Critical QuestionsBefore Reading. How is the concept of borders changing within the United States and throughout the world? In the United States, how is the debate over cultural purity versus cultural mixing being framed? How are nations becoming less important than a global culture on the one hand and smaller, more focused communities on the other?
Taking it Further. Why does economic success for U.S. immigrants, or the Third World countries in the new global economy, necessarily lead to a sense of cultural loss? Can a true community exist online? What is the relationship between online communities and other kinds of communities?
ReadingsWilliam Mitchell, "Soft Cities"
Allucquère Roseanne Stone, "Sex, Death, and Machinery, or How I Fell in Love with My Prosthesis"
Stephen Doheny-Farina "Real Cold, Simulated Heat: Visual Reality at the Roxy"
Howard Rheingold, "Disinformocracy"
William Greider, "One World: Ready or Not"
Benjamin Barber, "Jihad vs. McWorld"
Wen Shu Lee "One Whiteness Veils Three Ugliness"
Guillermo Gómez-Peña "The 90s Culture of Xenophobia: Beyond the Tortilla Curtain"
Gloria Anzaldúa, "La Conciencia de la Mestiza/Toward a New Consciousness"
Web Connections for Chapter 5
William Mitchell, "Soft Cities"
Mitchell makes the distinction between virtual communities (imaginary places constructed entirely on the Internet) and site-specific communities (physical places served by an electronic network). What are some of the characteristics of each? What are their differences? What kind of impact might an electronic community network (for a site-specific community) have on the actual physical community? What might an electronic dimension add to or take away from a local place? Find an example on the World Wide Web of a community network like the Cleveland Free Net that he describes. How is the local place represented electronically? What kinds of groups, activities, or relationships are represented there?
Allucquère Roseanne Stone, "Sex, Death, and Machinery; or How I Fell in Love with My Prosthesis"
Stone's discussion of interactivity and play in electronic environments makes the most sense in the context of rich immersion environments like games, and less sense for general thinking and retrieval environments like those of the World Wide Web. If you have played any computer games or participated in any extensive virtual, interactive environments, consider them in light of Stone's arguments about the connections among technology, desire, and the body. What elements of the virtual environments that you're familiar with work most effectively to engage you?
- Interactive Environments, Gaming (Brenda Laurel)
Stephen Doheny-Farina "Real Cold, Simulated Heat: Visual Reality at the Roxy"
According to Doheny-Farina, what are the chief differences between community and virtual community? Using your response to the previous question as a basis for comparison, describe the relationship of individuals to virtual communities, as the author sees it. What happens to the individual in cyberspace? Why does Doheny-Farina reject the conventional designation of cyberspace as a frontier? On the basis of your own experience of Internet community (newsgroup, listserv, IRC discussion group, MUD or other), evaluate the author's claims.
Howard Rheingold, "Disinformocracy"
What do you think is the Internet's value for democracy? Can you find examples of participatory democracy online? Do you think that the Internet and online technologies will enhance democracy, civic participation, and the First Amendment?
William Greider, "One World: Ready or Not"
Greider compares the toy factory fire in Thailand to the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire in 1911, which he says was a pivotal event in American Industrial history. There is a good site on the World Wide Web about the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire. Read around the site and find at least one document that raises some of the issues that Greider does about the international workforce. Are there similarities or differences in attitudes about women, work, and culture?
There are also interesting sites on more recent tragic fires in U.S. history. Visit, for example, sites that describe the 1991 Imperial Food Products Poultry Plant fire in North Carolina in which 25 workers were killed (mostly African American women) and 56-86 injured (different sources present different injury figures). The fire doors were locked because the employers thought that some of the workers would steal chickens. What issues do these sites raise? How does an activist site, such as "Factory farming" use artistic media? What do you learn from the U.S. government OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) site? What attitudes toward women, work, and culture surface in these sites?
Some critics of corporate globalization (especially violations of worker safety regulations, or lack of regulations) use cartoon art to publicize their opinions and make their arguments. What is your visual reaction to the political cartoons "Inaccessible Exits" or "Nike"? The site listed below also has links to comic books that satirize globalization. Read through "SSAPS" (Surviving Structural Adjustment Programs, a parody of the TV show "Survivor") or "Cosmic Doom." How do their satiric stories of globalization compare to Greider's journalism? How do these graphic stories compare to
MAUS and
Comanche Moon?
Benjamin Barber, "Jihad vs. McWorld"
It is possible to see the Internet and the World Wide Web as embodying and facilitating both of the tendencies Barber describes. That is, the network of the World Wide Web makes possible both global and tribal connections. In pairs, do some research on the Web and find one example for each tendency. What would you consider a tribal tendency or a global tendency on the Web? What about national interests (the cultural force left out in the tension between Jihad and McWorld)? Are there any ways that the WWW fosters national identity? Or are the identifications one finds on the Web either bigger or smaller than the national?
In addition to thinking about national formations as a cultural force that Barber leaves out of his dualistic descriptions, what other kinds of formations or human groups reveal something about the interaction between local and global communities? How would you name and describe, for example, the community represented by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan?
What are the risks of symbolizing violent and exclusionary tribalism with the word
Jihad? Does that semantic image make it difficult for readers to recognize the same phenomenon in other locations, for example in fundamentalist movements in the so-called Western world? Visit some of the sites below, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center. Do any of them describe groups in the terms that Barber uses to describe Jihad and tribalism? Are you skeptical of any of the descriptions?
Some might also take issue with Barber's pejorative use of the word
tribalism. There are activist organizations in both the Americas and in India, for instance, that do advocacy work for the rights of so-called tribals, historically disenfranchised groups that have faced discrimination and genocidal threats.
Wen Shu Lee "One Whiteness Veils Three Ugliness"
After reading Lee's article, think about what other knowledge you have about women and race, or colorism, in Southeast Asia. What do you know or think you know? What are your sources for that knowledge? Visiting the sites of Asian women's activist organizations might help you to test your assumptions about culturally specific constructions of race and gender, histories of sexist oppression, and histories of resistance in parts of Asia.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña "The 90s Culture of Xenophobia: Beyond the Tortilla Curtain"
Look at examples of Guillermo Gómez-Peña's performance art on the Web and compare it to this essay. What ideas in the essay do you see reflected or revised in the performance art pieces? Gómez-Peña has often collaborated with other artists, so we have listed their sites as well. You might also visit sites about "Superbarrio," a satiric superhero who comments on borders between the Anglo-American and Chicano, Latino, and Mexican communities as well.
Gloria Anzaldúa "La Conciencia de la Mestiza/Toward a New Consciousness"
What are the implications of Anzaldúa's theories and arguments for Latina, Chicana, and Queer (Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) activist and community organizations? When you visit the sites, below, analyze in what ways they reflect Anzaldúa's ideas or whether or not they put them into practice. For example, do any of these Websites also use code switching? Or, to take things in another direction, what seems of utmost importance to MANA? And to LLEGO? How do the agendas of these two organizations differ? What does that difference, or the gap between them, tell us about Anzaldúa's concept of borderlands and mestizaje?
- MANA: A National Latina Organization
- LLEGO: The National Latina/o Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Organization
Web Connections for Chapter 5
As the final chapter of
Beyond Borders, Chapter 5 brings together themes relevant to all the Web Research Activities. However, more than any of the previous chapter is focuses on the theme of cyberspace and discussions of globalization. Many of the readings, then, tie in directly with "The Web and a Sense of Place and Community" and "Democracy, Difference and Globalization." Readings such as K. Anthony Appiah's "The Multicultural Mistake" and Salmon Rushdie's "Yes, this is about Islam" will provoke many of the questions that the Web Research Activities explore.
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