ABSTRACT
Early advocates of the Internet predicted that cyberspace would transcend the constraints and conicts of the physical, material world (e.g., Spring 1999). Critics of this perspective have since argued that on-line activities “remain embedded within the context of the off-line spaces and the social relations of everyday life” (Valentine and Holloway 2002, 304). The same tensions shaping non-virtual activities, such as racism and sexism, are also at work in organizing activities in cyberspace (Kitchin 1998). For example, Barney Warf (2001, 6) has challenged utopian interpretations of the Internet by suggesting that “social categories of wealth, power, and place are inevitably reinscribed in cyberspace.” With the reinscription of these categories and distinctions, life on-line is not a socially unied realm but just as potentially fragmented and divided as life in the physical world (Graham 2000). Adams and Ghose (2003, 419) characterized new information and communication technologies as “contested terrains in which various groups compete for a strategically advantageous position.” As other scholars have established, the Internet has a transformative quality in which its speed and reach allows people to expand the scale of their activities and activism (Adams 1996; Froehling 1997; O’Lear 1997; Alderman 2008). In this respect, cyberspace is not merely an extension or mirror of politics in the physical, ofine world, but also a medium for redening (and even intensifying) lines of social struggle. Perhaps no group knows this better than African Americans, who have witnessed in cyberspace a “reconcentration [rather than a redistribution] of power along class and racial lines” (Beckles 2001, 311).
