to understand

A very important book to me when I wrote my master-thesis was James Slevin's The Internet and Society. Slevin's aim with the book is to contribute to a social theory of the Internet and its impact on who we are, our social relationships, culture and society, avoiding a post-modern approach to these questions. I found Slevin's book together with Terje Rasmussen's dissertation Communication Technologies and the Mediation of Social Life utterly significant and reliable - close to Truth (their reference lists are not too different, lots of Giddens, Beck, Thompson, Bauman to name but a few). However, during my first PhD-course in Denmark I realized that there are other approaches to studying digital media (sort of exaggerating my prior ignorance to other perspectives). In charge of the course were Niels Brügger and Niels Ole Finnemann. I found, and still find, their discourse on media theory difficult, yet obviously interesting. Both of them emphasize the level of the media materiality and technical characteristics.

I'm getting to my point: In October 2001, James Slevin participated in a workshop with among others, Brügger and Finnemann, at the Centre for Internet Research, at the University of Aarhus. They discussed Slevin's book, and as a result, a booklet was published with critique of some of Slevin's arguments posed by Brügger and Finnemann (and Jakob Linaa Jensen), and answers to this critique by Slevin. Reading the essays I got a familiar feeling: although apparently speaking of the same subject, new media researchers do not necessarily talk the same language. I am not sure whether Brügger's comments to Slevin's absent writings of the materiality of the Internet are actually relevant for Slevin's project of developing a social theory of the Internet, and I am not sure whether Slevin in his response actually responds to Brügger's questions. Finnemann too, criticises Slevin for paying too little attention to the characteristics of the specific medium. To which Slevin answers that Finnemann on the other hand stresses only this one level: the mechanical and the technical. I am exaggerating. They all seemed to get a lot out of the workshop, and they all explicitly compliment each other.

Still, communication is difficult, even to researchers of media and communication.