Postcolonial Politics, The Internet and Everyday Life: Pacific Traversals Online (Routledge Advances in International Relations and Global Pol) - Softcover

Franklin, M. I.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415459907 ISBN 13: 9780415459907

Publisher: Routledge, 2007

Synopsis

This book explores the technical, political economic and sociocultural implications of technological change. Using an international political economy approach, the author focuses on how the Internet is used by ethnic minorities to communicate.

About this title

Review:

'In this fascinating and important book, M.I. Franklin reveals that they are already present. Reflecting on her own contribution, Franklin expresses the hope to have made the initial opening in terms of other ways in which ICTs can be thought about, designed, and eventually used, by examining the practice of everyday life online (p. 232). She has succeeded in doing this and more. - J. Marshall Beier, McMaster University, Canada

 

'If culture means the ways people make sense of their place and time in the world, and if anthropology's distinctive contribution the study of such ways has been based on ethnography - meeting culture-makers on their own ground and terms - then this book must count as a pioneering work. It transports research to a field whose reality is in no way denied by calling it virtual. It is an inspiring example to follow, all the more remarkable because the author is "technically" not an anthropologist.'

- Johannes Fabian, Amsterdam School of Social Research, the Netherlands

'While other ethnographic studies of the internet are sensitive to global concerns, Franklin’s strength is that she brings together a politically-informed analysis of the ways in which the internet is implicated in globalisation with a very subtle, nuanced exploration of the everyday practices of internet use by an economically marginal group of people, namely Pacific Islanders.'

- Sally Wyatt, ASCoR, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

'No neat conclusions here, and nor should there be, but plenty of food for thought and, with a generous sprinkling of direct quotes - hilarious, furious, honest, wise, confronting and always insightful - a thoroughly enjoyable read.'

- Helen Lee, La Trobe University, Australia.

'Postcolonial Politics, The Internet, and Everyday Life represents scholarship of the future. That is, it takes seriously how a group of people usually not heard from in mainstream academia (the South Pacific diaspora) utilizes a contemporary means of communication (the Internet) to articulate and formulate a subject rarely discussed in liberal democratic theory (collective identity in a globalized, postsovereign world).'

- L.H.M. Ling, The New School, USA

'Through this methodologically unique exploration of translocal negotiations of identity and political agency, Franklin offers us new meanings of self and community in resistance to technostrategic trajectories and erasures. Likening this 'other' internet to the 'oceans within' Pacific Islander consciousness, she takes us to new "shorelines" of feminist postcolonial inquiry.'

- Anne Sisson Runyan, University of Cincinnati, USA

Synopsis:

The dotcom boom may well have come and gone but information and communication technologies (ICTs) are now an inescapable part of both everyday life and world politics. In this close-up study of several longstanding Internet discussion forums, M.I. Franklin explores the form and substance of everyday life online. The author traces how non-Western diasporas use the Internet to talk productively about local and global politics, cultural issues, and identity in an era dominated by neoliberal globalization. The openings for intercultural and intracultural empowerment, online and also on the ground, that emerge through ordinary people's uses of the Internet are being squeezed out, however, by powerful political economic and sociocultural interests from above and below.Franklin argues that a closer look at the content and communicative styles of these Pacific traversals online suggest other Internet futures; more hospitable, culturally inclusive and economically equitable than the one currently being put in place by vested economic interests and political power elites.

This book will be of interest to students of international relations, social sciences, cultural studies, science and technology studies.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0415459907
• ISBN 13: 9780415459907
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 308