New media, digitextuality and public space

Abstract

"How do cyberculture and cyberspace get “postcolonialized,” appropriated for specific, politically useful and significant purposes? Lisa Law (2003) reading the online version of the Migrant Forum in Asia argues that the heterogeneity, contestability and contingency of the project’s cybercultural domain makes for a cyber-public space. Employing Nancy Fraser’s notion of competing publics, Law proposes that the diversity and politics of representation of this Forum enables a new configuration of community in cyberspace. I see an (Indian) example of such a cyber-public emerging in the Cybermohalla Project, a collaborative project of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) and the nongovernmental organization, Ankur (http://www.sarai.net/practices/cybermohalla), that focuses on alternative education. Sarai is supported by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, and the Dutch aid organization HIVOS (Lovink 2002). The Cybermohalla project’s work, I propose, is a move towards a postcolonial appropriation of cyberspace, a move facilitated by and through the digitextual nature of the new media of information and communications technology (ICT). Discussing the postcolonial adaptations of the English language, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin refer to: The abrogation of the received English which speaks from the center, and the act of appropriation which brings it under the influence of a vernacular tongue, the complex of speech habits which characterize the local language. (1998, 39)"(pg 1)