The Internet as Artifact: Immediacy, Evolution, and Educational Contingencies
or
“ The Wrong Tool for the Right Job?”

Paper Presented to the
American Educational Research Association
Chicago, Il.
April 21st, 2003

Steve Thorne
Linguistics and Applied Language Studies
Pennsylvania State University

For some social classes and in highly privileged geographical regions, we have entered into a period of rapid and efficient global communication practices mediating a wide array of interpersonal, discursive-material, and cultural activities. Despite the robust connections between globalization, homogenization, and the increasing digitization of everyday communicative practice, Internet-mediated educational activities remain inherently polymorphous. Educational cultures and objectives vary across nation state boundaries as well as between institutions, students are enculturated into widely varying digitally mediated speech communities, and newer communication tools such as Instant Messenger are displacing traditional tools like email and threaded discussion. This paper attempts to refine a few important issues, namely that Internet communication tools, like all human artifacts, are cultural tools, and that cultures-of-use and mediational artifacts dynamically co-evolve over time. To explore the dynamic tensions between Internet-mediated educational and non-educationally related communicative practice, I will discuss life-history-with-CMC interviews and informal group discussions conducted with undergraduate university students in April of 2002. CMC tools are not neutral mediums in the eyes of these participants. Each has specific uses to which it can, and cannot, be readily put. The potential of certain tools to be used by students for specific kinds of communicative interaction, and not others, has demonstrable effects on the ways communication plays out. I suggest, and provide evidence to support, a strong relationship between the use of specific CMC tools and the following factors, 1) social-material conditions (both educational-institutional and non-academic), 2) specific cultures-of-use associated with specific Internet communication tools, 3) genres of communicative activity that relate to both tool type and discursive context, and subsequently 4), that these factors encourage varying types, qualities, and quantities of participation in instructed educational setting. This paper builds on a theoretical framework that can broadly be termed a critical cultural historical perspective of human communication (e.g., Gee, 1996; Hanks, 1996). This approach emphasizes how people modify, transform, and comprehend artifacts and environments (Bødker, 1996; Kapetlinin, 1996), including mediational artifacts such as Internet communication tools (Herring, 1999; Thorne, 2000, 2003; Kramsch & Thorne, 2002).

The structure of texts, literacy, and communicative practices are tightly bound to the materiality of their conveyance and representation. The relationship between mediational means, genres of communicative activity, and forms of communicative practice at the level of utterance and exchange structure, suggest that digital communication technologies have made possible substantive aesthetic shifts in human communicative practices.

The implication is that historical, institutional, and discursive processes (e.g., the flow of culture at a given point in time and for specific communities) largely mediate an individual's practical and symbolic activity. Artifact or tool (I do not make a distinction between these two terms in this paper) utilization necessarily implies cultural mediation and the routinized use of an artifact exhibits its temporally local as well as its historical constitution. To take a tool like e-mail as an example, it may function primarily as a family information medium for the generation that adopted it after retirement, or be used as a collaboration tool for academics writing articles together. For an Internet advertising operation (e.g., spam manufacturer), e-mail technology forms the means of production enabling its (highly annoying) business to thrive. I know individuals for whom e-mail is an "impersonal" medium ill-suited for intimate or non-work related communication; yet in a recent survey I distributed in a graduate seminar comprised of students from a number of countries around the world, 65% (n=17) responded that the emotions they expressed are as, or more, intimate through e-mail as in face-to-face (F2F) contexts. And as we shall see in the case study to be addressed momentarily, for many American undergraduates, "it's like, 'Oh God, I have to write an e-mail now'" (Grace, 19 year-old American undergraduate). Like many of her peers, Grace simply can't be bothered to use such a banal and non-immediately responsive modality. My point with this example is that even something prosaic like e-mail is a variably understood tool, a culturally specific tool, one that may serve a diversity of functions for some, while for others, it conjures up specific associations or may be used for highly restricted purposes. Internet mediated communication, then, can be seen to comprise a set of phenomena involving individuals and collectives who, through their everyday activities, construct CMC norms and forms of activity.

Within educational contexts, CMC activity often appears to forge a hybridity that allows for an interplay between students' non-academic identities and the discursively constructed institutional roles of the classroom. Factors relevant for analyzing CMC use in language classrooms include the historically sedimented characteristics that accrue to a CMC tool from its everyday use, what I am terming the "cultures-of-use" of an artifact. Of course, artifacts do possess a concrete material form, but in the "observer-relative" world of humans (see Searle, 1992), artifacts are meaningfully and differentially defined by their immediate and historical use by communities (Cole, 1996). In short, artifacts embody historical processes that shape, and are shaped by, human activity.

Employing this framework to interpret the mediated nature of human activity, a cultures-of-use analysis attempts to render artifacts as they exist for users. Without endorsing technological determinism -- the suggestion that technology determines human activity (an argument I counter in this article) -- the structural properties of Internet communication tools have an effect on turn-taking and exchange structures (e.g., Herring, 1999; Werry, 1996). However, I wish to underscore and illustrate in the analysis to come that an artifact's materiality is conventional and takes its functional form from its histories of use in and across cultural practices. In this sense, all artifacts, including Internet communication tools, are imbued with characteristics that illustrate the intersection of histories of use with the contingencies of emergent practice. Case Study: The Wrong Tool for the Right Job?

For many American students, an ever-expanding proportion of their lives is mediated by communication and information technologies. Computer-mediated communication has become a habitual dimension of social, academic, and professional communicative activity. That most of the American university students spend three or more hours a day using the Internet is not surprising (based on survey and interview data). Pushing back a few years to secondary school, a number of studies carried out as part of the Pew Internet & American Life Project (2001) revealed that teenagers 12-17 years of age use the Internet as their primary source for information for their most recent school project (71%) and communicate with teachers and peers outside of school on a regular basis (41%). In another study, Pew researchers found that 90 million Americans (approximately 84% of the total online population in the US as of October 2001), have participated in on-line communities to get or give information and/or for social or professional purposes (Horrigan, 2001). With often five or more years of Internet experience before they arrive at university, and then an increase in daily usage once they are on campus (due to the availability of Ethernet in the dorms and campus labs open 24 hours a day), specific cultures-of-use have developed that demonstrably contribute to communicative processes while in other unforeseen ways, present new challenges to the top-down organization of foreign language telecollaborative interaction (e.g., faculty-researchers making decisions about which CMC tools to use and for what communicative tasks within educational settings).

In this brief case study, I explore the ramifications of Internet communication tool choice and its relation to intercultural communication activity as part of a 4th semester French course in the Spring of 2002. The structured interactions called for each student to exchange e-mails with French key-pals (other CMC tools and activities were also employed). Additionally, three in-class synchronous CMC exchanges were carried out during which the French and American key-pals had the opportunity to "chat" with one another in real-time (using the program, NetMeeting). A video conferencing link was also used and students from both classes took turns sharing video images of themselves, most of which involved waving or extended shots of student groups typing at computer stations (sound was not available). At the end of the third and final NetMeeting session, the following interaction was video recorded and subsequently transcribed. Three students were both typing messages to their key-pals in France (two sharing a computer and one solo) while also talking to one another about their key-pals and the intercultural experience.

This dialogue illustrates a powerful and unexpected force that confounded the viability of the planned e-mail exchanges for a number of the American students. All three of the students found François to be likable, "the best person ever," and someone they would interact with on a regular basis, but only using the "right" Internet communication tool. Grace and Stef in particular (lines 16-17) vocalized the perception of many of the students interviewed for this paper: E-mail is a tool for communication between power levels and generations (e.g., students to teachers; sons/daughters to parents) and hence is unsuitable as a medium for age-peer relationship building and social interaction (our primary aspirations for the intercultural exchange). Grace, perhaps representing a more extreme case, described her views on e-mail this way.

Though I was not able to directly interview the participating French students, they demonstrated none of the, for lack of a better word, disdane toward email as a tool for age peer interaction. However, for these undergraduate American students, e-mail was a constraining variable in the intercultural communication process. Grace enjoyed her interactions with François. She states at a number of points that she would have communicated with him more readily and eagerly had she had IM as a tool option. For a number of students participating in the Spring 2002 telecollaboration section of this French course, the e-mail interactions fell flat and did not result in rich, or for that matter, contentious or problematic exchanges either. They simply did not happen at all. This is due, in part, to the fact that the communication tool decided upon by the project coordinators and instructor, e-mail, carried with it the specific limitation of acting as a communicative medium well suited for vertical communication across power and generation lines, but utterly inappropriate as a tool to mediate interpersonal age-peer relationship building. For Grace, her conviction that e-mail was an inappropriate tool for age-peer interaction even overpowered the coercive force of the direct (graded) assignment given by the instructor to continue e-mail exchanges. In other words, though she liked her key-pal and enjoyed the project generally, Grace chose not to participate when e-mail was the modality option.

Discussion

This example illustrates a third generation of technology users. For the first time, young people who have been socialized into the use of the internet from early ages (8-10) are young adults and active as keystone species in the production of digitally mediated knowledge and culture. Also for the first time since the advent ARPANET and the Internet, email is no longer a generic tool that most Internet users employ for everyday social and work interaction. New tools, particularly IM, now mediate social and age-peer interaction for a young generation of users.

Mediational artifacts both complicate and help to reveal the dynamics of human communicative activity. As an added mediational layer, CMC tools present additional variables and associations that may be difficult to predict within educational contexts. Based on this brief case study, I’d like to discuss the following points. First, I'll make the reminder that I am encouraging a dialectical approach emerging from the structuration lineage that emphasizes the relations between local social material conditions, the cultures-of-use of Internet communication tools, and the communicative goals at hand. As I have attempted to demonstrate, the mediational means available (e.g., IM versus e-mail) and its cultural-historical resonance for users, play a critical role in how and even if the communicative process and accompanying interpersonal relationships develop.

Wherever communication technologies are used, cultures-of-use, however mitigating or facilitative for educational purposes, are dynamic and will necessarily evolve in relation to the object of an individual or collective activity. As Bødker notes, artifacts have a "double character": They are an "object in the world around us that we can reflect on, and they mediate our interaction with the world" (1997, p. 150). As such, teachers and students can interrogate mediational artifacts and their cultures-of-use as an important (and altogether neglected) dimension of Internet-mediated intercultural communication.

Cultural Artifacts and Socio-Historically Located Subjects

Instead of the presumption of "extreme dissembedding" (Miller & Slater, 2000, p. 4) between, say, educationally oriented CMC activities and face-to-face interaction, we might benefit from assuming that most forms of Internet-mediated educational activity are embedded in and functionally dissassociable from other habituated and everyday communicative contexts. These may include casual F2F encounters, non-virtual relations of power and knowledge or, as I have argued elsewhere (Thorne, 1999, 2000), that the process of becoming a competent member of one digitally mediated speech community may have demonstrable effects on presentation of self and the aesthetics of communicative performativity (e.g., Butler, 1993; Cameron, 2000) in another, quite dissimilar digitally mediated interaction. In essence, an approach that presumes the existence of "the Internet" and then seeks to understand its effects on identity, activity, social formations, or the genres appropriate for intercultural communication risks becoming yet another argument that succumbs to the reductionism implicit to technological determination on the one hand and of reifying a dualism between agent and structure on the other (Miller & Slater, 2000).

Communicative activity articulates with and is a form of material culture (Bourdieu, 1991; Gee, 1990; Lemke, 1995; The New London Group, 1996). As such, getting a handle on material culture and its production, consumption, reproduction, and transformation involves interdependent correlations that can include multiple forms of digitally mediated activity (e-mail, chat, Web use, instant messenger), non-digital communicative and literacy practices, experience in and of brick-and-mortar institutions like schools and universities, and language socialization practices (again, representing a wide array of contexts and serving differing goals and needs). McDermott (1977) has remarked that people create environments for one another. Focusing on the relationships between cultures-of-use and intercultural human communicative activity mediated by the Internet, I suggest, inspired by Latour (1993, 1999) and Tomasello (1999), that cultures-of-use and mediational artifacts co-evolve over time. It is this co-evolutionary process that warrants attention and that correlates to how communication is carried out at both the intra and intercultural level. Showing that cultural, individual and collective historical factors influence the ways students perceive Internet communication tools and their (mis)uses provides insight into relationships between language use, mediational means, levels of engagement, and the potential for authenticity in the communicative process, all of which are implicated in developmental activity.

Internet communication tools cannot be fully apprehended from a positivist vantage point as generically "there" in the world. Cultural artifacts such as global communication technologies are produced by and productive of socio-historically located subjects. Such artifacts take their functional form and significance from the human activities they mediate and the meanings that communities create through them.

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