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Making Things Real

Ethics and Order on the Internet

London School of Economics.

If materiality is necessary for social order, we can usefully investigate what happens in social settings (such as, in this case, an Internet setting) which constantly problematize materiality and are uncertain as to what exactly count as `things'. This discussion draws on an on-line ethnography of people exchanging sexually explicit material (`sexpics') and communications over Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The paper argues that although, or because, this `sexpics' scene problematized materiality, participants went to great lengths to make `things' material. They set in motion a considerable range of `mechanisms of materialization', and they did so in order to establish a sense of ongoing ethical sociality. Conversely, the kinds of materializations they produced need to be interpreted in the light of the precise ethical sociality they sought to sustain. In particular, the article explores a paradox: although sexual imagery and communications were hyperabundant (partly because they were `dematerialized' as digital files), participants routinely materialized them in the form of scarce economic commodities which were exchanged within pseudo-market relations. What is at stake here is not the necessity of materiality for normative social order but rather the precedence of the normative over the material, or the `ought' over the `is'.

Key Words: commodity • exchange • gifts • Internet • markets • pornography

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