Virtual Methods

New Connections, Familiar Settings • 131
aspects of Trini-ness, including ‘liming’ and ‘ole talk’. ‘Liming’ is chatting,
hanging around, exchanging banter, finding out what is happening: traditionally a
practice of the street corner, it is now reproduced and practised on the Internet.
‘The term “lime” is regarded as quintessentially Trini – both definitive of the place
and definitive of its people’ (Miller and Slater 2000: 89). Similarly one finds on the
Internet ‘ole talk’ – endless talk about nothing in particular, stories, banter and
ridicule invariably of a sexual nature.
Miller and Slater’s work is important and distinctive because it focuses on the
interconnections between, on the one hand, virtual communication, and on the
other hand, local culture and everyday life. Perhaps counter-intuitively, they found
that the global communications network of the Internet enhanced and strengthened
local, indigenous culture, rather than functioning as a technology of homogenization.
For the purposes of this chapter, the significant point is that their analysis contrasts
clearly with that of virtual ethnographers, who have focused on online
interaction and activity, and who give less attention to participants’ offline lives
and how Internet activity connects with these.
Somehow, decontextualizing use of the Internet exaggerates its significance for
identities and everyday lives, and emphasizes the radical potentials and practices
of Internet use. While not all Internet research extols the virtues of multiple and
fluid identities, arguments or analyses that focus on extreme variants of Internet
use are more likely to be generated by research that focuses on the electronic text.
Much research on electronic communities has examined those who are heavier,
rather than more ordinary or less committed, users. By contrast, focusing on
Internet use in everyday life examines how Internet use connects and balances
with other aspects of everyday life and identity. Examining the context of use, by
definition, roots the research in everyday life, exploring how the potentials of the
Internet are taken up and deployed in practice.
Using the Internet is a process of writing and reading texts and the task of the
ethnographer is to understand these practices. Understanding the meaning of texts,
however, is far from straightforward. It is difficult to isolate, in any simple sense,
a single text for analysis, because of the interdiscursive nature of textual meaning
(Bennett and Woollacott 1987). Every media text is mediated by other texts, so no
text is bounded (Grossberg 1987). The text does not occupy a fixed position, but is
always mobilized, placed or articulated with other texts in different ways. This
raises the question of whether the text is dissolved into its readings. Barthes
(1977), for example, argues that it becomes a text – as opposed to a ‘work’ – only
when it is read. Rather than being fixed or stable, the text is continually re-created
through the ‘work’ of reading. Indeed, it is argued that there is no text beyond the
readings that are made of it – which leads Fiske (1989) to argue (about television
viewing) that there is no such thing as either text or audience, only processes
of viewing. Such a position points researchers in the direction of consumption