Plates online in Miller and Slater's 'The Internet'
Posted on December 10, 2001 @ 15:11 in Research
I've had Miller and Slater's book The Internet. An Ethnographic Approach on my shelf for a long while now, but hadn't gotten around to reading it, until today. I'm about halfway through it and I think the title doesn't quite fit the book. The book is an ethnographic study of "Trinidad and Internet" or maybe "Internet and Trinidad", focusing on use, role and understandings of Internet in Trinidad (and among the diasporic Trinidadian community around the world). "Trinidad and the Internet, an ethnographic approach" would have been a much better and less hypey (sp?) title.
Another thing that's rather annoying is that in the book the authors refer to plates (illustrations) but these plates are nowhere to be found in the book itself. The plates instead have been put up on a website, and although this site is mentioned on the Contents page of the book, it took me about two chapters to realize the plates just, really, weren't in the book. This I think is a very bad mix of two rather incompatible media. I want my book to be complete and when I'm reading it somewhere out of reach of the Internet, I still want to be able to see the illustrations (or whatever else the authors are referring to). Even sitting next to a computer it's awkward switching between the printed page and the screen/keyboard/mouse to look up some illustrations. I'm all for an electronic reading pad (as long as it's got the visual quality of a printed page) that wirelessly pulls (interactive) content off of the Net, but since I don't have that, I'll settle for good old paper and never mind mixing up incompatible media/metaphors.
Regardless, it's an interesting book and I have some theoretical points that I will discuss here later.
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