Dr John Postill

Grounding the Internet: An ethnography of cyberactivism and local government in a Kuala Lumpur suburb

To be published by Berghahn

Book outline

Preface

The preface recounts the making of this study. In 2002 I took up a research fellowship at Bremen University (Germany) and joined a team of European anthropologists in a comparative study of local governance and digital technologies in multiethnic areas of six different countries. Having chosen as my main field site a suburb of Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) renowned for its thriving community ICT scene, I conducted fieldwork there in 2003-2004. Although the fieldwork went well, on returning home my attempts at placing the various digital projects I had studied along a community-network continuum soon foundered. In hindsight I realised that I had fallen into the community/network trap – a conceptual trap lying at the very heart of Internet studies and that I seek to avoid in this book (see Chapter 1). In essence, the trap consists of reducing the plurality and flux of social formations that one invariably finds in any given locality (e.g. peer groups, cohorts, associations, gangs, clans, sects, factions, families, action groups, Web forum threads, committees, etc.) to a crude community vs. network binary.

Photo-essay: The proof of the padang

This photo-essay introduces some of the key players (or ‘agents’) in the social field that forms the basis of the study, the field of residential affairs in Subang Jaya-USJ, a largely middle-income suburb of Kuala Lumpur. Most pictures were taken at a dinner organised by a local residents' association and attended by my key informants, including an ICT-savvy local politician as the guest of honour. The subtitle refers to a ‘fundamental law' (Bourdieu 1993) of this emergent field of practice: in order to resolve a local problem, politicians and other powerful outsiders must first go ‘down to the ground' (in Malay, turun padang); only then can they hope to resolve the issue. Accordingly, in his after-dinner speech the politician described his tireless work on the ground and entreated all his co-diners to join him. In effect, he was saying that the proof of the padang is not in the eating – it is in the fixing. This law explains the importance to field agents of digital photography, a technology they use to document their own efficacious agency and denounce its absence in others. By introducing visually the field agents, the essay begins to tease out some of threads that run through the book (field theory, social change, technical affordances, etc). It also demonstrates the study's ethnographic, social relational approach to the study of Internet and local political change.

The cyberactivist Jeff Ooi in 2004

Chapter 1: Avoiding the community/network trap

This chapter is a critical review of the bourgeoning literature on ICT localisation, i.e. how local residents, activists and authorities around the world are appropriating digital technologies to pursue their goals. Two main approaches to this near-global process of localisation can be discerned: community informatics (Gurstein 2004, Gurstein et al 2003) and social network analysis (Wellman 2001, Wellman et al 2003). Despite their differences, both approaches reflect North American preoccupations with a perceived loss of community ‘social capital’ (Putnam 1995, 2000) and rely on the problematic, inseparable notions of ‘community’ and ‘network’. By contrast to the United States and Canada, I suggest, in Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia a chief concern of scholars, journalists and activists has been to establish to what extent the middle classes have succeeded in using new digital technologies to help bring about political reform (e.g. in Indonesia and the Philippines) – or failed to do so (e.g. in Malaysia or Singapore). Most existing Southeast Asian studies of this kind, however, consist of surveys and interviews with national elites (e.g. Abbott 2004), so there is an acute shortage of empirically grounded studies at local governance levels – a gap this study seeks to fill. The chapter then outlines the theoretical approach adopted in the present study, namely field theory, as an alternative to the community/ network paradigm currently dominant in local ICT studies, highlighting the book’s intended contribution to the fledgling political anthropology of media. It closes with a chapter overview.

Chapter 2: Ethnographic setting

This chapter situates the present study in its geographical and historical setting: the twin townships of Subang Jaya and USJ (SJ-USJ for short) during the 1999-2006 period. It provides an account of the methodology used, including the fieldwork rationale and process, and of the main online and offline research sites. SJ-USJ is the largest suburb in Southeast Asia built by a single developer, the former plantation owners Sime Darby. After a slow uptake in the 1970s, growth accelerated in the 1980s and the suburb reached saturation in the late 1990s. Its mostly young, middle-income ethnic Chinese families were enticed by its image as a leafy ‘model township' but gradually came to regard it as a deteriorating frontier riddled with crime, traffic congestion, unsafe playgrounds, a shortage of schools, etc. This was fertile ground for the emergence in the late 1990s of a specific brand of Internet activism described in the following chapter.

Chapter 3: A field of residential affairs

This chapter draws on Bourdieu's field theory and some of its key concepts, e.g. agent, position, symbolic capital, fundamental laws, field autonomy vs. heteronomy (the limitations of this theory are discussed from next chapter). It describes the genesis and early structuring of the field of residential affairs in Subang Jaya-USJ. This is an emergent field of practice in which local activists, council staff, politicians, journalists and other social agents compete and cooperate – often through the Internet – over issues of concern to local residents. In contrast to the ‘serious' (cyber)activism of the Kuala Lumpur and Penang intelligentsia with its keen interest in constitutional and other abstract matters, SJ-USJ is home to the ‘banal activism' (see * Note below) of broken drains, unkempt parks and congested roads. Over time, two fundamental field laws have evolved, one applicable to ordinary insiders (i.e. residents), the other to powerful outsiders. Insiders who wish to accumulate symbolic capital must volunteer their time, not their money, to assist ‘the community'. By contrast, powerful outsiders (as was shown in the photo-essay) must go down to the ground (turun padang) in order to resolve concrete problems, however banal these may seem to the casual observer.

Chapter 4: Ego networks, social fields

This chapter is the first of four (Chapters 4-7) aimed at moving beyond Bourdieu's field theory's overemphasis on intra-field dynamics and social reproduction whilst steering clear of the community/network trap. Here the aim is to explore the tensions and conflicts that arise from the ample opportunities for ego-centred (= personal) networking afforded by digital technologies on the one hand, and the severe constraints on such networking imposed by SJ-USJ's field of residential affairs on the other. The analysis tracks the field trajectories and activities of three influential agents introduced in the photo-essay: a local politician, a local Web forum owner and blogger (pictured above), and a crime watch cyberactivist. All three agents have cultivated vast ICT-supported personal networks, and yet they must ensure that the ego-centred logic of such networks does not conflict with the collectivist logic of the field of residential affairs where an ‘interest in disinterestedness' prevails (Bourdieu 1993). This chapter provides further empirical support for the case against the community/network paradigm presented in Chapter 1, yet it does not propose field/network as the new local ICT studies paradigm. Rather it suggests that the notions of ego-centred network and social field can be put to good – if necessarily limited – dialectical use.

Chapter 5: Two media dramas [html]

This chapter opens a second ‘black box' in Bourdieu's field theory: not process in general (pace Jenkins 2002) but specifically political process. Such was precisely the emphasis of earlier work on field theory by the Manchester School of political anthropology (see Swartz et al 1966, Evens and Handelman 2006). The chapter turns to Manchester School field concepts such as social drama, processual form, field sector and arena to analyse two crises that unfolded in SJ-USJ's field of residential affairs in 2003 and 2004. The first crisis was small and influential residents managed to contain it largely within a single field sub-sector (the Web forum USJ.com.my), preventing it from spreading to other field sectors and beyond. In stark contrast, the second crisis spread very rapidly, spilling over to the powerful fields of federal government and the national mass media through the deft use of a range of ICTs by an unprecedented alliance of residents' groups. Residents were protesting against the building of a food court on land reserved for a police station. Together, both crises reveal the field's dynamics of factionalism, alliance-building and technological mediation, as well as its complex relationships to powerful neighbouring fields at two specific points in time.

Chapter 6: Field diffusions and epidemics

This chapter extends the field theoretical analysis to a third research area neglected by Bourdieu: the diffusion and circulation of small non-human agents (stories, ideas, images, etc) across social fields. The chapter starts by explaining why a certain kind of Internet technology (Yahoo! mailing lists) and not others, spread and became appropriated by SJ-USJ residents' groups in the 1990s. It then adapts Dan Sperber's (1996) cultural epidemiological model to analyse the gatekeeping practices of certain field agents who appointed themselves as digital traffic controllers once these mailing technologies were in place. Their voluntary task is to protect the local cyberspace, including its mailing lists as well as local Web forums and mobile phone communications, from digital epidemics such as spam, urban legends, and hoaxes. The chapter's dual emphasis on the diffusion of technologies and on the epidemiology of representations goes against the grain of current anthropological thought which tends to celebrate the creative appropriation of cultural forms at the expense of their diffusion and epidemiology (Postill 2006).

Chapter 7: New residential socialities

This chapter assesses the direct social implications of the consolidation of a vibrant, ICT-mediated field of residential affairs in SJ-USJ. Sidestepping the community/network paradigm, and in line with Vered Amit's (2002) call for a broadened sociality lexicon, the chapter examines the extent to which these field practices and processes have transformed or reinforced existing forms of residential sociality. To this end, three forms of activism-related sociality are analysed: patrol sociality, committee sociality and thread sociality. Patrol sociality is the side-by-side (not face-to-face) fellowship of the neighbourhood watch beat, a media-distant form of sociality originating in Anglo-American websites but thoroughly appropriated to local norms and priorities. Committee sociality is the sociality of face-to-face, indoor meetings in non-domestic settings (cf. Jean-Klein 2003). Finally, thread sociality is the sociality of Web forum threads whose mood and tempo can change dramatically ‘under appropriate field conditions’ (Turner 1974: 134) from one of slow conviviality to another of fast-moving conflict -- and back (Chapter 5). This analysis of three kinds of residential sociality belies any simple dichotomies of online vs. offline or community vs. network sociality (cf. Wittel 2001), suggesting instead that Internet-mediated activism contributes to variously mediated forms of residential sociality.

Chapter 8: Comparable studies

Cross-cultural comparisons of local ICT studies are still rare. To fill this lacuna, this penultimate chapter compares and contrasts the SJ-USJ findings with those from other localities in Malaysia and elsewhere. Two types of localities are reviewed. First, case studies of so-called ‘intelligent’ or ‘smart cities’ such as neighbouring Cyberjaya (Yusof 2008), the high-tech city of Blacksburg, in Virgina, USA (Kavanaugh and Patterson 2002), Ennis, in Ireland (Bannon and Griffin 2001) or Manchester, in the UK (Agar et al 2002). Second, studies of ‘digital suburbs’ of Toronto (Hampton 2003), Telaviv (Mesch and Levanon 2003), and Melbourne (Arnold and Gibbs 2003). The chapter then discusses the implications of these findings, always bearing in mind their diverse disciplinary and geographical provenance. It is the second, suburban set of studies that reveals a closer match with SJ-USJ, e.g. in both suburban Telaviv and Toronto digitally mediated forms of banal activism are in evidence. Thus suburban parents with young children who turn to digital activism are likely to be driven by the universal middle-class imperative to find and maintain a safe, green environment conducive to family building and class reproduction (Chapters 2 and 3). It follows that university students and pensioners who adopt new digital technologies for political action will be driven by their own imperatives. In all cases, these general patterns will be refracted by local cultural practices and historical contingencies. All this suggests the need to attend closely both to the specificities of local populations and to their universal attributes when conducting and writing up ICT research projects.

Chapter 9: Conclusion

This is a summary of the study's main findings and argument. The book has argued that Internet technologies have become inextricably linked to the politics of residential activism in the suburb of Subang Jaya-USJ (Malaysia) and that this case study demonstrates the need to go beyond the current community/network paradigm in future analyses of grassroots ICTs as the Internet becomes increasingly ‘more local’ (Davies and Crabtree 2004). By drawing on the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu, but extending its analytical remit to encompass personal networks, the diffusion and circulation of new field technologies, intra- and inter-field political crises, and field-related forms of residential sociality, the study has opened up a number of local ICT research avenues that bypass the community/network bottleneck. It has also shown some of the possibilities of a political anthropology of media that draws on political anthropologists’ long history of efforts to study and conceptualise the flux and unpredictability of local political processes (Swartz et al 1966, Turner 1974, Evens and Handelman 2006) whilst paying heed to the ever more intricately mediated nature of such processes.

Glossary

(*) Note: Alexander T. Smith (personal communication, 22 May 2006) and I independently coined the term ‘banal activism’, in his case following anthropological fieldwork among Conservative Party activists in Scotland, see http://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/alexander.smith.html

References

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