Volume 5, Issue 2

Abstract

Mobile technologies and networks facilitate the delocalization of traditional power structures within an economic frame. This shift usually incorporates the discourse of the body creation as well. Our bodies are constructs in which individuals as well as and social perceptions and projections, reality and fiction fuse together. In a similar way, we doubt about the representation of reality and highly editable and generative images.

Nonetheless, some forms of bio-power can be identified in contemporary constructed mental images such as race or ethnicity usually linked to religious or linguistic differences that are traditionally used as borderline zones. Many examples can be traced back to representations of both fauna and populations of the new world in colonial America. This phenomenon has also emerged in representations of cyberspace even though Internet is advertised as a place in which traditional distinctions and imbalances in power between individuals have been effaced.

If Zizek's statement is true that in order to capture the spirit of an age you should not look to explicit social structures but rather to the ghosts that haunt us, and live in a region of nonexistent entities, the topic of globalization should not put aside issues of immigration and multiple representations of race. This situation is inherent to the present and future construction of both cyberspace and public physical space. Media imaginaries create a myriad of information that also includes artificial savages. This fact constitutes what some artists provocatively call a rather explosive universe of cultural misunderstanding under a new world border.

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2007-04-19
2024-03-29
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Keyword(s): bio-power; ethnicity; globalization; imaginary cartographies; new world border; race

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