Virtual transnationalism?

In this world of digital objects and mediated conversations we can call just about anything "virtual" but when it comes to ideas of relating and concepts that have never been concrete - like transnationalism - adding the term "virtual" creates its own problems.

The notion of transnationalism started out in the early 20th century as a way to contest the idea of immigrant integration and moved into the ground of privilege, defined as an increase in the ability for the people of certain means and aspirations to communicate, interact and conduct business regardless of national boundaries whose significance is seen as receding due to globalization.

Transnationalism as a notion got a similar treatment in academia as anthropologists such as Peggy Levitt and later post-modern media theorists such as Arjun Appadurai theorized the concept into a new existence. Levitt and colleagues saw the idea of transnationalism rooted in migrant practices of establishing and maintaining links between the countries of their origin and settlement, often infused and relying on large amounts of energy, financial considerations and emotional investments. In this conceptualization, transnationalism was about local communities and distant spaces tied to each other by virtue of particular human links, technological means and ways of navigating geopolitical conditions. Scholars saw these as spaces of resistance to state impositions, spaces of, often inadvertent, political oppositions to the established order, hierarchy and attempts at cultural homogeneity. It was the dispossessed creating their own worlds of survival that extended beyond national boundaries and encompassed distant places affecting each other and producing hybrid cultural forms.

Appadurai, Ong and other theorists saw transnationalism also manifesting in that earlier privileged space of globe trotting academics and cosmopolitan refusal of settled belonging in favor of broadly defined non-culturally specific world-identities, where past and culture and nation were occasional reminders of pre-existing conditions once could transcend, while fighting to realize a new kind of transnational identity - where culture was a process not a thing, and where all existing definitions of belonging and self fell short.

In between these two extremes of the world, lies my research, my subjects and the odd notion of virtual transnationalism, where travel is rare and the purview of the privileged, where economic connections are profoundly local and removed from the relationships dubbed transnational, where the concept of emigration had at a point in time implied a permanent physical absence with little promise of future visits and where social network sites suddenly offered a promise of reconnection that brought about deeply emotional experiences of nostalgic remembrance and intimate exchanges of current status, but where the idea of transnationalism does not quite fit despite the ties spanning national boundaries and temporal differences - reconnecting not only with each other but also with a kind of past that is long gone.

So in my view, virtual transnationalism is nostalgic connections with ties who now reside across the world - where these connections are about the past and about the nostalgia of past relationships and yet the current locations situate and contextualize both the reminiscences and the discussions of where life is now. These are connections that are necessarily technologically mediated - they have to be because they are not sustainable when the costs of communication are too high. Yet these are also connections whose attractive accessibility through technology motivates said technology use. These are lapsed ties - where reconnections are not about reviving relationships but about catching up, dusting off, exchanging current news, reminiscing about the past, exchanging a bit of gossip and then laying them back to rest, only slightly less inaccessible now.

Greateness at what cost?

I have been trying to decide which smartphone to buy in order to join the smartphone crowd somewhat belatedly I suppose. Certainly there is the obvious response - buy an iphone, but I refuse to. I must admit, I am occasionally tempted by the easy user-interface and the ecstatic reports from friends. Yet I have a small problem with Apple and it's products. I think that Apple conducts some of the worst offenses and it's business practices are horrid. The enfant terrible of the tech world produces eye-candy technology of very high quality, but at what price to the people that work for it, the people that revolve in the world directly connected to the design and production of this technology and to the rest of us in this crazy world? So you might say I have principles... not very strong ones (I do use Apple products for a variety of purposes and I do admit their technology is in many ways superior to competitors), but they do exist. I limit my consumption of Apple products out of principle.

Apple is the darling child of the tech community that seems to be able to forgive and forget it's missteps and little crimes in favor of consumption of its brilliance. Some very long time ago, an art history teacher of mine in a class on Russian art told us how one of the brilliant well known artists of the last century was also implicated in occasionally having sex with very young peasant girls (of the pre-pubescent age) and then painting their portraits. He asked us then, whether these crimes had any impact on how we perceived the frankly brilliant paintings now that we knew that the majority of the subjects were also molested by the author. I was horrified, but at the same time, there was a part of me that readily excused the brilliance for having to get inspiration in such a horrific way. As I look on at the enfant terribles of this world - I wonder, why DO we excuse the brilliance for its occasional (or not so occasional) missteps? Why are some vicitimizations and little crimes overlooked when our gains, intellectual or technological, are seen as worthwhile? Is it because the product of that brilliance, no matter its source, is a source of pride and that is important to our little human minds that feel so much smaller in the presence thereof? Is it because the cost-benefit analysis somehow tips in favor of the product no matter its source? I am not sure, but the Apple cultish cabal is sometimes too much conceptually to really buy in to the all-apple product line. Then again, I did just buy an ipad.