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5. Reflexive Internet? The Britishexperience of new electronictechnologiesSteve WoolgarA cartoon – well known to scholars in social studies of science – depicts awhite-coated scientist holding a clipboard, intently taking notes on a group ofbaboons. Behind him, a sociologist holding a clipboard is intently taking noteson the scientist. The point of the joke is that no single set of observationsoccurs in a contextual vacuum, that “what the baboons are like” is not straightforwardly,objectively available, but is the upshot of observations whichalways implicate layers of circumstance and context. Indeed, it is this samesituation that gives rise to the oft-noted phenomenon that, for example,baboons observed by German scientists exhibit markedly German characteristics;that baboons observed by British scientists display remarkably “British”traits, and so on. Importantly, the effect is constitutive of the entity beingobserved; the baboons become British.Applied to our understanding of the Internet, this general phenomenonsuggests a reflexive connection between our ideas about “the Internet” and thecircumstances of its apprehension and use. In particular, it is difficult tocontinue to think of the Internet as some kind of neutral technology aroundwhich there are simply differential responses. The nature and meaning of thetechnology is inseparably bound up with the circumstances of its use. This, inturn, has implications for our efforts to ask straightforward questions of thekind: is the Internet actually very different in different countries, regions,areas, organizations, groups, households? 1These observations are important and pertinent at this point in the evolutionof Internet studies. The story to be told in this chapter is about a set of UKbasedattempts to research the “social dimensions” of electronic technologies.But it is also a story about how to do such research while attempting to sustaina questioning attitude to the technologies under study. The first part of thechapter reviews some features of the evolution of Internet studies that nowmake a more reflexive appraisal of the Internet timely. In particular, it isargued, it is now time to take a hard analytic look at how we are using the125