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here is one overriding sense in which culture appears to be a driver behind the internet as a globalizing agent: new media technologies offer themselves as prestige objects of material culture through which people exchange, objectify and perform diverse notions of the global, of the future and of translocal interconnection. This is very far from saying that we can identify a culture that stands behind the internet, let alone a new culture that has been produced by it. Rather, we might simply say in Levi-Strausss old phrase that many people have found the internet good to think with, and that the things they think with it tend to be about the globe and about the future. Let me give a few examples from my past research:1 Trinidad, 1999: a Catholic charismatic eloquently argues that she experiences in the global scale and complexity of the internet a sense of transcendence that brings the user closer to God. Similarly, an Apostolic Christian feels deeply that God had to give humanity the internet so that they could finally envisage the coming future of global salvation: since the net is so global it immediately allows the church to feel global, and is therefore given by God to realize His plans. And a Pentacostal with much media experience was clear that the internet, along with TV and radio, were closer to the structure of a Pentecostal mind in terms of the relationship they have got: God is immediate.2

* Don Slater is a Reader in Sociology at the London School Economics. His research interests include theories of consumption (Consumer Culture and Modernity, Polity 1997); sociology of economic life (The Technological Economy, with Andrew Barry, Routledge, 2005); and visual culture (photography). For the past seven years he has been engaged in ethnographies of new media use in non-northern places (e.g. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, with Daniel Miller, Berg, 2000), and is currently completing a book-length treatment of this research agenda, New Media, Globalization and Development (Polity).

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Trinidad, June, 1999: Canadian representatives of IBM and KPMG hold a breakfast seminar for Trinidadian business leaders. The message they deliver is that the internet and information-based economy is the last train to global modernity, productivity and profit. It has already left the station, but if the Trinidadian elite run very quickly they might just jump on the caboose. The Trini response is both feverish and self-castigating: the participants already entirely accepted that the internet is the inevitable future; the seminar simply stunned them with the amount of ground they had already lost, yet again, in securing their proper place on the global stage; they felt (and were told) that this was their last chance. Ghana, 20024: the Ghanaian government launches a series of ICT (information and communication technology) policy documents that envisage transforming the country from agricultural society to information society within twenty years, leaping over the industrial age. This embrace of informationalization is both an alliance with prevalent development and business discourses, and a thorough break with previous Ghanaian development narratives. The documents build on deeply internalized concepts of information society drawn from international academics, development agencies, business experience and consultants; these concepts are performed through, inter alia, policy documents, seminars, informal contacts, enforcement through conditionality, rhetorical constructions, and so on. The resulting documents project a top-down transformation of every aspect of Ghanaian governance and society, covering everything from health and education services to the generation of a software programming elite and off-shoring operations. Ghana 2003, fieldsite in Accra: in an extremely poor migrant area, there is large-scale and enthusiastic internet use, particularly by young people, in up to ten internet cafes along the local high street. Almost none of these skilled users has ever knowingly visited a website, let alone obtained through any internet facility anything that would be construed as information by their government or by ICT and development professionals. For these young users, the internet is almost exclusively a chat facility (MSN, Yahoo) through which they seek to accumulate foreign contacts that might yield various values: money, help with visas, tickets abroad, invitations, help in getting a foreign education, a marriage partner, or simply a long list of foreign contacts to show ones friends. A Ghanaian academic colleague describes internet use simply as the latest cargo cult: if all value is abroad, the internet enables both practical and symbolic enactments of escape. More concretely, people understand the new technology in terms of a very old logic in which success in life depends on being enmeshed in a web of relationships;3 the internet is a means by which that web might more effectively enmesh northerners.

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North America, early 1990s: cyberculture activists perceive in the internet the achievement of both virtuality and disembedding, whereby identity is detached from the essentialism of the body on the one hand and physical social context on the other. Through the internet we might thereby achieve or demonstrate the truth of identity, which is its lack of truth, its constructed and performed nature. You are what you type: culminating a long tradition that perhaps starts with psychedelia, and persists through poststructuralism, they recognize that identity fixed by notions of authenticity and normativity is oppressive, and liberation lies in reflexively enacting identity as fluid, contradictory and constructed in performance. Berkeley, mid-1990s: while networks constitute the fundamental pattern of human life at all stages, it is only with the advent of the internet that this form of social organization can transcend the limitations that have so far subordinated it to hierarchical structures. The internet now enables and epitomizes the emergence of a new network society, which potentially resolves three social processes: a crisis in the industrial mode of production; the profusion of freedom-oriented cultural social movements; and the rise of technically-driven informationalism.4 The point of telling these stories is obviously not to decide which are true or false, let alone to opt for any one of them (though the Catholic charismatic was rather persuasive). Rather, they suggest that if our task is to understand something of how culture constitutes globalization, then we need to confront the internet as a cultural artifact, in all its deep complexity: what do people see in the internet, and therefore what do they seek to make it into and what do they try to perform through it? Whether they glimpse God, network society or the truth of human identity there, the internet evidently evokes some very epic visions. There are two simple responses to this approach, each of which is partially true: perhaps it is obvious that the internet would serve people as an idiom for thinking global futures because, on the one hand, the internet is in fact capable of connecting anyone to anywhere, instantaneously; and on the other hand, because these affordances have been relayed through highly prestigious global discourses (particularly American ones, as usual) so that the story of the inevitable coming of the information age has simply become global common sense. That is to say, the internet is good to think global futures because this is either, or both, an intrinsic technical property or the upshot of global ideologies. Neither point is wrong as such, but they dont take us very far. Any two people connected up to the internet (or viewing it at a remove) are alike only in that they are using an apparatus that is indeed capable of translocal connections.

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Beyond that, their understandings of the global, the internet and connection itself are likely to be consequentially different (e.g. religious transcendence versus last train to profitability). By the same token, their relationship to internationally pervasive discourses is likely to be mediated through very different histories and diverse institutional relays, power differentials and political stances (e.g. donor dependence in Ghana versus oil-based industrialization in Trinidad). In both cases, if we were to focus on the commonality (through the internet everyone is somehow bound up with globalization) rather than the differences (both internet and relations to the global are always performed quite differently) then we would be merely replicating what we are supposed to be analyzing: we would be simply globalizing the concept of globalization, using the image and practice of internet to concretize and perform the idea of a globalized world or a network society. However, there is another problem with both points, one which takes us more explicitly to the issue of culture. The first of these points is a realist argument about the nature of the technology and its effects; the second is an argument about discourse, representation or ideology. The tendency is to keep them separate, and identify the latter as the cultural aspect: there is the global spread of new mediations on the one hand, and on the other hand there is the hype (from cyberculture, to vice-presidential proclamations about information superhighways, through dot.com booms and busts, to WSIS, to Web2.0). Indeed much of my own research gets funded on precisely this basis: overseas development agencies want research that will separate the hype from the reality, and prove, unambiguously, whether or not ICTs really do have an impact on development goals. However, the stories above are not about hype, or about culture as systems of representation or discourse. They are about cosmologies, or the webs of significance5 that permeate practical forms of action, whether logging onto the internet in Accra or writing World Bank documents with a view to rationalizing global ICT and development policy. In this sense, the stories above are all snapshots of thick descriptions. What they suggest is that it is culture all the way down: these cosmologies are practical engagements with the world through which ICTs are understood and constructed; conversely, ICTs are deployed to reproduce and enact quite large-scale understandings of the world. Separating the hype from the reality is precisely what one cannot do if the internet, as material culture, is largely constituted in, and as, cosmological thinking about the nature of a changing globe, thinking carried out in diverse ways by diverse people, northern and southern.

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If the cosmologies are diverse in that people see in the internet (and rationally act upon) anything from the presence of god to epochal social transformation, then there is at least equal diversity in what they actually take the internet to mean. In fact, the internet only appears as one thing (the internet) when people are looking at it from within a particular cosmology. We can approach this from several angles. Firstly, the internet is never the same object in different places, even in the most mechanical sense. For the Ghanaian government, buying into transnational programmes of informationalization, the internet was e-government: they were clear that the internet is web-sites for public information access plus email and intranets for more effective government. However, for Ghanaian youth websites barely existed and were simply not part of their internet, which they defined as a chat medium. The farce of much ICT in development is often that users and policy-makers, beneficiaries and elites, are not even talking about the same machine, yet both may be skilled users of their own machine. Secondly, the problem is more complicated because the internet is usually a proxy for much wider constructions, such as ICTs, IT or information society. Use of the word internet marks out particularly prestigious narratives of emergent information societies, but then often scoops up other technologies into the same narrative, producing great confusion. For example, Ghanaian plans for their coming information society focused on internet but then pointed to mobile phones as if they were part of the same story. Our own research indicated that internet and mobile phone use in Ghana represented two different and fundamentally opposed processes: whereas internet was focused on a somewhat magical connection to northern values, mobile phones were already profoundly embedded in the practices of daily life and in maintaining existing social networks.6 Internet, as a proxy for information society, was also defined so that it excluded older ICTs that had no place in the prestige northern cosmologies of the globe and its future: radio was hugely popular and embedded in everyday life, was seen as central to the recent democratization of Ghana, and had close community ties through local language broadcasting, connection to church networks as well as music culture, and a very creative earlier generation of community radio activists. Yet radio had no place in government ICT policy, was largely excluded from Ghanaian preparations for WSIS, and was not connected to ICT (read internet) projects. We can go further: the most important ICT in rural Ghana was clearly roads and buses, and any medium which does not connect with the movement of people-with-messages can have very little impact or relevance. Yet within

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cosmologies of information society, it provoked a sense of ritual defilement even to put roads and internet in the same sentence let alone the same plan. This situation prompts recourse to Actor Network Theory.7 Crudely put, entities like the internet are given a false unity and stability within these various cosmologies they are black boxed whereas their productive use depends on opening them out to interconnection, to extensive enrollment of the materials and people to hand, to taking new material and institutional shapes, and to the construction of contingent assemblages (e.g. internet + radio + roads = a useful ICT). The guiding concept in all the studies on which this chapter is based was communicative ecology: instead of studying the impact of a new communicative machine (the internet) on a culture, or of a local culture on a new machine, let us look at what actually counts as an act of communication, or a medium, or information in a particular place. Taking this approach, it is easier to open the black boxes. Instead of assuming that we know in advance what the internet is (let alone what the local culture is), we instead focus on the diverse things that actual people assemble into systems for communicating: machines, roads, social networks, theories, global discourses, and much more. Thirdly, even where we can reasonably assume that we are talking about a similar feature of the same object (the internet), the differences overwhelm the similarities. It is clearly true that most people understand the internet in terms of global connectivity (for example, rural Sri Lankan children, who had often never seen a computer, regularly described the internet as extremely fast mail that you can send anywhere). But consider how the globe and globalization are constructed through the material culture of the internet in the following cases, all focused on youth. In Ghana, the internet is seen by poor young users as a conduit to northern goods that replicates histories of donor dependency, post-colonial migration and structural adjustment livelihood strategies: for these users, the global is identified with specific geographical routes to poverty reduction, and these are developed through internet, but not mobile phone, use. By contrast, rural Sri Lankan youth, steeped in a village-centred moral universe, regarded global connectivity as a means by which the globe can be accorded the privilege to see website photographs of their village shrines and local landscape; and by which migrant Sri Lankan labourers in the Middle East could see and hear the village. Young Trinidadians, on the other hand, see themselves as naturally global actors who have been marginalized by global scenes (educational, economic, musical, whatever), or have had to leave Trinidad for London, Toronto or New York in order to realize their

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cosmopolitan sense of themselves. They prided themselves on their knowledge of other places, and their ability to operate anywhere, absorb anything on their own terms. Unlike with Ghanaian youths, for example, it was definitely not cool to copy northern hiphop styles: soca music had always absorbed whatever it encountered within its own aesthetic structures, and the expanded contacts afforded by the internet developed along precisely the same lines. All these stories involve the global, perform the global; they even globalize. But they are obviously more than a matter of local instantiations of something global called globalization or the internet. They also signify more than the mediation of the global through local conditions. They are about the production of different globes and global connections, different maps and different journeys. And this leads to a fourth issue: these different maps and journeys, these different internets, are not culture in the vague sense that the internet is somehow moulded by local or indigenous or traditional values and beliefs, or that culture forms a context for assimilating a given object. What people glimpse in the internet is both theoretical and practical, models of how the world works (or could work) and strategies for achieving goals within the kind of world they perceive. Lets pursue this final point through another example: Meenakshi was a member of a womens self-help group (SHG) in a village in southern India. The group participated in a UNESCO project through which it received ICT equipment, plus a researcher/project worker for a year; equipment and worker were to be located in one of their members houses. The original project proposal intended that the SHG should focus their ICT use on income generating activities: in this development discourse, ICTs should feed into income generation by various routes such as designing and printing marketing materials, learning skills online and by CD, email communication with experts, access to market information and so on. This initially framed the technologies as directly instrumental tools within a vision of technical modernization. Meenakshi and her colleagues had not previously encountered ICTs directly, but they had been represented to her in many ways: glimpsed in Bollywood films, in billboard ads for local private computer schools (one in her village carried the tag-line, computer education: boon for middle class), from family connections in the cities, from local NGOs, from educated local people, from prior UNESCO visits, and so on. In all these encounters, ICTs were selfevident framed as the inevitable future of the world, from local to national to regional to global scale; they summed up what it will now mean to be modern and to survive in yet another new modernity. As the project developed, all of this was also negotiated, debated and rethought in engagements with other

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self-help groups, with the project worker, and with UNESCO workers like myself. Indeed, Meenakshi and others were very clear that ICTs generally brought them into extensive global connections by means other than actually using them: the transaction of these technical objects involved conversations, networks, institutional ties that forged new geographies (and frankly the internet connection itself often didnt work). In this context, Meenakshi to a great extent experienced ICTs as a new burden. She was an extremely poor woman, separated from her husband (and therefore of very problematic status), with a 10-year-old daughter, employed in coolie labour on roads and fields. She was already investing a staggering proportion of her income on private school tuition for her daughter. She would now have to invest in computer literacy in addition, because it was now accepted as an essential survival skill within any responsible mothers familial livelihood strategy. Meenakshi accepted this level of sacrifice because she accepted the place of ICTs in the global future. However, she was very unclear as to how precisely these ICTs actually connected up to that future, let alone to particular career paths or other modes of advancing her daughter. That is to say, she was in precisely the same situation as UNESCO and me; indeed, the only reason I met her was that all of us were sure that ICTs were part of the future, in some sense, but could not specify quite how. We all had to generate development theories and strategies. Meenakshis theorization of the future through the idiom of ICTs followed two contrary routes, and she was quite typical in this respect. On the one hand, she assimilated ICTs to a much older development narrative: people advance their children by helping them to get educational credentials that should lead to secure white collar office jobs. Meenakshi had at this point never seen the inside of an office, but knew this to be the gold standard of social advancement. Whereas previously she would have had to invest in English language lessons and secretarial courses for her daughter, now it would take computer literacy as well. On the other hand, Meenakshis own encounter with ICTs as opposed to her theorizing of development on her daughters behalf pointed towards a different line of analysis: Meenakshi loved this technology and was extremely adept. Although entirely illiterate, she could always find the right menu commands, produced very inventive drawings, wrote her name on screen, loved using a digital camera, and could run all the peripherals, such as the printers. Meenakshi perceived and acted upon a potential for empowerment and democracy, in which her access to technology and status within the group

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depended on her energy and skill in the matter at hand. The similarity to new economy visions of ICT-driven flattening of hierarchies, innovation and meritocracy is hard to avoid. However, this vision got her into trouble, and led to her and her daughters temporary expulsion from the group: Meenakshi easily got the printer to work when the highest status woman (who also had a powerful relative and a college degree) floundered and failed. She was labelled as aggressive and insubordinate, and finally as corrupt. Meenakshi therefore constructed not one but two configurations of technology, development theory and practical strategy. One assimilated new technology to a very old view of social structure while the other saw in technical relations the means for overturning social structures. One started from conventional narratives of social mobility through education; the other started from practical engagements with the technologies and with social relationships around the technologies. In both cases, however, particular objects (printers, computers) and models of social process are directly connected up because what is at stake are strategies and practices: again, both UNESCO and Meenakshi were concerned with ICTs in the first place because they are framed as the global future; and in order to see how ICTs might be practically mobilized to achieve desired futures and connections, both had to act as development theorists. Whether it is useful to describe all this under the notion of culture is another matter. The whole terrain of internet and ICTs is seriously paradoxical. On the one hand, it has prompted the most extravagant claims about the production of diversity: visions of a world of promiscuous and unbounded interconnection, dissolving identities, allegiances and institutions into fluid and multiform networks, and based on a technical imaginary of centreless aggregations of semi-autonomous nodes. On the other hand, academic and public discourse has spoken a language of extreme uniformity, universalism and technological determinism: it is somehow inherent in the very nature of the internet to produce such a new world, wherever it is instantiated; and this process is somehow so irresistible that, despite local resistance or mediation, we can glimpse the global future in this bit of material culture. In this sense, the cosmologies of internet spilling out of the north have also provided much of the energy and imagery for the idea of globalization itself (after all, the term appeared at about the same time that internet became a public obsession). It is probably also not a coincidence that internet-based visions of information society are arguably the first since nineteenth-century romantic nationalism to portray total and epochal social transformation in largely cultural terms, in that a new communicative machine has become extrapolated into a new social order.

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What is missing from these accounts is something simpler: the profusion of cultures, globes, technologies that arises from diverse peoples attempts to make sense of what the world now is, how it works and how to live within it through their encounters with an object that seems capable of both representing and producing the world.