Critical
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Summaries | Works Cited
Nationalism
This text begins with a clear refutation of the global village narrative,
with its echoes of Star Trek that see Earth’s peoples as a unified
whole – even though that whole is a Westernized, consumer based one. The
presentation of the Web as a global village constructs the Web as a neutral
arena for communication and commerce that is equally approachable by all
and that is outside of the boundaries of nationality, ethnicity, class,
and gender. This text demonstrates that individuals and groups are
not unified in their perceptions of their Web experiences; instead,
the studies’ participants experience the Web through the lens of their
own cultures and contexts.
Yet these chapters are focused around the nationality of the participants.
Almost all of the articles explore the Web literacy practices of a clearly
defined and described national subgroup; only Richardson and Lewis’s discussion
of online hip-hoppers presents the literacy practices of individuals whose
“race, class, and geographic profiles” could not be determined with complete
confidence (252). Each chapter also relies on a modernist notion
of a nation as a boundary for its discussion, though for some chapters
those boundaries are not excessively restrictive. The text’s dependence
on nationality is most evident in the table of contents: each chapter title
refers to at least one country. By using nationality as an arrangement
device, the text’s organization reaffirms the modernist concept of nationality
as a unifying, partially deterministic influence on individuals’ literacy
practices.
This arrangement device, and the implicit assumptions in it, are at
odds with the goals of the text. Through Hawisher and Selfe’s exploration
of the “internationalness of the literacy environment” on the Web, this
collection rejects nationality as a deterministic feature of Web literacy
and Web identities (3). I am compelled by their arguments against
nationality as a deterministic feature of Web literacy practices and Web
identities, but it still struck me as odd that the name of a country is
in each of the chapter titles and that each chapter uses a country as a
limiter on the research. Despite this tension within the text, Hawisher
and Selfe’s rejection of nationhood in their discussion of the global village
narrative and in their discussion of postmodern identities originally struck
me as appropriate and intelligent, for “nationhood” and “nationality” struck
me as a too simplistic understanding of the connections among people both
within a country and between countries.
Before September 11, 2001, Hawisher and Selfe’s thoughtful, predominantly
theoretical, dismissal of nationality as an especially salient feature
of Web literacy practices and of the postmodern identities that occur on
the Web struck me as sufficient and logical. But today, rejecting
nationality as a too simple rubric for a serious study of transnational
communication is not so simple for me to do, now that a friend’s brother
has died just because he went to work in the World Trade Towers.
Nationality has become a current, immediate, complex concern, whether I
am a postmodern academic or not. So I’ve started to suspect that
Hawisher and Selfe’s binary opposition – the global village vs. internationalness – misses
the point. In the global village narrative, the planet becomes one
people, one “nation,” much like in the American myth / story of Star
Trek. In webbed, international communities, we still have the
idea of separate nations underlying our perceptions of these cross-border
interactions. Both the ideal of the global village and the concept
of internationality are responses to, and are shaped by, the combining
of classes, ethnicities, genders, communities and individual identities
into a nation. So Hawisher and Selfe's predominantly theoretical
discussion of nationality and internationality in Web literacy practices
and in online, postmodern identities strikes me as insufficient to prove
that nationality is not still determining our literacy practices and our
identities. I’m finding that I want detailed evidence to show
me that we really can bypass the influence of nationality, both on
the web and in ourselves.
To truly get out of that dynamic – to see our identities as hybrid, cyborg,
transgressive, which is the goal of this text – a study may attempt to bypass
nationality, possibly by focusing on ethnicities, tribes, classes, genders,
or communities of interest and arranging the study to reflect that focus.
But such a “bypass” of nationality does exactly that: it avoids the need
to conduct extensive, detailed, and specific research to understand how
nationality, and the concept of a nation, influences Web literacy practices
and online identities. So a more valuable study would directly
explore the influence of nationality. Such a project could begin,
for instance, with the people of one tribe, family, or ethnicity from two
nations. It could research the particular similarities and differences
of these people's Web literacy practices so as to detail the influences
of nationality on their identities. It strikes me that such a study
would uncover the influence of nationality without being organized by the
modern concept of nationality, which would provide the specific details
needed to support a rejection of nationality as an especially salient force
on people's identities on the Web.