ABSTRACT
With the unfathomability of its electronic networks, the fluidity and bidirectionality of its information flows, the proliferation of such flows, its resistance to censorial control or definitive expression, its potentially global reach, the internet epitomises the ‘maelstrom’ of late modernity like no other technology. Here one many find the ‘vociferous confusion’ and ‘cluttering up of cultural space’ described by Kenneth White (1999), here one may find an intractable milieu in which identity has become disembedded from the body and the body disembedded from place – identity reduced to the level of a text message. As Judith Donath notes,
Said Sartre in Being and Nothingness, ‘I am my body to the extent that I am’. The virtual world is different. It is composed of information rather than matter. Information spreads and diffuses; there is no law of the conservation of information. The inhabitants of this impalpable space are also diffuse, free from the body’s unifying anchor. One can have, some claim, as many electronic personae as one has time and energy to create. (1999: 29)
Actually, Donath reiterates this familiar assertion in order to argue the opposite. ‘“One can have . . . ?”’ she continues, ‘Who is this “one”? It is, of course, the embodied self, the body that is synonymous with identity, the body at the keyboard’ (ibid.). Indeed, much of the ‘millennial rhetoric’ which characterised earlier studies of the internet has now given way to more sober analysis which recognises that the internet is merely another ‘site among many in the flow of economics, ideology, everyday life, and experience’ (Sterne 1999: 282) and that ‘it is essential to treat telecommunications and computer-mediated communications networks as local phenomena, as well as global networks’ (Shields 1996: 3). Discussing the internet as both ‘culture’ and ‘cultural artefact’, Christine Hine similarly
argues that the internet has ‘multiple temporal and spatial orderings which criss-cross the online/offline boundary’ – she concedes, however, that the interaction between these various social spaces remains to be adequately explored by academics (2000: 27; see, however, D. Miller and Slater 2000). I suggest that the contemporary practices of genealogical research and roots tourism cannot be explored except in these terms and that the journeys of discovery with which I am concerned typically move across this online/offline boundary, involving migrations between homepages, as it were, and homelands.
