Public
Lecture by Prof Curwen Best
Head of
Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature
Professor of
Popular Culture and Literary Studies
Faculty of
Humanities and Education
University
of the West Indies
Cave Hill
Campus
Barbados
Faculty’s
Professorial Lecture Series entitled
“Strategic Space: 10 Things Our Youth Know (that we don’t) about Cyberspace,
the Nation and the Future”
Lecture Theatre 2, Tuesday 14
May 2013 @7:30PM
a REVIEW:
By O. O. Worrell
By O. O. Worrell
Professor Best started with a packed audience before him
(standing room and floor space only) with the didactic mix of professors and
preachers and a full row of teenagers with smart phones and tablets in hand.
Much like church today. It is believed they are all members of Prof Best’s
extended and or church family. Not that there is any difference. I remember
seeing a bus in the parking lot bearing the name of a local church. There was
an almost evangelical air about the lecture theatre. Robert Leyshon, Senior
Lecturer in Drama and UWI Public Orator was smiling and clapping long before
the lecture was in full swing, much in the manner of a reformed Protestant. Historian, Trevor Marshall, of the Barbados
Community College, sat reverently (a
miraculous feat) behind Evelyn O’Callaghan, Professor of West Indian Fiction. Both in front row pews of the people’s
cathedral. Perhaps seeking a closer encounter of the Best kind. [Nevertheless] we [whoever they are] were all there, to receive spiritual counsel from our
beloved senior pastor. Enough spam!
- What to make of this provocative topic? "What do the youth know, that we don’t, about cyberspace?"
Professor
Best started, in his usual enigmatic style, with multitrack prepositional
concepts, such as:
- “Reading culture as containing multiple tracks of data”
- “Digital culture and reading strategies”
And
- “Multi-Format Caribbean Cyberculture”.
The rationale, presented by Prof Best, for proposing such a
theory is both enlightening as well as incandescent. That is, the
evorevolutionary spaces, which give rise to commercialized space-aged
technologies, namely, the World Wide Web, make it virtually impossible for
emerging 21st century (metropolitan cultures) not to emit and mimic
the efflorescence of digital cyberspace transmissions. A trivial example of one
such matrix giving rise to another can be viewed in the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Televised (wireless sound-images
from the moon) of Neil Armstrong, US astronaut, becoming the first man to set
foot on the moon (July 20, 1969) may have given rise to the popularized Michael
Jackson moonwalk
dance[1], mimicking the characteristic weightless motion of walking on the moon.
In short, we have no choice but to go with the flow; tick with the tock; track
with the trek! Wherever the technologists lead us, we must follow (even
reluctantly so). It is a real-world phenomenon that the emerging, burgeoning
digital culture is baptizing the ultra-orthodox, proselytized, barbarian,
educated, differently educated, bond and free into the same murky river of
multi-format cybercultures.
This led to more robust postulations from the goodly
professor as he presented a holographic image of how our youth (a term which he
and the United Nations’ councils have great difficulty defining) freely,
ingeniously, dexterously and ignorantly navigate, infiltrate, violate,
participate and situate themselves in cyberspace. Professor Best wondered how
the rest of us navigate these cybernetic arenas (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,
WhatsApp, etc.) In these holographic texts (software, hardware, chat rooms,
video games, etc.) the question of reality colliding with make belief; the
material world and the illusionary; human and digital interfaces come into
sharp focus. To this end, Prof Best posits the need, by critics, theorists,
academics, bus drivers, social commentators, embalmers; to consider “what or
who is “real” and what is simulation?” Do we need to employ an FBI-type
approach to investigating the possibility of “assumed identities” among our
youth and their “projected” alter egos? Do our youth “stage their presence”
before a live audience (parents, teachers, priests, peers, etc.)? If so, why
and what are the immediate and long-term implications? Alternatively, is it
simply an erstwhile but ongoing Anancy Web Project[tion]; embedding old world
archetypes and prefigurations into New World methodologies, technologies and
refigurations? Are we making much ado about nothing?
Who’s afraid of cyberspace? Certainly not the youth, opined
Prof Best. According to the professor, the youths’ positive response to
cyberspace and its concomitant cyberculture, fueled by its cybertechnologies,
provide an opportunity for our youth to experiment with notions of
“visibility”. What, in the opinion of Prof Best, the youth seem to have
discovered is that the important commodities in cyberspace are not the
recessional, bankrupt, old school, hunter-gatherer preoccupations with (food,
shelter, clothing, health, etc.) Rather, our youth have jumped unto Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs and reduced the old
man’s pyramid to one essential need, “Visibility”. What Maslow termed
“self-actualization”. Perhaps our youth are unto something revolutionary!
One revolutionary outcome, which has certainly grown into an
ever-widening craze, is what Prof Best termed the “advancement of thumb
culture”; a new sign language, involving the “human hardware interface”. The
more we interact with emerging technologies the more we are conditioned and
programmed to interact in a truly digital and digitized (fingers or thumb
modulated) global community. For Prof Best, this is a clear-cut case of “how
technology creates culture and how culture creates technology”.
This brings us to the love-hate ambivalence, which is often
applied to “Net/Cyber-Lingo”. That is,
the complexities, difficulties and problematics associated with the usage of
cyberspace language and its encroachment on grammar and academia is at times
treated with an acceptable convenience of unbridled brevity and at other times
with draconian scorn. “Those born in the era of texting”, argues Prof Best, are
“progenies of Cyber-Linguistics”. Why should they care about such nuances or
nuisances as [I before E, except after C] when abbreviations or
quirky spelling is what the cyberlinguist ordered? Does this spell, smell or signal the death knell of
traditional rules of grammar? Are formal registers of linguistics being
hijacked by “cyberhackers” who have created their own “linguistic rules and
cyberethics?” Professor Best considers this an arena of “gray matter”. In other
words, “ethical hacking” and the resultant “hacker culture” should be viewed as
the youth giving a positive spin to an otherwise illegal manipulation of
invasive cyberespionage and cyberwarfare. It is Prof Best’s unswerving
conviction that “ethical hacking really has to do with networking”, thereby,
liberating the cyberhacker from the legally enforced penalties, pitfalls and
emotional doldrums usually associated with copyright infringements. Perhaps Ni[chol]xon (godfather of ‘ethical hacking’ and ‘international cyberhacker’) was
ahead of his time and the W[he]atergate scandal is nothing more than stagnant water
under the bridge. [Afterall], the War on Terrorism has given preemptive rise to
militarized and domestic use of both drone and nanotechnologies. Are you
concerned that Uncle Sam is watching you right now? Do you not know you are
free to watch back? It is called ‘Webcamming!’ Just do not get caught!
Professor Best proposed the use of cyberspace to “create reincarnations” of Self. Forget about drinking the shrinking potion and crawling through the rabbit hole; simply purchase an upgrade. To this end, he sees redeeming qualities in the cartoon character “Ben 10”. For Trevor Marshall, this is nothing more than neocolonialism by another name. Marshall countered that such cybercultures are really prefigurations of self-negations, subjugations and First World distractions from real-world material history and politics. Conversely, Prof Best believes in the existence of “Anancy reincarnations”. The cyberhacker enlists cyberspace to spin his own web of survival mechanisms; redefining notions of Self, recreating multiple identities and autonomously projecting through mass media, social media and web media multiSelves simultaneously, through the manipulations of cybertechnologies.
This begs the question, how then do we as participants,
viewers, critics and illusionists within cyberspace differentiate between
what’s ‘true’ in the material world and what’s an ‘illusion’ of cyberspace?
Cybersports was cited by Prof Best as a medium whereby the youth can discover
self-actualization. The challenge, admits Prof Best, is to broaden the use of
cybersports, such as cricket or soccer, as a force for liberation by allowing
the participant to design and determine favourable outcomes without confusing
the “relationship between ‘game’ in the material world and ‘game’ in
cyberspace”. Whatever the outcome, all work and no play makes Jack a
cyberjunky; all play and no work makes Jack a cyberpunk.
An uneasy application of cybertechnologies, so identified by
Prof Best, is the “socio-spiritual challenges in cyberspace”. Using
“cyberministries” to evangelize, recruit, propagandize, dissiminate,
assimilate, infiltrate and terminate;
willing, naïve, innocent, vulnerable and impressionable individuals are all
happening within cyberspace. As an instant mass media tool; cyberassemblies,
communities and cells can generate global impact without the constraints of
geography, rigid partisan politics and or ancestral ties.
Professor Best hastily concluded, with evangelical fervour,
by suggesting that for our youth “virtual experiences may be no less real than
experiences of the material world”. Is the Holodeck (Star Trek illusion) with us? Have our youth been assimilated by the
cy-BORG-netics cultural Collective? Is resistance to this
seemingly unstoppable pseudo-race of cyberconnected humanoid drones futile? I
almost blasphemed by thinking that perhaps Prof Best was an agent provocateur.
Could he be a secret agent of the hive? A Locutus of Borg, functioning as an intermediary, a spokesman for
the Human race in order to facilitate the assimilation of Earth’s [non-youths]
so that the process would be as quick and efficient with the least number of
casualties on both sides? Has Prof Best been saying to us all along as scholar,
academic, researcher, writer and cultural ambassador: “"I am Locutus of Borg? Resistance is futile. Your life as it has
been is over. From this time forward you will service us?”” There, I almost
blasphemed again! Alas, he is too goodly a gentleman to be anything less than Best! C. L. R. James and Kamau would be
proud!
OOW
2013
[1]
Michael Jackson executed the dance move during a performance of “Billie Jean”
on Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever
on March 25, 1983.
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