revolutions and diasporas

This page looks at the myth of the internet as innately beneficent, democratic and and subversive of autocracies. That's a charming idea, beautifully expressed by techno-romantics such as Gilmore and Rheingold, but inconsistent with what we know of other media.

     the rhetoric of revolution

The first page of this guide highlighted some of the wilder cyberlibertarian rhetoric, such as Barlow's assertion that we can simply become citizens of cyberspace ... off on a digital voyage to arcadia, sans care, sans responsibility. That's echoed by the Interzone Republic site, a

individuals who have renounced or intend to renounce their citizenship in any and all geographically-based States, and who work towards replacing the valid functions of those States from collectively-held resources.

One of the feistier critiques is the 2000 Duke Law Journal paper by Amy Bomse on The Dependence of Cyberspace, building on analyses by Richard Barbrook, Lawrence Lessig, Paulina Borsook and Jack Goldsmith. Selections appear in Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, (Cambridge: MIT Press 99) edited by Peter Ludlow, a follow-up to his High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues In Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT Press 96) - available here.

For a recent restatement of the arcadian vision, see Roger Clarke's rather silly paper Paradise Gained, Paradise Re-lost: How the Internet is being Changed from a Means of Liberation to a Tool of Authoritarianism. One might well say the same of the printing press or - pace Trotsky's description of Stalin as Ghenghis Khan with a telephone - other electronic media.

There's a more nuanced analysis in Ithiel de Sola Pool's masterful Technologies of Freedom (Cambridge: Belknap 87) and Technologies Without Boundaries (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 90), Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books 99) or James Beniger's The Control Revolution: Technological & Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 86)

     digital trumpets

This page is under construction. While you're waiting for the digital trumpets to sound neath the walls of Jericho, the following items from recent articles in Analysphere provide a range of views on state responses to the net in Asia, the Americas and the EU.

Shanthi Kalathil & Taylor Boas' The Internet & State Control in Authoritarian Regimes: China, Cuba & the Counterrevolution (PDF) suggests that those regimes are coping comfortably

Jack Qiu's 2000 article Internet Censorship in China (1999-2000), William Tao's 2001 article Censorship & Protest: The Regulation of BBS in China, and Lokman Tsui's 2001 MA thesis Internet in China: Big Mama Is Watching You (Internet Control & the Chinese Government) (PDF) offer a more critical view

V Krebs' 2001 article The Impact of the Internet on Myanmar

Harry Cleaver's paper The Zapatista Effect: The Internet and the Rise of an Alternative Political Fabric is more convincing than Vicente Rafael's paper Generation Text: the Cell Phone & the Crowd in Recent Philippine History

D Pantic's 1997 article Internet in Serbia: From Dark Side of the Moon to the Internet Revolution

     diasporas and digital nations

For diasporas see the Virtual Nations: Nationalism & Diasporas site.

Other perspectives feature in works such as Misty Bastian's 1999 Nationalism in a Virtual Space: Immigrant Nigerians on the Internet (PDF), Ananda Mitra's 'Virtual Commonality: Looking for India on the Internet' in Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety (London: Sage 95) edited by Steve Jones and Madhavi Mallapragada's 'The Indian Diaspora in the USA and Around the Web' in Web.Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 01) edited by David Gauntlett.

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