New Book Available:
Inuit in Cyberspace: Embedding Offline Identities Online
By Neil Blair Christensen
For more information and to order please see:
http://www.mtp.dk/catalogue?m=bi&id=684
Dear Arctic Info Subscriber,
I am delighted to be able to write to you now and inform you that Inuit
in Cyberspace has recently been published. In this cyber-ethnography, I
explore the processes by which a wide selection of personal, local,
cultural and national identities are expressed and understood on the
Internet. The different Inuit peoples of the circumpolar Arctic have
always taken active part in the world, but their contemporary use of
Internet(s) has affected even more their relative isolation - one that
comes from living in a peripheral region of the world. Yet, Inuit and
others are constructing web pages with social and physical references
that sustain an imagined Arctic remoteness; a logic that seems to be a
key aspect of Inuit identities and cultures.
The book brings together in analysis and discussion the realities of
contemporary Inuit, the myth of cyberspace, a selection of dynamic
strategies for identification, as well as a discussion of online methods
for research. It concludes that Inuit dynamically remain Inuit, in all
their diversity, regardless of an imagined compression of time and
space; their use of changing technologies, or participation in enlarged
social networks. It carries a series of new perspectives for the
researched and the researcher.
Kind regards
Neil Blair Christensen
Christensen, Neil Blair: Inuit in Cyberspace: Embedding Offline
Identities Online, 2003, 135 pages, ISBN 87-7289-723-6. Prices: $19, €
20, £14, DKK 148
Contents
Introduction: Shifting Boundaries
Modern Tradition
Escape Cyberspace
Old frontiers in new space
I Going Nowhere to get Everywhere
Online survey
E-mail interviews
Content analysis of web pages
Wanted: practical method
II (Re)producing the Arctic in Cyberspace
The myth of cyberspace
Peripherality on the Net
Three regions: Canadian Artic, Greenland, and Alaska
Bridging a gap?
III A Common Web of Difference and Similarity
Recursive dynamics: social boundaries and cultural stuff
Us and them: self-identify by identifying others
Taloyoak in cyberspace
Native language
Guestbooks
Intelligible boundaries
IV Perceiving Cyberspace
Engaging with the world
Disengaging from abstract theory
Continuity? Accept Change and Understand Context