Cybercultural Politics: Political Activism at a Distance in a Transnational World

Abstract

Globalization, the information era, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are highly complex, much-debated topics that are both the causes and the results of many changes in political, social, cultural, and economic life. This chapter explores the entanglement of these issues to shed light on the emergence of another dimension of political and cultural life, the virtual imagined transnational community that can be better understood through an analysis of cybercultural politics. It describes how cybercultural politics enhances interplay between political actors anchored in different levels of integration, transnational flows of political information and articulation, and "witnessing and political activism at distance". New communication media, especially the Internet, create, under the aegis of computer-and-electronic capitalism, possibilities for the existence of a virtual imagined transnational community. The chapter focuses on the use that NGO activists, particularly environmentalists, make of electronic networks, because these actors are highly sensitive to new ways of enhancing political action and to ideologies that boost transnationalism.

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