Untitled - socium.ge

Reflexive Internet? The British experience 137epistemologically informed social studies of science. As a result, those of ustrained in that tradition attach considerable weight to the view that the natureof scientific knowledge, the results born of natural science, are best understoodas the upshot of the social circumstances of their production rather thanas a simple reflection of the actual state of affairs. The same applies to socialscientific knowledge. In Britain at least, there is considerable reluctance toaccept the idea that the methodologies and technologies of research are neutraltools which afford objective results. Results can no longer be considered asjust results, in a kind of transcendental isolation. Since the conditions ofresearching the network society are instead part and parcel of the “results,”these results are always results for somebody, some organization or institution.In this closing section, I indicate how this distinctive feature of British socialscience perspectives is intertwined with the emerging characteristics of theBritish “network society.”The Virtual Society? program was a major program of empirical researchexamining the social implications of Internet technologies in a wide range ofapplication areas across the UK. This revealed a series of strikingly counterintuitiveresults as summarized in the five rules of virtuality above. In brief,we found that in the UK the new Internet technologies were not being used forthe purposes anticipated, nor by the people and groups expected, nor in theways predicted, nor at the rates widely trailed in the period leading up to thedot-com crash. The results are thus counter-intuitive in the precise sense thatthey are against expectation. But the point about the relativity of the resultsallows us to see that there are important additional dimensions to this insight.It turns out, for example, that although many of the results were surprisinglycounter-intuitive in some quarters, they were viewed as more or lesscommonsensical by others. For example, the discovery that clerical workerspay little heed to the supposed dangers of privacy intrusion, associated withelectronic office systems, was of little news to the workers themselves (Masonet al., 2002). Rather, it turned out that this finding ran counter to the specificclaims of researchers within the labor process tradition, to some trade unioninterests, and to some concerns voiced within the media. This differentialdistribution of responses thus underlines the relativity of the results. It alsoraises at least two further crucial research questions. First, to the extent that weare willing to accept that such insights are counter-intuitive we might legitimatelyinquire: what then has happened to our intuitions?! What processes,what sets of social relations and associations, what alliances between differentsocial institutions have helped shape our expectations, such that researchdocumenting the absence of a much-anticipated effect is greeted withsurprise?Secondly, it reminds us once again to beware the temptation, when speakingof new technologies, to engage in the forms of “clumping” that go with