James Witte

Embedded Technology: A Sociological Perspective on Communication and Information Technology

Biography
James C. Witte (Ph.D., Harvard University) is an Associate Professor of Sociology. Areas of interest include the sociology of the Internet, economy and society, family and statistics. His ongoing research focuses on ways to use the World Wide Web to collect survey data and on similarities and differences between online and offline society. Witte is Chair-Elect of the American Sociological Association’s Communication and Information Technology section. Witte’s teaching responsibilities include courses in research methods, the sociology of communication and information technology and the sociology of work.

Position Paper
In this paper we examine the reciprocal relationships between society and new forms of communication and information technology. Our aim is to show that these technologies are not separate and apart from society but deeply embedded in society. Further, there are two aspects to this embeddedness.

First, in its infancy the Internet was referred to as cyberspace, a special, new and different, “virtual” space. Today, there is no more cyberspace. That which is virtual is increasingly real and an increasingly smaller and smaller part of our lives is untouched by new communication and information technologies. Social scientists, but also computer scientists and information scientists, need to understand the fundamental significance of the manner in which these new technologies have transformed and will continue to transform our social world. In part this transformation comes from the increasing digitalization of our lives. An ever expanding range of economic and social activities are mediated through new communication and information technologies. However, the consequences of new communication and information technologies extend far beyond an increasing variety of goods and services available in digital form. Social phenomena need not be digital to be affected by our digital world; digital communication and information technologies are profoundly influencing those parts of our society that remain primarily analog, i.e., that which is represented by continuously variable, measurable, physical quantities.

To illustrate this point we will present research on email permanence and the maintenance of social capital. Within contemporary sociology few concepts receive as much attention as social capital. Typically defined to include a full range of non-material assets (formal and informal social networks, group memberships and broad social attachment and sense of community), social capital represents a key component in the resource portfolio of any individual and influences their ability to act and impact the world around them. Social capital is founded upon social interaction, which is in turn mediated by communication and information technology. Email address permanence is both a means to mobilize social capital and a measure of its stock. This research is based on a sample of 23,000 respondents to Survey2001, a comprehensive web-based survey that collected information on individuals’ Internet access, use and experience and measures of social capital as well as demographic characteristics. Survey2001 was hosted by the National Geographic Society on its home page. At the conclusion of the survey respondentse were asked if they wished to be contacted about future survey efforts. Early in 2005 4,300 individuals who asked to be contacted were emailed with a link to Survey2005, the latest National Geographic web survey. In this analysis we use the 2001 data to predict which addresses remain viable in 2005.

Second, the implications of any technology depend on the social processes in which its development and application are embedded. The dynamic of the meeting of the digital and analog worlds is not a pre-determined, objective and neutral unfolding of the logical implications of technologies. Instead, the development and application of new digital forms of communication and information technology is necessarily embedded in the social structure that has called it forth.

Commercialization of CIT—the example of the Internet: The Internet bears the imprint of the capitalist society that brought it into being and, at the same time, the Internet has become an integral economic tool in our capitalist society. Empirical analyses in this section are based on data obtained from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive is a digital library of the Internet funded by a number of public and private foundations including the National Science Foundation and the Library of Congress. The Wayback Machine allows users to access and view archived versions of publicly available websites, going back to 1996, collected through Alexa Internet webcrawls. At this time, the tool allows users to browse over 11 billion web pages archived between 1996 and 2003. Specifically, the analysis will focus on the changing content of leading Internet portals during the period 1996 through 2003.

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