Digital economy, diasporized 'homes' and ideological crisis in global interpretive communities: rethinking the political economy of ICT virtual reality

Alfred Ndi
2017 Greener Journal of Internet Information and Communication Systems  
This paper on digital economy, the diaspora and ideological crisis argues that ICTs in the context of the political economy of trans-nationalism and globalization are a very powerful machinery taking on new shapes, concerns and directions and with potential to subvert any narrations of nation states, home, roots or other forms of organization. Exploiting the tools and techniques of the cyberspace, with the uses to which they are put to promote capital (ebusiness, e-commerce, e-marketing, etc),
more » ... he paper maintains that the technology intersects with and neutralizes concerns over civilization, identity, political image, ethnicity, religion, law, and so forth. The digital diaspora is therefore a formidable project which is ongoing at a greater pace than before; however, this pace is undecidable, unpredictable and irreducible to any given region, nation or community. Drawing insights from Stanley Fish's critical theory of interpretive communities, it argues that digitization of the economy and the diaspora are narrowly fueled by the determinism of capital and ICT technologies; therefore, it is necessary to consider that there are always new forms of civilizational foundationalism that have the potential to resist the cyberspace of 'origin', from the perspectives of narratives of place, time, identity, etc, and are now re-asserting themselves in different ways and by re-engaging alternatively with the digital technologies of transnationalism and globalization and in a manner that was never predictable. The new identitarian ideologies emerging from the digital economy and diasporization of 'homes' have to do with the culture of being 'cool', construction of new political awareness leading to dissensions, the talking-back website culture, lesbian and gay pride identities, post nation state identities, creation of transnational and multilinguistic 'masses', construction of pornography diasporic communities, communities of popular resentment and economic disruption, of self-organization , of digital youth branding;, black critical consumerism, and global humanity. New security questions are also emerging to take centre stage in these identities. Keywords: E-marketing cyberculture and virtual reality, nation state communities and political dissensions, home, transnationalism and diaspora, neo-imperial age of the digital economy, undecidability of ideologies. 30 homeland universe. Children born in the diaspora employ the internet to connect with their peers in their ethnic homes (Saunders 2011: 5). Individuals who leave their home communities and those who decide to stay, employ the internet to construct a continuum of information and ideas. When minority groups leave their home communities for western, information-endowed countries, for reasons of oppression, for example, they use ICT resources very richly as a tool of national political liberation to deconstruct the hegemonic versions of information practices in their own nation states. Similarly, indigenous populations exploit the resources of the technology to create alternative narrations to the dominant culture of nation state media control. In this way, ICTs have been deployed for the deterritorialization of old Westphalian systems and for reconstructing new virtualities of nation states and new identities of globalizing communities (Ndi 2015) . This paper proposes to investigate the implicit ideological meanings that underpin the complex intersections of digital economy (e-commerce, e-marketing, e-trade, etc,) of the diaspora and the ‗roots'-and-‗routes' of global communities with a view to elucidate the ‗fluidity' of virtual reality and the construction of new community identities in this new imperial age. By exploiting critical cyberculture insights (Kitchin 1998 , Lévy 2001 , Haraway 1991 , Haraway, 1997 , Rogers 2013 to investigate various transnational intersections, the paper is premised on the hypothesis that any signifier of capital such as the digital technology is too deterministic a value to explain the new identity drives reconstructing the virtual reality space in different global contexts. The ‗double articulation' of the signifier/signified can be very illuminating when appreciating the potentialities of the new digital technologies, in the context of diaspora formations and the complexifying identities created in environments where trans-nations emerge freely. The process of digitization of the diaspora is unleashed when e-communities of migrants, who are geographically dispersed, start to form as they travel from their homelands in the Third World to the core countries in Europe and the US and to semi-periphery countries in Asia and interact with their ‗homes' and ‗routes' as online or virtual societies thanks to the ‗new' technologies of information and communication, fostering racial solidarity, unity and responsibility (Brinkerhoff, 2009; Everett, 2009). In history, digitization of the economy in the diaspora emerged at the same time as the access to cell phones, online public content, connectivity and as the Internet was made possible and cheaper (Diminescu 2008 Diminescu, Jacomy and Renault 2010). The trans-nationalization of ‗homes' in nation states was made possible thanks to social media tools and techniques such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn through which online communities were re-constructed to promote integration in host countries in ways that were not possible in their ‗offline' life (Diminescu, Jacomy, and Renault, 2010; Riddings and Geffen 2006). Web sites and blogs are now being deployed to construct virtual communities, by communicating and conveying information about diasporic experiences and social life in ‗hosting' and ‗origin' nation states (Alonso and Oiarzabal 2010). In this globalization dynamic, grassroots communities and societies are emerging in cyber-spaces as networked diasporic communities thanks to digital forums where ideas, debate and opinions are mobilized, friendship and support are expressed and issues like soliciting of funds to promote social and economic projects are addressed (Brainard and Brinkerhoff 2004) . These digital tools are being deployed as well to contest the legitimacy of what is seen as oppressive nation state governments, to circulate propaganda in media networks against their ruling elites, facilitate the radiation of political programmes and to call for open confrontations and disobedience. The e-economy is one of the signifiers of capital that potentializes expansion of this knowledge economy and increases the prospects for development of new narratives of ‗home', ‗roots' and ‗routes' through the culture of the diaspora. This transnational virtualization of reality that globalization constructs is one of inter-dependence of electronic communities living apart in different geographies. The e-economy is therefore a powerful engine of community growth, which has been sustaining new massification relationships and cultivating better forms of cooperation between villages, nations states, and transnations in ways which politics or diplomacy cannot (Bolaffi, Bracalenti, Braham, and Sandro 2003:131) and yet, these developments cannot be totally controlled as they create new ideologies of their own that flow in undecidable directions and ways. This flow of signifiers/signifieds has been theorized by Stanley Fish in his interpretive communities paradigm. Stanley Fish's interpretive communities The concept of interpretive communities, which is deployed to understand the emerging phenomenon of digital diasporas, was developed by Stanley Fish (1985) on the principle that the production of signs (de Saussurian signifiers and signified) can shift away from what is in a text towards ways of re-producing the text itself (Whitson and Whittaker 2013: 91). Fish maintained that the production of meaning is not infinite but always constrained (1985). For example, he upheld the structuralist view that people always make determination on certain kinds of readings of texts as ‗incorrect' and on other types of readings as ‗correct'. But, there is increasing evidence from cybercultural ‗texts', especially in the area of digital diasporas, that meanings can never be constrained. Deleuze and Guattari proposed the idea of double articulation and by that they were referring to the fact that meanings operate on the basis of different ordering processes take place simultaneously but on various plateaux and processes that may even take meanings (signified) to the verge of chaos. From this light, meaning consists not merely of either/or but of both/and. The act of interpreting meaning cannot be one of delimiting it to an intended primary sense, territorializing it to an
doi:10.15580/gjiics.2017.2.111116204 fatcat:xwatkqabofc2jeczr54cpg5asi