“Strategic Space: 10 Things Our Youth Know (that we don’t) about Cyberspace, the Nation and the Future”

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

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 21^st 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       

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[1] Michael Jackson executed the dance move during a performance of “Billie Jean” on Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever on March 25, 1983.