Crossing Boundaries in Cyberspace? The Politics of "Body" and "Language" after the Emergence of New Media - Critical Essay

As a largely text-dependent medium, unlike radio or television, the Internet requires a certain level of literacy, as well as technological knowledge, which is not only in question in the economically less developed regions of the world, but even in the most industrialized nations, where a great number of people are as unlikely to connect, because of their psychological disposition, age, or class. Acknowledging this "digital divide," as Olu Oguibe writes, it becomes increasingly evident that as we connect, we become part of a new ethnoscape, what one might call a netscape or cyberspace where information and individuals circulate and bond into a new community. And as this community broadens in spread and significance, we are effectively implicated in the relativization of the rest who remain on the outside of its borders." [3] [3]

Inasmuch as the Net represents the matrix of connectivity and the sacred corridor of seemingly limitless freedom for an increasing number of participants, the Net community's blind spot remains the social, political, and cultural implications of the technological and symbolic exclusion of those who are not partaking in it. The Net is an emergent global social system and forum of agency for the represented, in which the nonarticulated outsiders are nearly invisible and inaudible. These outsiders inhabit the "dark continents" of our digital culture, as Terry Harpold writes in his "Critique of internet Metageographies," in reference to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as one of the defining tropes of high colonialism. [4]

Harpold's analysis of the "blind spots of cartography" might shed light on the aspects of darkness in the valences of the Net. By showing how the un-networked nations are like "framed voids" that merge with the empty background, were it not for their faint borders, darkness as a sphere of the nonrepresented becomes visible. As he writes, "Thus, the fusion in such images of a tropology of presence/absence and fullness/emptiness with conventional signifiers of regional and nation encodes the traces of network activity with meanings beyond the mere visual registering of place-names. Viewed with an eye to their unacknowledged political valences, these images [and the cultural practice] of the wired world (that is, of the mostly unwired world) draw... on visual discourses of identity and negated identity that echo those of the European maps of colonized and colonizable space of nearly a century ago." This leads us back to the question of the utopian constitution of cyberspace as one network, one world." While the Net is not the new domain of colonialism, it nevertheless creates structural inclusions and exclusions that cannot be separated from a world history of colonization and contemporary globalization. The crossing of boundaries inside this realm reaffirms those boundaries between the parts of the world where access to electronic media has become part of the everyday and those parts where the cultural, infra structural, and economic preconditions have not yet been achieved.