The New Dawn: Black Agency in Cyberspace

Mary F. E. Ebeling

doi:10.1215/01636545-2003-87-96

New Media and Its Uses in Transnational Black Studies No other medium or information technology developed during the twentieth century mirrors the transnationalism of the black world much like the Internet. Broadcast media have limited reach — broadcasts can only reach people within the boundaries of airwaves and frequencies. Telephones and fax machines, although they enable people to communicate virtually anywhere in the world, are narrowcasting media that connect only a few people at a time. But it is Internet technology's transnational character—globally networked, media-rich computers unfettered by national or geographic boundaries — that allows for multiple users in multiple locations to communicate, organize, and access data and transcend time and space by meeting in cyberspace. The increasingly broader use of the Internet comes at a time when scholars studying Africa and the African diaspora have called for research that transcends the constructed nation-state boundaries of the twentieth century as well as similar boundaries constructed by academe and that recognizes the interconnectedness of the black world. A historian who studies the historic, transnational links between Afro-Cubans and African Americans during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Lisa Brock, for example, asserts that "there are and always have been solid ties between [Africa-descended] peoples and enough comparative 'transnational processes or recurring conditions to make black world studies data rich and analytically fertile."' ... [1st paragraph]

The New Dawn: Black Agency in Cyberspace

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The New Dawn: Black Agency in Cyberspace

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