Netizens
“We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.” — Michel Foucault
(Foucault, Michel; Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias (lecture); 1967; at http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html)
To get a handle on Cybersecurity, one needs to understand Computer Networking, the structures one is seeking to protect. Similarly, to know the Cyberspace we inhabit, one needs to understand the textures and contours of our Cyber Reality.
Many of us, especially starting with those inhabiting prominent financial centers in the early 2000s, were entrenched in one of the cores of electronic mediation. In particular, I cannot even begin to retrace my heavy reliance on the Internet to manage my activities, habits and responsibilities. The Internet became indispensable: ‘google’, ‘ebay’, ‘youtube’, ‘facebook’, to name a few popular online institutions, are tools that hardly escape our everyday life and conversational references, many of them were sedimented our consciousness long before the lyrics of our respective national anthems.
Student life has especially made me heavily reliant on the Internet, computer literacy was made mandatory when I entered primary school, our education seemed to guarantee that we would eventually become valuable, technologically savvy, well-informed, economic agents, who would soon contribute to the production of knowledge and technology.
The relatively unfiltered, non-hierarchal flow of information I was afforded, made me learn the importance of alternative sources of information, and appreciate the value of marginalized perspectives that interrogate the ‘necessary’, ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ systems of domination. The realm of the inexpressible or impermissible for the members of the unrestrained cyber consciousness is continually being probed and complicated. I have often wondered about the Internet as uncensored representational space, for I am intrigued by whether the reflection of no longer suppressed (now terrifying) aspects of humanity will impel us to find a solution for social problems, or will it cause one to become desensitized and subsequently self-contained/alienated?
Our parents’ generation (before the advent of the Internet), navigated firsthand through less extensive documentation of contestations and disputes of cultural narratives and ideologies. Nowadays, these opinions are not just coming from respectable, traditional ‘experts’, everyone is an ‘expert’ these days, anyone can publish on the Internet. Additionally, the Internet has made knowledge much less exclusive, it not just reserved for the elite. As knowledge is power (reinforced to me by my eventual exposure to Foucault and Gramsci), the modes of disseminating information provided by the Internet, undoubtedly redistributes power in ways that puts the elite hegemony of the experts and the institutions in check. With prolonged use of the Internet, the ‘truth’ that informs individuals’ judgment of one’s self and relationships with others becomes far less monolithic. With my relatively unconstrained access to virtual spaces, my acceptance of the various ‘truths’ I encountered in these spaces became more critically mediated. I soon valorized a kaleidoscopic, pantheistic approach towards the bewildering incongruence of different systems of thought, detachedly juxtaposing discourses of all sources and forms. Since my parent’s generation, a different type of socialization between human beings has been brought on by the management of our virtual lives/ identities within the Internet’s communicative structures: The onset of globalization is facilitated dramatically by the Internet as shown by the limitless multiplicity of representations and narratives of events and individualities that proliferates in an exponential manner; as discourses collide in cyberspace, ‘deviations’ from ‘norms’ become more acceptable. It is debatable whether communication has been made more effective through use of the Internet’s communicative structures, but it is undeniable that there is a wider array of rapid methods to communicate with others than before. Additionally, connections can be established more easily between cybercitizens of diverse backgrounds: it enables us to find and consolidate those who have common interests more quickly.
My conception of modernity as mediated by my daily use of the Internet has been synesthetic and pre-theoretical: the Internet provides me with simultaneous, equidistant ‘here’s and ‘now’s where nothing can be too ‘distant’ and ‘exotic’. Electronic mediation of community creates a more complicated, disjunct, hybrid sense of local subjectivity, the Internet has an all too familiar overwhelming sensory overload that accompanies the phase of modernity (late capitalist globalization), where we often occupy multiple communities, and, at times, contradictory social positions. The Internet, to an extent, is a transnational spatial representation of modernity in that it renders the cybercitizen more conscious of cultural and ideological processes. However, if one does not nurture a self-determined critical capacity to make judgments about competing claims and facts, one will inevitably be overwhelmed by confusing facts, which could yield a painful relationship with knowledge.
Cyberterritoriality
“Modernity now seems more practical and less pedagogic, more experiential and less disciplinary than in the fifties and sixties, when it was mostly experienced through the propaganda apparatuses of the newly independent nation-states and their great leaders.” — Arjun Appadurai
(Appadurai, Arjun; Modernity At Large; University of Minnesota Press; 1996; p.10)
In an era of late capitalism, variously termed post-modern or hyperreal, marked by increasing calls for, and pronouncements of, the end of the heyday of the nation state as sovereign container of social relations and ontological building block of international relations, nation states’ vociferous extension of territorial sovereignty to the diffuse, decentralized, and trans-national space of the Internet appears curiously counter to the dominant current of global flows. In particular, it draws attention to fallacies and limitations of viewing what is termed globalization and nation states as locked as a zero sum game wherein the nation state loses whenever globalization wins and vice versa. As the nation state demonstrates, statehood and sovereignty are perhaps better understood as being transformed in scale and scope as a result of the encounter with ever globalizing capital, rather than being attenuated or reinforced in any easy sense of either statehood or sovereignty.
(Re)assertion of territorial sovereignty is indicative of the ways in which inherited geographies of state-power are being dynamically put to the test and subsequently rescaled and/or re-territorialized. Nation states’ spatial fetish and continued reliance on the ontological primacy of the nation-state is manifest in its continued efforts to organize the primary socio-cultural identities of its citizens on its model, and with it as (implicit) referent.
The Internet creates and affirms meta-theoretical and self-reflexive spaces conducive to the analysis and understanding of inherited notions of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ in this increasingly transformative ‘glocalizing’ world.
