Downtime on the Net: The Rise of Virtual Leisure Industries

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Abstract:

When Manuel Castells in 2001 came to focus on the culture of the internet, attempting to describe its curious amalgam of origins and influences, and their persistence in the values present in its manifold operations, he suggested that it was in many ways a culturally schizoid medium. On the one hand, as maintained for instance in the many myths of its APARNET military foundation, it presents as a scientific, pragmatic, rational, communicative instrument; a standardized, and so regulatory set of operations to facilitate and accelerate data flows. But at the same time, given its long conception in a largely informal and highly collegial set of laboratory backrooms and University graduate-assistant work zones, it has inbuilt elements of the sorts of libertarianism or radical communitarianism identified by Bauman (2000). It retains a playfulness, a feisty independence, and an innovative edge, among the enduring marks of its operations. Perhaps then it should come as less of a surprise that we have come to see leisure pursuits: pastimes popularly conceived as belonging in the personal domain of self-expressiveness, private recreation or “downtime” sociability; as prominent agents of the Net’s development. In some cases, whether desired or not as part of any “official” history of this currently central cultural medium, online recreation or “virtual leisure” has been positioned among the dominant elements within the internet’s development. Consider for instance persistent suggestions that the technologization of online pornography has contributed new forms of interactivity to webcam and online video use (Slater, 1998; Williams, 1990); innovations introduced at least as early as those for scientized telemedicine for instance, and rather more widely used. In some of the very earliest academic analyses of online content and services-often published in screen journals, before the rise of more specialized publishing sources- analysts and researchers were already aware of powerful online communities working around such “unrespectable”, unproductive or even illicit activities as sex, game play, or just plain sociability.