INTRODUCTION

In an insightful essay that argues for the necessity of a cultural studies approach to the Internet, Sterne has pointed to the prevalence within academic studies of considering the Internet as a ‘millennial cultural force’ (1999: 258, original emphasis). He finds that the most common approach in these studies is to treat the Internet in terms of binary oppositions, most typically those of revolution/alienation and technophilia/technophobia. These approaches, he argues, assume the technology is autonomous from other forces (social, political, cultural) and suggest a highly deterministic place for the Internet. Lacking these contexts, such studies fail in their attempts to understand the Internet in two key ways. First, following Bourdieu, Sterne argues that it is the careful construction of the research object that these studies fail to undertake. What, precisely, in other words, does it mean to study the Internet? Is it, for instance, to study a communication tool, an information resource, an electronic network, a mass medium, or even a set of industrial practices? Without clarity on what is being studied we can learn nothing. Too often, it seems, the academic is essaying an investigation that is founded on rhetorical claims (‘the information superhighway’, for example), rather than critically examining the nature and provenance of such claims and their location within culture. Second, and proceeding from that, there appears a tendency to treat the Internet as a largely autonomous site, for study negates contexts, whether historical, economic, political, social or cultural.