Forum: New Media & Society

For law enforcement agencies, the ‘information revolution’ is eroding their capacity to regulate money laundering, thereby undermining their ability to combat drug trafficking and terrorism. They argue that without enhanced surveillance powers, these problems will be exacerbated. This emphasis on the control problems precipitated by technology distorts our understanding of the relationship between the ‘information revolution’ and money laundering, much of which has been fuelled not by technology but by the dynamic interaction between technology developments and ongoing changes in criminal justice policy and the US state. An alternative narrative is sketched: the escalation of the US’s failed ‘War on Drugs’ has been a key factor driving both money laundering and the proliferation of surveillance countermeasures. In this context, information and communication technologies have been key resources/sites of struggle for both money launderers and law enforcement. The expansion of surveillance powers will do little to curb illicit action. Indeed, the expansion may escalate laundering as well as erode citizens’ privacy. The article suggests that a similar dynamic may be operating in the US state’s ‘New War on Terrorism’.

Mexico’s Zapatista movement was one of the first to use the internet to propel a local struggle onto an international stage. In so doing it originated a new kind of social movement, one that pushes beyond group identities around which social movements have traditionally organized and into the realm of network identity. This analysis of Zapatista websites and listservs examines the ways several key myths – of a universal Marcos, of noble savages and of a neoliberal beast – help structure the relationships among diverse members of the network. Examining the myths around which the movement is organized reveals how people go about creating network identities and helps us assess to what extent they are new and to what extent traditional roles and relationships are being played out in a new environment.

An editorial opposing the violence being perpetrated on the Palestinians by the Israeli government that was written on the Common Dreams website prompted several hundred email responses to the author. The essay had been reposted to many listservs and other websites around the world. In a case study approach, we track the repostings and qualitatively and quantitatively analyze the responses to that editorial, to determine the nature of the discourse in an electronic environment. The study found that readers of the essay were prompted to write to the author largely when they agreed with her position because of their political or religious views, linked to their own experience or feelings, wished to relate their own personal stories, and when they were male.

Most representations of Thailand which circulate in the global public sphere portray Thai women in two categories; both instances position them as happily subservient to western men. This article investigates how contributions by Thai women to internet discussions function simultaneously to renegotiate and reinscribe conceptions of nation, gender and community formation. It focuses on the Thai-managed, English language website SiamWEB.org (www.siamweb.org). The existence of this forum enables conversations between visitors that would otherwise not take place, providing a space for Thai women to respond to these dominant images. The article discusses SiamWEB.org’s strategic use of English, the in-process subject-position assumed of participants, and the persistent refusal of accepted conventions circumscribing national membership. Finally, it analyzes visitor responses, concluding that SiamWEB.org‘remaps’ and redefines participants’ online identities, Thailand’s national borders, and the tenets of national affiliation.

This article argues that the literature describing the internet revolution in the 1990s was characterized by the rhetoric of the technological sublime. This rhetoric suffered from three fatal flaws: (1) it was not sufficiently grounded in the historical development of technology; (2) it viewed the internet in isolation, failing to consider the wider technological context; and (3) it failed to examine the internet in view of the social, economic, religious and political circumstances of its users. Several examples from history are cited, demonstrating that changes in various systems for the production, dissemination and preservation of cultural information both border and deborder the world. The article suggests that if internet researchers take a pragmatic, historically grounded approach, they will discover that the introduction of internet technology can be seen to have similar consequences. While the technology overcomes many boundaries (of space and time, politics and economics), other social borders may be created at the same time. It is easier to see old boundaries coming down than to see new ones being erected. Rather than being swept by utopian or dystopian enthusiasms, the article insists that the really interesting discoveries are to be made in locating the subtle social shifts taking place, relatively unnoticed, as a consequence of technological change.

The Front National, a far-Right French political party which had long been ostracized and criticized by the mainstream media, was among the first to adopt a presence on the web as a means to publicize its goals. This article outlines the party’s growth, disaffection with traditional media and its online strategy using discursive analysis of the web site over five years. The article analyzes the internet as a site of cultural negotiation between the national discourse governed by dominant political parties and the more marginalized Front National. France, a centralized government, anxious about the cultural imperialism of English, at first resisted the introduction of the internet, but later promoted it to ensure the presence of French content. The Front National contested the more mainstream notions of French citizenship and nationhood and employed the internet as a catalyst and outlet for its ‘counter-knowledge’.