social actors and newish objects interact, and how imaginative these authors’ analyses are. For some time to come, authors writing against the myths surrounding new media are likely to struggle with similar balancing acts, created by the interdisciplinarity required to analyze these phenomena effectively. Let us hope they are as thoughtful and deft as these authors.
