ABSTRACT
An archipelagic context may intensify isolationism: drawing on David F. Howell's work on Japanese geographies of identity, Henry Johnson argues that in this archipelagic arc of island identities there are not only national, regional, cultural and island borders but also internal island borders that create a further level of 'island' community. In the digital philosophy movement, for example, nature computes; that is, the data are forms of information processing. Promoting the virtues of 'archipelagic thinking' as the articulation of a global creolisation process, Edouard Glissant contended, 'The entire world is becoming an archipelago.' As a universal level conditioning alternating fragmentation and recurrent consolidation, the sea is an archipelagic algorithm. Marco Cuevas-Macro Hewitt argues that a distinctively archipelagic political organisation, a 'territory without terrain,' depends on evaluating 'the sea between – the sites of multiple relationships that are never fixed, but constantly in flux.'
