It is funny because, I am not fighting with that dichotomy anymore!!

I will almost not put energy on discussing it, just taking for grating the continuity of the on/… well, I don’t want to use the dichotomy to say that it is not analytically meaningful.

In the meantime, I have got involved in discussing the problems with a concepts such as ‘blogger culture’, so Dina, good comparison!

Anyway, thank you very much for the dedication, Anne.

I am thinking of the concept of double hermeneutics. Is that what you are referring to to?

In that case the concept might not bear much analytical value. But one might still take into account that because many people understand and define their relations and differences in terms of culture.
In that case I would agree with you that culture might not be valuable as a concept that explains things by being added. Instead it is a (or more likely several interpretations of) a phenomenon that will acquire our attention because it exists as categories in our informants minds.

I am not sure if that is what you mean, when talking about offline / online, but I saw some similarities to the old debate regarding “culture”

The comparison with ‘culture’ is very interesting, but I think this is a little different.

I’m not not not not not saying that I changed my mind and that I now think that online/offline is something valuable to hold on to as an analytic distinction!!! I’m saying that it’s now clear to me that lots of people don’t consider this language problematic, and therefore that my advice to skip making the argument was garbage. Because people, witness the book, still talk about ‘the online-offline distinction’ as though that means something. In this context, it becomes very important to address these terms, as Adolfo did.

I remember some of those discussions. And I like this dedication. It’s always interesting when you have to change a perception of something old and used, and realize that there might be something to it anyway.

It reminds me of the goods old anthropological debate concerning the concept of culture. In the eighties this concept almost started a war among some anthropologists as some said it had become a garbage category, whereas other pointed to all the features it carried with it that would also be lost by discarding it.

Well Anyway, reading this post was a wonderful way to start the day. Thanks.