Page 198 - Cyberculture and New Media

De-Colonizing Cyberspace:
Post-Colonial Strategies in Cyberfiction

Maria Bäcke

Abstract
Increasingly important information and communication technologies (ICT)
play a significant role – sometimes as an image, sometimes as a tool – for
authors like Ellen Ullman, Melissa Scott, Jeanette Winterson and Pat
Cadigan. In their novels they explore patterns of power, hierarchy and
colonization through the destabilization of space and transgress boundaries in
the space they create. By making connections between post-colonial/post-
structural/post-modern theory and technology, I explore the authors’ reasons
for making these transgressions. Édouard Glissant explains how computers,
and computer-mediated text, can generate a ‘‘space within the indeterminacy
of axioms” and how this opens up possibilities to create a space where
imaginative and ideological liberation is possible. Glissant’s idea of
indeterminacy grows out of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s discussion
about space and how it is structured. The virtual, seemingly topographical,
space of the Internet has been described, on the one hand, as an information
highway (striated space) and, on the other, as a web, where it is possible to
surf (smooth space). I connect these concepts to the novels and explore to
what extent the authors use these strategies to de-colonize the fictional,
digital space their characters inhabit.

Key Words: Literature, ICT, novels, hierarchy, power, Deleuze, Guattari,
Castells, Glissant

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Cyberspace is sometimes used as a synonym for the Internet, but the
two concepts are not entirely identical. The Internet is more limited and often
related to the real world, whereas Cyberspace is a broader term, a metaphor
for the thought-space created by information and communication
technologies – a space often explored in movies, games or literature.
Cyberspace is an idea of a new land full of opportunities, a territory ready to
be explored. But there is irony here, since, although Cyberspace is visualized
as free space, the vast majority of the people, who are doing the visualizing,
are white, middle class males in their late twenties or early thirties, living in
the suburbs of large cities in industrialized countries. I would argue that this
gender-, class-, age-, and ethnicity-based digital divide has had a great
influence on people’s view of Cyberspace, and reinforces the myth of the