Internet... the Final Frontier: An Ethnographic Account
	Captain's Log The Internet as a cultural space Governing Technologies and Techniques of Government: Politics on the Net Hello Usenet - Good-bye? Agency and Ordering in Electronic Communication 'Last Chance for Common Sense': A comprehensive view of the Internet Literature Acronyms and Abbreviations
	Captain's Log
	Jump-off point 1   Welcome to the Net 2   Project outline 3   Exploring the new territory
	It´s 1999, and the Internet is stretching out before us - into infinity. You are reading the final report of the research project entitled "The Internet as a space of interaction. Net culture and network organisation in open data networks". This text is accompanied by a CD-ROM containing our collected works about the Net, also to be found on our Internet web server at http://duplox.wz-berlin.de. This joint project, involving the WZB and the Technical University of Berlin, was sponsored from 1996 to 1998 by the Volkswagen Foundation as part of the priority programme on "New information and communication technologies in the economy, media and society: interplay and future prospects". It was carried out by the project group "The Cultural Space of the Internet", which was founded in early 1994 in the WZB department of "Organisation and Genesis of Technologies".1
	1 Welcome to the Net
	The 1990s was the decade of the Information Society in Germany, as it was in other countries. The construction and expansion of information infrastructures became part of the political agenda; "multimedia" was voted word of the year in 1995; and the Bundestag set up a commission of inquiry on "The Future of the Media in the Economy and in Society: Germany´s Pathway into the Information Society".2 Connection to the Internet on a global scale and ever speedier communication are trends that involve a huge part of the contemporary world. The Internet has transformed itself from a research network into a universal medium at a speed which has surprised many. A presence on the Net seems to have become an indispensable part of public life. If we subdivide processes of technical development (as an ideal type) into the three phases of emergence, stabilisation and establishment (Dierkes 1997; Weyer et al. 1997), we would probably now situate the Internet in the "established" phase. The number of computers connected to the Net across the world has increased more than ten times in the last four years: the Internet Domain Survey counted over 3 million Internet hosts in July 1994, compared to over 36 million in the summer of 1998 ( http://www.nw.com/zone/WWW/report.html). The number of countries with international Internet connections grew from around 70 to over 170 over the same period (to July 1997). Although the Internet has undoubtedly become established, it is now less than ever a "finished" technology. Today´s Internet is no longer what it was only a few years ago. New services such as the WWW have changed its appearance fundamentally, its functions have been expanded by innovations such as Internet telephony and push channels, and growing commercial use has increased the security and reliability requirements of e-commerce and legal business. In short, the establishment phase has brought the Internet far-reaching and radical change.
	2 Project outline
	In the Net Culture and Network Organisation project we wanted to know what essentially holds the distributed "net of nets" together. The central thesis behind our research was that the open, unbounded network has a kind of implicit design plan. This implicit design has left its mark on the Internet in the course of its use, during which Net users have effectively constructed the system. In addition to this thesis, we also started out with certain fundamental assumptions regarding the Internet as a cultural and sociological object of investigation. These assumptions are packaged together in the concept of "cultural space". We looked at the Net as a new kind of space of interaction, distancing ourselves from the metaphor of the Information Highway which became popular in 1993/94 and portrayed computer networks merely as arteries that transport information (see Canzler, Helmers and Hoffmann 1997 on the information highway metaphor). In the global information space, saturated with technical media, the exchange of information and its regulation are subject to different conditions than those applying in the traditional (mass) media or in the geographical space of distinct nation states. For us the culture of the Internet represented a "complex whole" in the ethnological sense, which both includes and pervades knowledge and usage, and institutions and artefacts (see Helmers, Hoffmann and Hofmann 1996). The material, immaterial, technical and social elements of the network do not evolve in isolation, rather constitute a cultural web of meaning, which growth and transformation now threaten to tear apart. The description of cultures is traditionally carried out using ethnographical methods. Ethnography means going to the scene of the action, observing people in their activities, possibly becoming personally involved and recording what occurs. The world of the Internet can also be an object of ethnography and be described "from within" (see Helmers 1994). The technical basis of computer networks does not, in principle, prevent the researcher from becoming personally involved in the object under observation. Both access (literally and in the sense of understanding) to the field and investigation of the field do, however, entail particular prerequisites; on the other hand, the Net also permits hitherto unfamiliar forms of observation (cf. Hofmann 1998b). Field research on the Internet thus requires the researcher to be equipped with the relevant technology and practical experience to a degree which is otherwise uncommon in cultural and sociological projects. To summarise these four aspects: our approach involved a spatial model of communication, an ethnological concept of culture, a commitment to a perspective of the Internet from within and a determined immersion in technology. On this basis we chose three arenas for an empirical investigation: the technology of Internet nodes; the basic Internet transmission protocol; and a popular communication service. The three parts of this report each take us to one of these three areas of investigation. The central concern of the first part is the Unix culture - dominant for so long among Internet hosts - and its reincorporation into the technical and social norms of data traffic. The second part is concerned with the political aspects of the Net, as exemplified by the reform of the Internet Protocol (IP). We show how the reigning architecture of the Net and the "techniques of government" in Internet governance are bound together. Using the example of Usenet, the third part tunes into the noise of a medium in use. Here we illuminate communicative action on Usenet which is concerned with the medium of communication itself. All three strands of the investigation are equally concerned with questions of "being" and "becoming". In the conclusion we highlight those aspects of the interaction space of the Internet which, in our opinion, continue to exert an influence on the constantly expanding Net even as it changes. Both efforts to reform "from within" and attempts to regulate "from without" have to work on the basis of these concurring patterns of organisation. Our study thus ultimately illustrates the continuities accompanying the transformations - in other words, how persistently the culture of the Internet asserts itself even in the phase of radical change.
	3 Exploring the new territory
	The Internet has gained in terms of visibility and - at least in the industrialised countries - in terms of social and economic relevance. There has also been a growth of cultural and sociological research about the Net. A rough survey of the more recent literature in English reveals three main areas of interest. Works on virtual communities that have grown up around the services of the Internet are most common: social relationships and the formation of identity in the information space have been the main objects of investigation here, while some researchers have also treated the internal organisation of Net services (see, e.g., Jones 1995 and 1998; Kollock and Smith 1998; Porter 1997; Shields 1996; Sudweeks, McLaughlin and Rafaeli 1998; Turkle 1996). The second area of interest, which has received much less attention, is the reappraisal and documentation of the history of the Internet (see, e.g., Hafner and Lyon 1996; Hauben and Hauben 1997; Salus 1995). The third research area is concerned with political and legal questions of Internet governance (see the following volumes of essays for an overview: Kahin and Keller 1997; Kahin and Nesson 1997; Loader 1997). An enormous quantity of books about the Net has also appeared in Germany over the past few years.3 The majority of these are instructions for construction and use, course books and dictionaries, but there is also an increasing number of social science titles.4 The only recently discovered "terra incognita of Computer networks" (Wetzstein and Dahm 1996, p. 37) has become a favourite destination for business trips. In sociological research the new reality of the world of the Net is being given a superstructure of old/new objects of knowledge. Objects of knowledge are not found; they are made. The Net as a cultural space, the focus of our project, is one such object of knowledge constituted by the anthropology of technology. To this corresponds a form of representation which reflects the images recurring in the field under investigation. (We are confident that the readers of this report will not be entirely unfamiliar with the voyages of the Starship Enterprise: space...the final frontier...) The external perspective of regulation and control offers another type of approach. This, for example, is the approach of the project being carried out at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne: "The Internet and the development of research computer networks. An international comparison from a governance perspective".5 While this project focuses on the genesis of the technical infrastructure of the Internet, the Telecommunications Research Group at the University of Bremen is investigating which public instruments can be used to foster the institutionalisation of the new technologies of communication at the applications end. Their project is entitled "Pathways into the Information Society. Comparing German, EU and U.S. 'Multimedia' Initiatives and their Institutional Embedding" ( http://infosoc.informatik.uni-bremen.de/internet/widi/start.html). The Internet as a "life world" represents a third approach. The question here is how the new forms of computer-based communication affect identities, relationships and communities (see Döring 1998 on the present state of research). Thus, the "Virtual Communities: The Social World of the Internet" project under the social science priority programme "Switzerland: Towards the Future" is concerned with the question of whether virtual communities possess a function of social integration and what power they have to bond people together     ( http://sozweber.unibe.ch/ii/virt_d.html). The project group "Transit Culture" at the RWTH in Aachen is examining the role of global networking in the transformation of the space-time framework ( http://www.rwth-aachen.de/ifs/Ww/transit.html). Finally, the Net is becoming interesting as a place of commercial innovation, as an "electronic marketplace". In this context a technology assessment project is being carried out at the Karlsruhe Research Centre on "Internet Payment Systems for Digital Products and Services" ( http://www.itas.fzk.de/deu/projekt/pez.htm). Digital money is also a focus of the project "The Internet as a Global Store of Knowledge" at the Humboldt University in Berlin, which comes under the inter-regional DFG Research Cooperative "Media - Theory - History" ( http://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/I+G/Listen/Forschung.html). Inevitably connected with electronic commercial dealings are new requirements for legal relations on the open Internet with its lack of state borders. In this area - as in others - the Net is becoming not only an object of research and regulation but also a resource for these; see, e.g., the "German Cyberlaw Project" (http://www.Mathematik.Uni-Marburg.de/~cyberlaw/) and the "Cyberlaw Encyclopaedia" ( http://gahtan.com/techlaw/home.htm). A further line of investigation concerns online research tools. The working group "Online Research" set up at the Centre for Surveys, Methods and Analyses in Mannheim (ZUMA) in May 1998 is dealing with fundamental scientific questions in the area of Internet-based procedures of data collection ( http://www.or.zuma-mannheim.de/). The examples mentioned are an indication of the increasingly diverse links between the Internet and economics, politics, science and the world we live in. There is no shortage of prognoses that the Net will change our lives, but assessments of the actual extent of social change that it will bring vary widely. While some see it as merely a transitory home for more or less fleeting computer-mediated social worlds (Rammert 1998), others discern the evolution of a "qualitatively new kind of society" (Bühl 1997). While our "insider" perspective allows us to make certain well-founded conjectures about the persistence of traditional forms of order within the Net, we cannot make far-reaching statements about the sociological significance of open data networks. But we can at least point out that the correlation between growth in size, centralisation and the development of hierarchies observed in traditional "large technological infrastructure systems" (Mayntz 1993, p. 105) is not yet apparent on the Internet - quite the contrary. Trends towards increasing heterogeneity and decentralisation in Net architecture and in applications are becoming apparent. But then the Net is not a normal information infrastructure, rather it is possibly "the best and most original American contribution to the world since jazz. Like really, really good jazz, the Internet is individualistic, inventive, thoughtful, rebellious, stunning, and even humorous. Like jazz, it appeals to the anarchist in us all..."(Edward J. Valauskas, cited in Rilling 1998). Now that we have completed our work, the project group "The Cultural Space of the Internet" bids you farewell. We would like to thank all those who have supported us by providing information, effort, advice, criticism and, last but not least, financial contributions. "Energy!" 1 Apart from the "standing members" (Sabine Helmers, Ute Hoffmann, Jeanette Hofmann, Lutz Marz, Claudia Nentwich, Jillian-Beth Stamos-Kaschke und Kai Seidler), the following people also contributed to the work of the group: Tilman Baumgärtel, Meinolf Dierkes, Valentina Djordjevic, Volker Grassmuck, Madeleine Kolodzi, Johannes Brijnesh Jain, Thei van Laanen, Jörg Müller, Martin Recke, Barbara Schlüter, Evelyn Teusch und Eef Vermeij. 2The commission concluded its work in the summer of 1998 (see the reports under http://www.bundestag.de/gremien/14344x.htm). 3While in the autumn of 1995 the "Internet Literature List" counted around fifty publications in German, three years later, in autumn 1998, there were over a thousand ( http://medweb.uni-muenster.de/zbm/liti.html). 4A selection of titles in German:Becker & Paetau 1997, Bühl 1997, Brill & deVries 1998, Gräf & Krajewski 1997, Hinner 1996, Münker & Roesler 1997, Rost 1996, Stegbauer 1996, Werle & Lang 1997. 5 http://www.mpi-fg-koeln.mpg.de/~kv/paper.htm; and Leib & Werle 1998.

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