Page 203 - Cyberculture and New Media

194 De-Colonizing Cyberspace
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entirely unhappy with-and she exists in Cyberspace only, Max is forced to
reconsider: “No doubt about it, this was the real Sarah Jane-and boy, how
weird was that? The real one being the cartoon in the Web and the fake being
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the flesh-and-blood avatar in the real world”. Their meeting confirms that
the relationship between Max and Sarah Jane is real regardless of
environment. Max’s emotional reaction in the novel becomes the only proof
he needs, but also the only one he will ever get. In this children’s book
Cadigan thus attempts to destabilize both the reader’s view on virtual and
real, traditional gender roles, the question of identity, and the preconception
that emotions have no place in technology.
Similar questions are posed in Dervish is Digital, where the female
police officer at techno-crime, Doré Konstantin, is busy investigating crimes
taking place in a virtual world. The novel is written for an adult audience and
its tone is darker. The novel explores privacy, safety, and law enforcement in
the virtual environment and the main concern is control. To what degree can
someone control someone else in Cyberspace and to what extent could it in
that case influence the real world existence? The book discusses the problem
of retaining individual integrity in Cyberspace when any data collected can
be stored and used for manipulation and control. In the novel an individual is
not ‘safe’ even if he or she takes on another identity, since the characters’
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personality shines through and is possible to trace. This means that what has
been considered one of Cyberspace’s main advantages – the freedom to
invent personas to hide the real-world self – is not available anymore in this
novel. Konstantin’s real-world self almost dies because of what happens to
her in Cyberspace. Freedom – or smooth space – has given way for striation
and control.
The fourth and last of Manuel Castells’ cultures, the entrepreneurial
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one, was the primary shaping force behind the Internet’s expansion. The
entrepreneurs actually make money out of ideas, out of creating the future.
Castells argues that the entrepreneurs with technological capacity have
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managed to make the Internet the backbone of our lives. Cyberspace thus
has its firm base in the new economy developed hand in hand with ICT. In
Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook the narrator is an e-writer called Ali or
Alix – the narrator’s gender is never entirely clear – who makes a living by
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selling stories, “Freedom for just one night,” on the Internet. Customers are
free to invent a persona; the real world name, age, gender, or occupation is
irrelevant. Only the personality remains; free from real world expectations
and obligations. Ali, or Alix, is selling the ultimate consumer dream, and
might therefore seem like a shrewd entrepreneur when defying the rules of
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the physical world and offering the customer a virtual one. The narrator
makes the most of Cyberspace’s possibilities to destabilize time and space
and believes that the virtual world has little impact on the real one, but
ultimately the narrator falls in his or her own trap when s/he falls in love with