M. I. Franklin

I Define My Own Identity Pacific Articulations of ‘Race’ and ‘Culture’on the Internet

Most of the participants in the internet discussion forums, the Kava Bowl and the Kamehameha Roundtable, herald from the South Pacific islands of Tonga and Samoa. These forums are part of a cluster of popular online meeting places for the ‘Polynesian Diaspora’ and other people from the Pacific Islands who live in the USA, Australia and New Zealand for the most part. They have been going strong since the mid-1990s, nearly as long as the worldwide web. One of the most recurring topics in the discussions is the nature of Tongan and/or Samoan ‘identity’ and how this relates to ‘living overseas’. In these discussions, participants - many of whom are of ‘mixed race’ - exchange personal experiences, political opinions, emotional and intellectual expectations about the outer and inner limits of race/ethnicity, and/or culture in their everyday lives. This article reconstructs several of the more substantial debates on the meaning and implications of ‘identity’ that show how these generations of the postcolonial South Pacific Islands are (re)defining what it means to be Tongan, Samoan - Polynesian - in a diasporic context. Discussions revolve around several axes; the personal and political issues of race (ethnicity) as everyday embodiments; Tongan/Samoan and Pacific Island cultures as negotiable rather than fixed practices; ways of turning colonialist categories for Pacific Island societies, such as ‘Polynesian’, into futurist tropes for communities who are often socioeconomically disadvantaged and discriminated against both ‘at home’ and ‘overseas’. As they argue, write, read, send emails and interact with one another on and offline, the creators of thousands of interwoven online texts over the years have been articulating ‘race’ and ‘culture’ on their own terms. They have been doing so in the public cyberspaces of the worldwide web, tracing, as they come and go, a nascent postcolonial politics of representation.

Reading Walter Benjamin and Donna Haraway in the age of digital reproduction

Abstract Walter Benjamins ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ has much to offer contemporary analyses of the ‘Information Age’. This article rereads this famous essay in light of a later intervention by Donna Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’. There are strong parallels and overlaps between these two groundbreaking pieces, despite their many differences. Both deal with how their respective generations of ‘new’ information and communication technologies (ICTs) are intertwined with broader sociocultural and political economic change. Both apply controversial, Marxian, theoretical insights to changes in the mode of (re)production in their analyses of techno‐economic change that herald both negative and positive political possibilities. This article takes Benjamin and Haraway in turn, their lives and their work in general and these two essays in particular. It concludes with a brief discussion on how Benjamins and Haraways optimistic takes on technological change ‐ as political opportunity, despite less than optimal tendencies in the political economic and technical apparatus of their respective ages ‐ can contribute to fleshing out theory and research on ICTs. And to do so without lurching between the positions of extreme pessimism or optimism that characterize the debates to date.

Democracy, Postcolonialism, and Everyday Life: Contesting the ‘Royal “We”’ Online

Digital technologies have been inducing political and social anxiety for some time now, those demarcating the first, second and, now, third-generation Internet especially. Marxian approaches to this anxiety favour macro-level critiques, whereby the galloping commercialization of all things digital is twinned with neoliberal globalization. With the patchy track record of ‘electronic democracy’ often serving as a case in point, this version of events underscores the premise that the Internet is inherently politically suspect.1 This undertow of techno-economic determinism also tugs at much postcolonialist scepticism of the ICTs For Development rhetoric, touted as the latest panacea for endemic disenfranchisement in the so-called Global South. While hyper-corporatization tendencies and evidence of a ‘digital divide’ lend support to this sort of robust circumspection about the democratic potential of ICTs (information and communication technologies), it is not the whole story. In both cases, it sweeps commentators by other (non-elite, non-corporate, non-Western) designs, uses, and adaptations of digital technologies — those of the Internet especially — which cast another light on the matter. Engaging with the heterogeneous, unpredictable, and hopeful aspects to Internet-mediated interactions, (hyper)texts, forms of onlineness unfurling from ‘below’, renders the Internet’s democratic deficit far less inexorable.

Being Human and the Internet; Against Dichotomies

Ethics defines a distance between what is and what ought to be. This distance designates a space where we have something to do. On the other hand, dogmatism is authorized by a reality that it claims to represent and in the name of this reality, it imposes laws. (Certeau, 1986: 199)

Change of Editorship of the Key Thinkers for the Information Age Series

The Key Thinkers for the Information Age series, which in its first years was overseen by Christopher May (Professor of Political Economy at Lancaster University), has been a unique forum for examining a wide range of alternative views on the development and problems of the information society. Sadly, because of other commitments, Christopher May is unable to continue as editor of the series. Information, Communication & Society has been able to secure the editorship of Marianne Franklin (Senior Lecturer in Social and Political Theory at the University for Humanistics, The Netherlands) who has agreed to take over these duties. In this brief introduction, Christopher May takes his leave as former editor and convenor of the Key Thinkers series. Marianne Franklin then outlines how she sees the series unfolding in the future. Her contact details are provided at the end for prospective contributors.

KEY THINKERS PAST AND PRESENT: SERIES EDITOR'S NOTE

The Key Thinkers feature article in this issue by Zeena Feldman, on Georg Simmel, is the last one to appear in the Key Thinkers Past and Present series. The series is drawing to a close as the next generation of Internet-based technologies and corollary media products and services become more deeply embedded in everyday life, society and politics. Once new and strange – way back in the 1990s if not the decade before – these products and services are now banally familiar if not intrusive; indispensable for many and arguably desired by all nonetheless. Their direct and indirect influence on how people communicate with each other and go about their daily business is interpolated with an ongoing tension between the promise held out by (computer-)mediated, (non-)proximate communications to further longstanding ideals about global community on the one hand and, on the other, their idiosyncratic potentialities for facilitating relations of domination, control and resistance. This temporal dimension, short-term and long-term, has guided this series since its inception over a decade ago in 2000 by founding editor, Christopher May. As May notes, the series has ‘sought to conclusively demonstrate that whatever else may be happening in the information revolution, it is certainly not invalidating the insights of previous analysts of society’ (Franklin & May 2006, p. 105). On taking over the editorship of the series in 2006, I looked to further this objective at the moment when it was safe to say that the Internet, and what was then called ‘new media’ products and services, was becoming normalized, even institutionalized. Contributing authors continued to present often overlooked thinkers whose work, past and present, in their lifetime as well as our own have been ‘thinking beyond the immediate moment’ (Franklin & May 2006, p. 107). Recent years have also seen articles addressing streams of thought rather than single individuals, along with thinkers and ideas that are central to disciplines such as cybernetics, phenomenology, feminism and critical pedagogy. Whilst the aim of including non-western thinkers has been only partially successful, a characteristic of the series as a whole is that those who feature are not the ‘usual suspects’ in the current social sciences literary canon on information, communication and society; one where the names of Anglo-Euro-American thinkers predominate in university curricula, funding streams and literature lists.