The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach

An examination of Internet culture and consumption. The Internet is increasingly shaping, and being shaped by, users' lives. From cybercafes to businesses, from middle class houses to squatters settlements, the authors have gathered material on subjects as varied as personal relations, commerce, sex and religion. Websites are also analyzed as new cultural formations acting as aesthetic traps. At every point, email chat and surfing are found to be exploited in ways that bring out both unforeseen attributes of the Internet and the contradictions of modern life. The material, taken from ethnographic work in Trinidad, adds depth to earlier discussions about the Internet as an expansion of space, the changes it effects to time and personhood, and the new political economy of the information age. A tie-in with the book's own website provides further illustrations.