As I was about to give a talk at the "Media in Transition" conference last weekend (Oct. 8 - 10) at MIT, I was struck by a schism in my own thinking about the Internet.

The talk itself began as follows:

In an essay titled "Thinking the Internet: Cultural Studies vs. The Millennium" Jonathan Sterne notes that a central issue for cultural studies approaches to "thinking the Internet" is quite literally how to think about it beyond traditional dichotomous perspectives. Instead of asking whether the Internet lead us to utopia, or whether it will destroy the fabric of society, how might we examine the Internet as another media technology situated in everyday practice and everyday life? Scholars must pay attention to the routines undergoing transformation because of networking, for it is in the realm of the mundane that we most clearly see the consequences of the Internet in culture and society. Sterne asks us to imagine a day in the life of one of his students, and to note the ways in which the Internet, or more appropriately perhaps internetworking, is embedded in mundane routines and practices. Stopping in a computer lab between classes to check e-mail, for instance, or sending a note to a professor while doing homework, are examples he cites of common practices altered by Internetworking.

That's as far as I got before I began to venture in two different directions. One was toward the planned comments concerning online community, the other, which I shall follow here, into thoughts about the consequences of wireless Internetworking and voice recognition for our understanding of the Internet and everyday life.

Those studying the Internet have for a long time relied on the notion of being "wired," much longer, really, than we have been thinking and writing about the Internet. Even though we have had wireless communication technologies for nearly 100 years, it is important to not lose sight of our reliance on wires. Indeed, some media have traveled in reverse, and then back again -- television entered the home as a wireless technology, became wired thanks to cable broadcasting, and reclaimed some of its wireless character thanks to satellite TV.

There is an important boundary that is created by a wire. It is not only the boundary of width, that is, the border that divides between one side and the other, but also the boundary of length, the distance the wire will reach from one end to another. A wire only goes so far before it must either connect to other wires, or compel us to go to it. Such is the case thus far for our experiences with the Internet. We are "wired" not only because it is wires that connect us to the Internet, but also because we must go to the machine, which itself must be located at the terminal point of the wire supplying our network connection. But Internet scholars have largely overlooked what it means to be wired (in the now quite commonplace and overused Wired magazine sense) in favor of examining what it takes to get wired. For instance, it is common to read essays about access, the "digital divide," and so on, that do a good job of telling about the inequalities of race, geography, gender, age and class that can prevent people from going online. It is rare (perhaps impossible ) to find those who have written about the act of going to the computer itself to log on, about the activity of reaching a computer, its place in space and in routine.

It is important that we consider such matters, for being "wired" is not just about content, but also about context. The environments within which we use computers -- homes, classrooms, libraries, cybercafes, airports, bedrooms, offices, etc. -- are as important to Internetworking as are the sites (households, automobiles, offices) of our engagements with other media. But an even more compelling reason to engage context and environment in relation to being wired is that, if we fail to do so, we will fail to fully theorize the importance of wireless Internet access.

To put it another way, if we are to ask what wireless access will mean for the ways we use the Internet and for the ways we think the Internet, we must know what wired access means in its mundane sense. It is likely that Internetworking will, thanks to wireless access, merge with myriad other practices. Perhaps this will provide us with another way to think about "convergence." Instead of content converging within a single media form, or multiple media converging in one expression and performance, it may be that convergence involves the bringing together of multiple contexts and environments of mediated experience. I am reminded of my experiences with the Sony Walkman. As one of the first in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois to purchase a Walkman, I delighted at the prospect of listening to my cassettes, my chosen music, while walking or bicycling. But within a few minutes of cycling down the street Walkman-clad, I realized I was in danger of losing my sense of the immediate surroundings and unable to process competing aural environments.

Maybe that was a lack of my own brain's development. But I have a similar sense when at a sporting event or concert that has a "Jumbotron" television screen to which all spectators' attention turns in-between action on the playing field, or when I see people at a public event with a Sony Watchman or radio. It is less a matter of "being" elsewhere a la "Being There," and more a matter of "being there" twice over. The expressions of frustration from sports fans at a stadium when the big-screen instant replay doesn't work point to a desire for more reality, for recording and playback, for having control of that which we observe, for having a Panopticon not only of lenses but also of recorders and controls.

We have scarcely begun to deal with the domestication of computers and the Internet, and already I am not sure how we will deal with it in regard to wireless Internetworking. The demonstration of Apple's iBook at my campus's recent Mac user group meeting underscored the point. Those in attendance were less interested in the usual things like CPU speed, screen size, and the like, and more interested in the range over which the AirPort wireless networking device will connect (150 feet, give or take a few feet). When I spoke with people about what they thought they would do with the iBook, responses ranged from "I would surf the web from my couch while watching TV" to "I would put my lecture notes on it and take it to my classroom." The ordinariness of the responses was what struck me most -- there was nothing particularly new about the uses to which the iBook was to be put. Rather, it was the re-placing of the computer in sites it had not been previously easy to place. The PalmVII, it seems, is being used in a similar fashion, to access data and information and to communicate, from any variety of places, as are the numerous cell phone/web browser hybrids from Qualcomm, Nokia, Ericsson, and others.

One could observe some of what wireless Internetworking may do to the ways we use the Internet by noticing changes brought about by use of the cordless and cellular telephone. Un-wiring the phone meant telephonic conversation could take place anywhere. But I believe we have done little to study the cell phone's social and cultural consequences. One example: the mythology of the cell phone has revolved mainly around danger. Does it cause auto accidents? Brain tumors? Or, as USA Today reported this weekend, does it cause explosions at gas stations? (The latter is most interesting, since it has led to policies banning use of cell phones and other electronic devices at gas stations, without evidence of causality.) What might the mythology of wireless Internetworking bring?

I bring up the matter of the cell phone particularly because it is a voice technology, and the other development in computing and Internetworking I want to highlight is that of voice recognition and speech. Thanks to Mac OS9 my Macintosh "knows" my voice. The Macintosh has for some years now responded to voice commands, and it has had a rudimentary system for speaking text with a synthesized voice. What is most surprising about the new operating system, OS9, is that it can recognize my voice. It uses it as a "voiceprint" with which to secure my computer, and responds only to it and no one else's voice (or, if I prefer, I can allow some, but not all, others to have voice access). I am immediately reminded of Barthes, of notions concerning the grain of the voice, of matters of aurality and orality, of listening and hearing, of the roar of the crowd. How will the computer's voice enter the aural landscape?

I imagine I will soon see an iBook user, interacting with the computer without need of a screen, using, instead, voice and speech. We are thus likely to see a convergence of computer, cell phone and Internet uses and activities. And I feel compelled to ask: how shall we theorize the un-wired wired, the spoken and heard Internet, the new voices and sounds that, like ghosts, can haunt us no matter where we are? How can we formulate a cultural studies that will help us capture the nuances of sound as well image, of voice as well as text, of experience, place and motion? When the wires are cut, how shall we be able to connect practice and theory, space and place?