ABSTRACT
In its current state, the internet may be understood as a dynamic, shifting assemblage of computers and other electronic signal receptors storing, transmitting, pointing toward, and/or receiving bits of digital and analog information.1 Popular representations of internet use, however, depict the exchange of information as the habitation of virtual space. Of course, privileging certain conceptions of online discourse environments over others is not a “disinterested” aesthetic strategy. In this chapter I consider how the envisioning of space, like all forms of rhetoric, inscribes particular relations of power (Foucault 1979; Soja 1989; Davis 1992). Current procedures for identifying the location of electronic data, Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), imagine the internet and the World Wide Web as geographically based systems with corresponding geopolitical reference points in the physical world. Rather than recognizing the networks formed through online information exchange or the World Wide Web’s systemic indexicality, the
prevailing images of the internet and the World Wide Web locate individuals, not to mention data, via spatial coordinates. The extension of time-space compression to the World Wide Web signifies yet another instance of western colonization. Some websites, however, eschew special metaphors and use networking and data dispersal to describe their function on the World Wide Web; for instance, Tamil Eelam websites highlight network figurations, dispersal, and/or boundary/ border crossings. Tamil Eelam refers to the northern area of the island, which a majority of Sri Lankan Tamils believe should be designated a discrete nation-state. By prominently featuring the phrase “Tamil Eelam” in Web content, they challenge the idea that creolization and nationalism are mutually incompatible. While the use of creolization and the emphasis upon national sovereignty are consistent, the strategies of freedom fighters, government workers, and politicians – not to mention website administrators – differ. As the epigraphs illustrate, these Tamil Eelamcentered websites are not primarily concerned with geopolitical verisimilitude, but rather with community formation, primarily with respect to ethnic Tamils in diaspora. Through the interpellation and dissemination of a strategic narration of Sri Lankan history, these sites seek to emphasize shared descent, culture and language, thereby inspiring a sense of cultural nationalism. This reliance on ethnic identification over citizenship in a nation-state not only incites participation from permanently displaced Tamils, but also sympathetic recognition from non-Tamils who consume and reproduce their texts and images. In order to more fully exploit the possibilities of the World Wide Web, these Tamil Eelam websites practice a range of tactics for digital creolization, expanding the metaphors of space, network, and online interconnection by providing histories, national subjects, and western-style news reports that are replicated in Sri Lankan, Indian, and western presses. Sri Lankan Tamils in diaspora established themselves on the internet early, actively posting to Usenet groups and, since 1996 launching websites. These websites vary in purpose, but are linked together to form an online presence premised on national recognition. They are updated frequently and provide a range of information and services for ethnic nationals in exile, their families and communities, and the world at large. Although the websites signifying the Tamil Eelam nation are dedicated to the creation of a conventional state or nation, many of the sites dislodge the correspondence between the World Wide Web and particular stategoverned territories. Not only do the sites refuse to recognize the primacy of country-code suffixes to denote nation and location, but several Tamil Eelam websites portray themselves in contradistinction to practices understood to regulate the transmission protocols of data between linked computers. Unlike Paul Gilroy’s assertion that diaspora is “an outer-national term” (2000, 123), these sites posit a national citizenship premised on bodies in diaspora rather than the occupation of land, and view the act of virtual recognition as the crucial component that will enable territorial sovereignty. Accordingly, the duration, look, and
reliability of these groups on the Web is deemed more important than the possession of a “country code Top Level Domain Name” (ccTLDN). Given that the internet often appears as a timeless and ahistorical constellation of smooth spaces, this modification is essential. This chapter will investigate the process by which dominant metaphors, particularly that of the spatially designated World Wide Web, have become naturalized and then examine the inequities that accompany these metaphors, such as the presumption that the internet occupies a space beyond historical time. Finally, I will establish that the most popular English-language websites concerned with Tamil Eelam employ the notion of networks to create a community premised on cultural nationalism. Through the process of digital creolization, Tamil Eelam websites have forged a platform for organization, and while this certainly promotes the recognition of their right to nation-state status, it also adjusts traditional conceptions of the nation-state and national membership by envisioning the internet as networks of information that scatter and shift over time. Rather than presuming direct correspondence with a geographical namesake, these Tamil Eelam websites lobby for traditional nation-state recognition by incorporating additional temporal histories, strategic cartography and symbolism, innovative practices for optimizing resources across media, and unique formulations for national membership through electronic connections and information dispersal. As a result, Tamil Eelem’s digital creolization creatively exploits internet communication and reconceives our limited metaphorical designations and domain citation procedures.
