A rant in two parts
Part 1: Internet Studies, Cultural Studies

The delightful Kris has just come back from AoIR, and reflects on the lack of connection he felt with the approaches of many people there; people with whom he shares a common subject of study (weblogs), but whose objects of study, and methodological frameworks, are worlds apart. This is something I, as a fence-sitting sociologically-tainted cultural studies person, have also begun to notice in the field of Internet Studies: a field which is not so much emerging as it is in the process of lockdown; validating itself as Serious and Important work via the tried-and-true technique of erecting a scaffolded structure of positivist social science research around the otherwise maddenly elusive Internet, furnishing the rooms with Big Topics (Regulation, Governance, and Law) that map nicely onto Big Instutions and decorating them with numbers – lots and lots of numbers. It’s hard to find space in this structure for academic practices that seek to understand the ephemeral, the apparently trivial, the emergent, and which are in themselves insistently relational, reflective, recombinatory. The frustrating thing is that the smaller, richer pictures, and the relations between them, could be very productively brought into dialogue with the Big one. But there are language barriers, and academic class divides, in the way.

Of course, I’m being clumsy and overly aggressive. Of course, the Big Topics are Big for several reasons (many of which need to be persistently worried at and not merely assumed). Of course Internet Studies is bigger than “new media” and “online community” (but should it be smaller?). And of course there’s room for social and cultural research of every persuasion – trust me, I do empirical work myself, and sometimes I too like to know “how much”? “where”, and “in what circumstances”? In fact, one of the frustrating things is that in the context of humanities research, I’m relatively (sometimes grumpily) prosaic, pragmatic, even positivist (a lot of alliteration here, isn’t there?) But I have in recent times felt deeply frustrated at the end of a promising paper that turned out to be full of stats and graphs and mystical diagrams that gloss over the hard questions, and delivered or invited none of the rigorous and critical debate that I had wrongly assumed the quantitative analysis was designed to provoke.

I also get the distinct impression that “new media” studies, and even worse, “cyberculture” studies, are thought to be first-wave Internet nonsense, and the worst possible symptoms of the aestheticisation of the academy, the cultural turn in the social sciences, and postmodernism to boot. And since many people assume (quite wrongly) that cultural studies is about the celebration of media cool, whatever “wow” factor cultural studies once had in the academy has evidently faded away in some circles. In the eyes of the social sciences, we are the emperor’s new clothes; recently reclaimed from a charity shop and being worn most inappropriately to a Serious and Important dinner party.