Delivering the Virtual Promise from access to use in the virtual society

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Delivering the Virtual Promise?from access to
use in the virtual society

• Steve Woolgar
• ESRC Virtual Society? Programme
• Brunel University
• www.virtualsociety.org.uk
• QEII Centre, London, 19th June 2000

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Delivering the Virtual Promise?

• The Hype
• The Virtual Society? programme
• Positive Scepticism
• Preliminary Results four rules of virtuality
• Delivering the Virtual Promise

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Delivering the Virtual Promise?

• The Hype
• The Virtual Society? programme
• Positive Scepticism
• Preliminary Results four rules of virtuality
• Delivering the Virtual Promise

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Delivering the Virtual Promise?

• The Hype
• The Virtual Society? programme
• Positive Scepticism
• Preliminary Results four rules of virtuality
• Delivering the Virtual Promise

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Virtual Society? - the problem

• Massive growth of new electronic technologies,
  but social context of use poorly understood
• Fundamental shifts in how people behave, organise
  themselves and interact as a result of new
  technologies?
• Changes in nature/experience of interpersonal
  relations, communications, social control,
  participation, cohesion?
• Crucial bearing on commercial and business
  success, quality of life, future of society

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Virtual Society? - the Programme

• 1997-2001 22 projects in 25 British universities
• 67 academic researchers
• wide range of applications areas
• counter-intuitive initial results interesting
  if true
• research AND outreach

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Delivering the Virtual Promise?

• The Hype
• The Virtual Society? programme
• Positive Scepticism
• Preliminary Results four rules of virtuality
• Delivering the Virtual Promise

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Positive scepticism

• the ambivalence of new technology
• technology good/bad
• technology love/hate
• technology works/doesnt work
• same technology, different effects
• same effects, different technology...

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• Over the course of a few years a new
  communications technology annihilated distance
  and shrank the world faster and further than ever
  before. A world wide communications network whose
  cables spanned continents and oceans, it
  revolutionised business practice and gave rise to
  new forms of crime. Romances blossomed. Secret
  codes were devised by some and cracked by others.
  The benefits of the network were relentlessly
  hyped by its advocates and dismissed by the
  sceptics. Governments and regulators tried and
  failed to control the new medium and attitudes to
  everything from news gathering to diplomacy had
  to be completely rethought.

10

• Over the course of a few years a new
  communications technology annihilated distance
  and shrank the world faster and further than ever
  before. A world wide communications network whose
  cables spanned continents and oceans, it
  revolutionised business practice and gave rise to
  new forms of crime. Romances blossomed. Secret
  codes were devised by some and cracked by others.
  The benefits of the network were relentlessly
  hyped by its advocates and dismissed by the
  sceptics. Governments and regulators tried and
  failed to control the new medium and attitudes to
  everything from news gathering to diplomacy had
  to be completely rethought.
• The telegraph, mid 1840s (Standage, 1998)

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Positive scepticism

• the ambivalence of new technology
• technology good/bad
• technology love/hate
• technology works/doesnt work
• same technology, different effects
• same effects, different technology
• beware cyberbole!

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Delivering the Virtual Promise?

• The Hype
• The Virtual Society? programme
• Positive Scepticism
• Preliminary Results four rules of virtuality
• Delivering the Virtual Promise

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Four Rules of Virtuality

• Current rate of straightforward rapid expansion
  may not continue.
• New technologies tend to supplement rather than
  substitute for existing practices and forms of
  organisation
• The more virtual the more real!
• The more global the more local! - impact of new
  technologies depends crucially on their local
  social context

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Delivering the Virtual Promise?

• The Hype
• The Virtual Society? programme
• Positive Scepticism
• Preliminary Results four rules of virtuality
• Delivering the Virtual Promise

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Delivering the Virtual Promise?

• Access for all in five years?
• What kinds of access? For whom? To what?
• How to move from access to meaningful use?
• How to sustain positive scepticism?

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Delivering the Virtual Promise?from access to
use in the virtual society

• Steve Woolgar
• ESRC Virtual Society? Programme
• Brunel University
• www.virtualsociety.org.uk
• QEII Centre, London, 19th June 2000

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The Institutions of the New Economy

• Manuel Castells
• University of California, Berkeley
• Delivering the Virtual Promise? QEII Centre,
  London, 19th June 2000