While Race in Cyberspace offers cultural studies an important discussion on
the ways race is played out in the electronic realm, cyberstudies must consider
the theoretical positions put forth by writers like Burroughs. The challenge to cultural studies
in the digital age is not to reproduce the logic of print culture (representation)
to question racism, but instead to ask how racism can be fought in the digital through
various cultural and technological strategies. For, as Burroughs pointed
out, representation is always a difficult concept to nail down because of our own
cultural positions.
Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative. (Naked
Lunch 220)
Reading the digital South, for instance, is a cultural position
constructed out of a "relative" ideology. Critiquing
one position by way of another does not necessarily solve the problem.
Instead, we must manipulate those positions we deem unfavorable (like
racist websites) through the technology those ideologies are constructed from. Otherwise, technology, by itself,
will always reproduce dominant discourses.
Probably the best lesson Burroughs has for the study of cyberculture
is the cut-up.
Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into
writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation.
(The Third Mind 32)
The cut-up is the strategy of hybridity put forth by Gomez Peña; the cut-up is the method
used by hip hop culture to critique social injustice. And the cut-up is a practice most practitioners
of digital culture already know to some extent.
In fact, when we write for the Web, we most likely engage the cut-up
in some form (copying source code, rearranging HTML tags). The task now is to reapply it as a method of cultural
critique and not just as a design strategy, to look to current digital practice (like
Gomez Peña or Mez) for models for how to digitally critique institutional practices.
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