Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
One of the most important uses of cyberspace by progressive social groups is
scale jumping, the use of one scale to facilitate political action at another, allowing
the local to become global (and vice versa). A fecund body of literature has
recently portrayed scale as made, not given, denaturalizing it as a social con-
struction with powerful and contested political dimensions (Marston
2000
; Benner
2001; Marston et al.
2005
; Moore
2008
). Such a perspective avoids the common
error of conceiving as scales hierarchically, i.e., like nested Russian matroyshka
dolls; rather, it allows processes to be viewed as deeply multiscalar in nature, and
foregrounds the nature of social relations as networks and flows rather than spaces,
a notion essential to poststructuralist perspectives. Telecommunications are an
ideal mechanism for groups to jump scale (Adams
1996
), allowing them, for
example, to leverage public opinion at the global scale in local struggles for
justice. Prominent examples of scale jumping using cyberspace by progressive
social movements include the Zapatista uprising (Cleaver
1998
), linking local
community networks in the U.S. (Longan
2002
), farmers' opposition to transna-
tional mining companies in Peru (Haarstad and Fløysand
2007
), and the Indian
Farmers' Movement resistance to foreign biotechnology (Featherstone
2003
).
Leveraging the global to shape local struggles is a tool long used by transnational
firms; the internet offers the same strategy to groups operating in civil society. In
Cox (
1998
) terms, the internet allows local groups to expand their spaces of
engagement, i.e., the geography of their supporters and audience, well beyond
their spaces of dependence, the locations of their support networks on the ground.
The internet is often used by diasporic networks to maintain contacts among
persons living outside their country of origin (Cunningham
2001
), keeping them in
touch with one another and with their origin country, forming a globalized
''imagined community'' of the sort made famous by Benedict Anderson (
1983
).
Parham (
2004
), for example, notes its use by the Haitian diaspora to form Haitian
Global Village, a sprawling website that receives one-half million visits per month.
Indian emigrants forged a Hindu cyber diaspora in the early 1990s (Lal
1999
), and
Tamilnet.com links Hindu Sri Lankans worldwide. Often such groups have con-
tacts in cyberspace that cross caste, gender, or religious lines in ways that would
not be possible in person. The Iranian diaspora, for example, is linked by a series
of cyber channels that connect people of varying ages, degrees of religiosity,
different levels of fluency in Farsi, and political outlooks (Graham and Khosravi
2002
). These lines of connection serve to problematize prevailing conceptions of
citizenship, as some diasporic communities may be more informed about and more
involved in political affairs in their home country than their brethren in remote
rural villages. Some diasporas, such as Russian Jews in the late 1980s, Kurds,
Palestinians, and East Timorese, deployed the internet in struggles against
oppressive governments in their respective homelands (Dahan and Shefer
2001
).
As Appadurai (
1996
, p. 10) puts it, ''The transformation of everyday subjectivities
through electronic mediation and the work of the imagination is not only a cultural
fact. It is deeply connected to politics. The diasporic public spheres that such
encounters create are no longer small, marginal, or exceptional.''
