Cyberspace is mainly perceived as another kind of space to be conquered, civilized, and colonized. If it were, the overpowering diffusion of the best backed-up cultural forms could be taken for granted. This is precisely what the champions of political correctness fear most--to see the entire cyberspace invaded by, and subjected to, the dominant Western pop-culture. "For a much too long time, the Internet's default culture has been U.S. culture," said Bram Dov Abramson (reported by Damien Cave in salon.com, February 28, 2000). Overtaxed by a monotonous cultural menu, this research analyst from TeleGeography would like to find the picturesque and colorful diversity of real-life relief on the web. He finds some comfort at the news of some newly developed software products (e.g. TraceWare from Digital-Island.com, or the yet un-named item of iCrave.com), that can determine the physical location of any logged-on PC with high reliability (i.e. 96% for TraceWare). This would allow the geographic bordering of the Web. The persistent association of each region could be centered with a specific cultural style. A cybernaut from Singapore would never see any advertisements for Viagra (the reliable sex potion is prohibited over there), a Québec surfer would be politely directed to francophone sites, the European Union would be in the position to digitally enforce its option for l'exception culturelle. Moreover, the authoritarian or totalitarian regimes would cease to fear the freedom of e-communication. The cultural filters would soon be put to work according to the local Big Brother wishes. In Abramson's view, implementing geolocation forces content providers to think about other defaults than the American way. In my view, this would only bring back local idiosyncrasy, censorship, distortion and manipulation.

Fortunately enough, we are not in the position to choose between local abuse and global uniformity. Cyberspace is not merely an easily permeable space, wherein distances are irrelevant, so that dominant cultural forms are over pervasive. It is a collection of interconnected cyber-places, each one of them being the outcome of a time-space synthesis. The spatial aspect of a place is determined by the fact that one can access it, explore it and use it as a start for a new journey. The temporal aspect is provided by the author's history, which is converted into an informational artifact--the cyber smith, upon building his site, turns his time-rooted cultural attitude into a meaningful cyber-environment. The differences, as far as personal timelines are concerned, account then for the stylistic diversity of the places.

A promenade on the Web in search of samples of cyber-images offers the diversity of a curiosity shop, not the monotony of a suburb. In spite of cyberspace being detached from real world territory, the symbolic integration of the sites in their specific, time-matured cultural backgrounds is impressive. See, for example, Masaki Fujihata's image proposal at www.flab.mag.keio.ac.jp/light/. The site presents an array of 7*7 icons of electric bulbs, which can be activated individually, according to the commands on a spreadsheet. At the Softopia Center, Gifu, Japan, a real life replica of the array is exposed, the on/off state of each electric bulb being the same as the one of the corresponding icon from the site. The effect is clearly related to the traditional Asiatic culture. The panel, as well as the array from the site, is an interactive game of Go, extended in cyberspace. Unlike the agonistic Western games, here there are no either winners or losers, but connoisseurs who contemplate the refined patterns of their own interactions.

Marija Mojca Pungercar lives in the ex-communist Slovenia and remembers vividly the daily life in a police state. Her site, "The Mojca Case", from the address http://mila.ljudmila.org/scca/mojca, is the ironical and playful development of a cyber-CV as a homepage, while programmatically undermining all the accredited strategies of self-marketing. The artistic conception takes as a reference a police file. The main page contains the personal data of the "wrong-doer" Mojca and the description of the "case": "The indicted uses real historical events in order to distort them according to the free play of her imagination. Her multimedia narratives turn against their own sources, which are altered, distorted and ridiculed." The artist feigns to plead guilty: "I purposely got into ambiguous and compromising situations, I committed the crime to reconfigure according to my own ideas the fragments of the scattered reality. I used the imagination to mediate between the event and the document, and sometimes I lost the document itself."

The most successful example of an identity well marketed by cyber-images is offered by the phenomenon Mahir. The young Turk made up a very simple site (http://members.xoom.com/mahiractive/) from some commonplace photos and scarce personal data in broken English. However, he managed to hit upon a still unexpressed collective yearning for an unsophisticated, happy-go-lucky identity, sort of a playboy with limited resources, who likes to play the accordion, wants to kiss everybody and "invitates" women to share his tiny apartment from Izmir. The success of the site transformed Mahir into a cyberspace celebrity. Fan clubs develop the initial symbolic offer, parody-sites add-up zest and humor; jokes, interviews, studies continue to proliferate. A cyber-subculture is about to be structured, the subculture Mahir. Like in the case of other outstanding, although un-similarly famous, personalities (Shakespeare, Homer etc.), many claim that Mahir does not exist; he is just the playful creation of a hacker. Possibly a Turk hacker with the same name.

"The Internet has never been placeless," says Abramson. "It's always been a virtual overlay on top of the real world, anchored there by architecture, which is very physical indeed. Now the two worlds are merging. Real geography exists in the physical world; it had to show up on the Internet sooner or later." However, he misses an important point--cyberspace is related to the physical world, but it is certain that the two do not merge. It is not physical geography that shows up on the Internet, but real-time history.

Copyright © 2000 Adrian Mihalache All Rights Reserved

Adrian N. Mihalache is a professor at the "Politehnica" University of Bucharest, Romania. Presently, he is a Fulbright Scholar at Western Michigan University, Department of Anthropology where, together with Professor Arthur Helweg, he is working on the book "Ethnology of Cyberspace".