Cosana Nicolae
The Romanian “Digital Diaspora”
In a recent anthology dedicated to home, exile, and their visual correspondences Homi Bhabha coined the phrase “digital diaspora”. He made an apology for the proteic possibilities offered by the Internet ontology. In other words, You do not have to be whom you say you are, You can recreate yourself or What you see is not necessarily what you need to know are valid sentences for the lure of this “new communitarianism”. Consequently, according to Bhabha, virtual reality depletes our life of its historical memory”(Bhabha in Naficy: 9), whether stored either in the real or the imaginary homeland, to use Salman Rushdie’s phrase. Wherever we live, if connected to the Internet, we can become cybernauts and navigators within present tense. At the same time, we reterritorialize in cyberspace, that is, inside the virtual geography of online communities.
This paper addresses the notion of public space online, while analyzing the impact and consequences of a site for Romanians all around the world called romaniaBYNET.com. It also investigates some different definitions of cyberspace that will prove useful in context for notion such as social interaction, agency, and identity. The analysis accounts for the mode in which a certain audience/public is constructed on the Internet, specifically for a Romanian virtualized social space replicating real life. While exploring the national imaginary as it is restructured online, one can discover the way in which virtual politics operates across real-life categories. The goal would be to reveal a different version of Romanian citizenship, showing how what I would call Romanianness is imbricated in the overall national definition through identification in other than juridical terms. The discussion becomes thus part of the ongoing debates about virtualized citizenship and the negotiation of public sphere online.
Once an arcane means of communication for researchers and academics, cyberspace has now become the ideal medium for any human activity, from shopping to chatting or cybersex. Originally a term from William Gibson’s science-fiction novel Neuromancer (1985), it is the name one uses for the conceptual space where words, human relationships, data, wealth, and power are manifested by people using CMC technology. In other words, according to Neil Postman in an interview on radio, “cyberspace is a metaphorical idea which is supposed to be the space where your consciousness is located when you’re using computer technology on the Internet, for example, and I’m not entirely sure it’s such a useful term, but I think that’s what most people mean by it.”
As a culturally constructed phenomenon, cyberspace is made up of “ongoing processes of definition, performance, enactment, and identity creation (…) not a place (as Gertrude Stein might say, there is no there there), but rather a locus around which coalesce a hypertext of texts, modes of social interaction, commercial interests, and other discursive and imaging practices” (Kolko, Nakamura, and Rodman: 10). No longer hampered by corporeal demands, our identity in cyberspace relies more than everywhere on the power of discourse and its various practices.
Although cyberculture is made possible by the network’s wires, cables, servers, and terminals, it thrives where users meet within the wires and upon the interfaces. These online social interactions, or what Allucquere Rosanne Stone calls “virtual systems,” are as broad as they are diverse and take place within basic email, newsgroups, reflectors, and listservs, bulletin board systems (BBSs) and Usenet, MOOs and MUDs, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), electronic chat rooms, and interactive sites on the World Wide Web. (Kolko 33)
For Slavoj Zizek, cyberspace represents nothing else but the “unbearable closure of being”, as it is the carrier of the phantasmatic logic of social reality to its extreme: it proves the increasing handing-over of the subject’s self to the Symbolic order which virtualizes the self. Zizek claims that the Internet enables the symbolic order to inscribe itself isotopically on and in subjects’ most intimately bodily zones and deepest libidinal recesses. Insofar as this is valid, we witness a pernicious full colonization of the subject by the symbolic order. This is the collapse of the distance between subject and the sublime object that ideology requires in order to maintain itself as a frame within which the subject’s psychosocial fantasies are organized and managed. (Zizek 143)
Without arguing against Zizek’s point of view, this paper holds that online communities reconstruct a different type of intersubjectivity as to one in habitual terms, and also replicate social interactions. The subject online no longer belongs to the official line regulated by the social practices that it has to accomplish every day. Cyberspace offers the vision of new communities by allowing one to transpose oneself ideally into the virtual realm:
Although spatial imagery and a sense of place help convey the experience of dwelling in a virtual community, biological imagery is often more appropriate to describe the way cyberculture changes. In terms of the way the whole system is propagating and evolving, think of cyberspace as a social petri dish, the Net as the agar medium, and virtual communities, in all their diversity, as the colonies of microorganisms that grow in petri dishes. Each of the small colonies of microorganisms–the communities on the Net–is a social experiment that nobody planned but that is happening nevertheless. (Rheingold, online version)
RomaniaBYNET.com represents an online version of the public sphere. From this point of view it is a communitarian space, defined through policies of consumption and a new type of public, constructed on the web site and made up of disincorporated social actors. It is created by WebBYNET.com, which is according to its own words,
a global Internet company producing country-specific portals containing dynamic comprehensive information in a rich community environment. They offer access to the culture, history and products of different countries having the aim to be the ultimate online source for in-depth country-specific information, resources, and e-commerce and services including travel, communications and various community-type features. (Online text)
According to the chapter “Chatter in the Age of Electronic Reproduction” in The Phantom Public Sphere the public becomes an objective, it has to be produced (Robbins 100). My contention is that the notion of publicness (the terms belongs to the German Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge in their late influential Public Sphere and Experience) is much easier created online. Here one encounters a set of prescribed options for opinion formation, since everything is framed in such a way. For example, messages posted in the chat do account for a special type of public opinion feedback. In other words, the public is itself socially constructed insofar as “it creatively invokes an imagined space defined by individuals’ freedom alongside their social responsibility. It is where the various demands for equality are negotiated” (Eisestein 6).
In the age of the postcommunist state, Romanians want to recreate the hopes of public participation and a different public realm untarnished by the frustrations and disappointments of real-life politics. According to Caius Dobrescu, many young Romanians would connect themselves to the Internet because this is a chance for them to reconstruct a virtualized Romania far and away from the perils of the real social and economic reality. He adds this to the “gallery of self-projections in the marvellous world of the future” (212). A new “sheltering sky” for whoever accesses it is explored and enjoyed in the serendipitous egalitarianism of the Internet. The young project themselves into the future as settlers of a brand new cyber Romania because “the Internet represents one of the ‘clean’ places, with no memory (…) where a new life could begin” (213).
In July 2000, through a specified service, I contacted the server administrators asking for extra information concerning the Romanian staff. The kind reply came in an e-mail from Ionuţ Stavăr, one of the editors-in-chief. The site-editors and collaborators, according to the profile that Ionuţ was kind to offer me for my analysis, are all in their twenties and thirties. He also underscored that the site has a certain policy as to monitoring discussions online. According to prerequisites posted on the site,
like actors on a bare stage, members of an online discussion create the illusion of a place or scene that others can watch or join through words and graphical gestures or icons. As the interactions become more complex, several roles become available for the sustainers of the group conversation. Often these roles are filled intuitively; small understandings are smoothed out, visitors welcomed, etc., simply because it feels right. (Online text)
Different communities of interpretation, from anthropology to economics, have different criteria for studying whether a group of people is a community. In trying to apply traditional analysis of community behaviour to the kinds of interactions emerging from the Net, Marc Smith, a graduate student in sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles, who has been doing his fieldwork in the WELL and the Net, focuses on the concept of “collective goods.” Every cooperative group of people exists in the face of a competitive world because that group of people recognizes there is something valuable that they can gain only by banding together. Looking for a group’s collective goods is a way of looking for the elements that bind isolated individuals into a community. The three kinds of collective goods that Smith proposes as the social glue that binds the WELL into something resembling a community are social network capital, knowledge capital, and communion (Kollock and Smith, 1999).
What kind of capital is thus circulated in the Romanian cyberspace we are discussing here? The reason for “launching” the site was the widespread need of feeling closer to home. Therefore, in the anniversary message, romaniaBYNET.com attempts at a “connection between Romania and people gone away”. According to this scheme, social network capital is to be found in the 27,000 people whom romaniaBYNET.com, launched in cyberspace in May 1999, counts to have as regular members, not to mention the various visitors whose numbers, according to the statistics of the site administrators, exceeds 500,000. Knowledge capital could be found in the various levels of expertise that members of this community can provide during chats or in their editorials on various topics that range from political analyses to sports, to instilling a sense of belonging to the site. As for communion, this is something likely to happen provided people who communicate online shared the wish to dedicate themselves to a goal altogether. This third level, political, derives from the middle, social level, for the role of communications media among the citizenry is particularly important. A sense of communion is induced in the very persuasiveness of belonging to the site as a member, the instrumentalization of national emblems (the Romanian flag and anthem), or the invitation to participate in online chats on sociological or entertaining topics. It is here, between these two levels that we can talk about the notion of public sphere online, that is recognition of a living web of citizen-to-citizen communication otherwise well known as civil society or the public sphere.
As the recent Romanian socio-political context proves, in the absence of a cohesive and fulfilling activity in the public sphere (the “shrinking public”, as Lisa Duggan puts it in a forthcoming book), and the crisis of the representational politics – this could be read as the crisis of a certain communicative model based on the principle of propaganda and persuasion. This has been noticed by the editors of romaniaBYNET.com, who in their message posted to celebrate one year online, underscore their attempt at offering quality services, “all these in a country with a low rating, with major economical problems and social disorders, with a low life level and a rushing inflation, but with a hope for better times”.
Notions such as exile or diaspora are eluded since this is meant as an online comprehensive approach to Romanian all around the world where citizenship or geographical actual space is irrelevant. This ‘Romania’ is a cultural construct, since one can never pretend to hold all possible information and knowledge about one single country as a source of information. The editors of romaniaBYNET.com offer the version of their own Romania, a territory to which members are supposed to subscribe after surfing it. They become citizens only after a click. How does this “cyberRomania” look like? On the home page, the bilingual information accessible from the left side of the opening page lists the following order: Community, Entertainment, Info, Services, Shopping, Romania (this one with the sub-categories – Religion, Destinations, Politics), Literature Corner, and Careers. Each person becoming a romaniaBYNET.com “citizen” will at the same time receive regular e-mails updating the information posted on the site.
According to Luis Althusser, interpellation theory accounts for the implicit presence of ideology in any given text. In Althusser’s view, individuals are always already interpellated subjects, “hailed” to belong to a specific representation and hence always already ideologically oriented. Interpellation refers to the way each of us is hailed by our social order in a particular way. According to this notion, a social formation constructs and locates us as subjects whom respond and consent to it in certain ways. Therefore, individuals recognize or misrecognize themselves in the way they are interpellated by ideology. Althusser assigned to the concept of ideology “a system of representations”, that is images and notions that impose themselves “as structures”, through a process that escapes the control of individuals; and as a means by which they make sense of their experience and conceive of their place in the world – “…ideology is a matter of the lived relation between men and their world. In ideology men do indeed express . . . the way they live the relation between them and their conditions”. (Althusser 54)
Therefore, Romania is structured, hailed according to religion, geography and socio-political life. The chief-in-editor wraps up his editorial by saying, “So help us God”, thus dispersing any impression that Romanians are not an overall religious people. On the consumerist side, the possibility to buy Eastern Orthodox icons and other church products underscores this religiosity online. At the same tine, most photos posted on the site depict monasteries around the country. In the chapter Destinations, all historical territories are there: Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia, each with the corresponding data, as well as mountain resorts, Black Sea coast and the Danube Delta. The capital of the country, Bucharest is a visual omission, although present in a thorough historical description.
As a full-fledged community is thus constructed, the site promotes its own literary and cultural information. For example, at the end of May 2000 and 2001, the site promptly covered the editions of Bookarest, the largest book fair in the country. On the other hand, a canonical decentralization is noticeable in the literature corner, available only in Romanian, where any reader can post one’s literary creations online debased from the real-life inhibitions when facing a non-gratifying public. (Wallace, 1999) The production of these most of the times young authors is beyond control and any valorizing validation. Members are also gratified with periodic updates on sport, weather, politics, and Romanian domestic affairs.
In the chapter dedicated to politics, the analysis makes reference to the ten years that have passed since 1989. The discourse online deploys a sombre rhetoric when referring to the economic situation of the country viewed as one of the laggards of Eastern Europe. As the classified section is bilingual, one might expect to find similar notions both in Romanian and English. One year ago, in 2000, the English version of matrimonial ads hardly represented the same thing as the so-called original. It reflected more a commodification of Romanian bodies willing to offer escort services, Virtualized bodies thus became the screening room for teleported corporeal desires abroad. Such postings have now long disappeared and romanticism has returned with a vengeance in an ideal attempt to imbue the site with a more positively reflected spirit.
As a matter of fact, online citizenship offers ideal conditions, namely restrictions and borders become fragile, porous, and ultimately irrelevant. Individuals can act freely, without being hampered by censorship, and they can also attempt new socializing structures. Cyber-Romania is no more fractured by economic and social distinctions. It is a user-friendly and updated hyper-reality.
References
Althusser, Louis, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Trans. Ben Brewster, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971
Dobrescu, Caius, “Romania in the 90s: Breakaway to Fantasia” in Tănăsescu, Antoaneta and Petre, Cipriana Ed. Ten Steps Closer to Romania, Bucharest: The Romanian Cultural Foundation Publishing House, 1999
Eisenstein, Zillah, Global Obscenities. Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Lure of Cyberfantasy, New York and London: New York University Press, 1998
Kolko, Beth E., Nakamura, Lisa, and Rodman, Gilbert B. Eds. Race in Cyberspace, New York and London: Routledge, 2000
Kollock, Peter and Marc A. Smith, Eds. Communities in Cyberspace. London; New York: Routledge, 1999
Naficy, Hamid ed., Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of Place, New York and London: Routledge, 1999
Rheingold, Howard, The Virtual Community (online version), Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publications, 1993
Robbins, Bruce ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (for the Social Text Collective), Cultural Politics, Volume 5, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993
Zizek, Slavoj, The Plague of Fantasies, New York and London: Verso, 1997
Wallace, Patricia, The Psychology of the Internet, Cambridge University Press, 1999
www.romaniaBYNET.com
www.worldBYNET.com
Bibliography
The Cybercultures Reader, New York, and London: Routledge, 2000