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Banal Nationalism and the Internet

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On the internet, no one knows you're a blond (tee hee).
--Anonymous

The usual markers of national indentity -- for example, race, dress, physical (geographical) location -- are easily elided in the interaction of the internet, especially text-based forums such as UseNet and email. Despite this, and even in the context of multinational 'virtual' communities, people tend to retain a strong sense of their nationality. A new set of markers has developed and been deployed both in deliberate nationalism (what Michael Billig describes as "flag-waving") and as everyday background noise, or Billig's "banal nationalism".

 Billig uses the term "banal nationalism" to describe "the ideological habits which enable the established nations of the West to be reproduced" (6). His primary example is the ubiquity of the American flag, with which he illustrates the methods by which "national identity in established nations is remembered because it is embedded in routines of life, which constantly remind, or 'flag', nationhood" (38). However, he points out, it is precisely because these reminders are not consciously noticed (and thereby opened to questioning or interpretation) that they are powerful.

 On the internet, people are identified by their email addresses as much as by any name which they offer. Email addresses identify the individual in a two-part format, much like the given-name family-name convention of modern 'real life' names; on the internet, the convention is given-name "@" domain-name, identifying the person inextricably with the organization which puts them online. To someone capable of 'reading' domain-names, this offers as much information as a genealogist might obtain from a family-name. In particular, almost every domain-name indicates the country of origin in the 'top-level' (last) segment of the name. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) provides these "country codes" to the domain name servers (DNS) responsible for delivering email and other internet communications; each country receives a two-letter designation which should suffix the domain-name of each resident.

 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the United States of America is an exception to this rule. While the U.S. does have a country code (".us"), the original internet did not extend outside of the U.S.; domain-names ended with a designation of internal boundaries (not physical ones -- the distinctions were between commercial, non-profit, educational, military, and governmental organizations). American organizations are still grandfathered in by this precedent; thus ".edu" implicitly designates the named individual as a resident of the U.S. (It is noteworthy, but a digression, that residency and not citizenship is indicated). Frances Cairncross points out, however, that

a British company, for example, would end its name "co.uk," and a Japanese one with "co.jp." American companies rarely put a national tag at the end of their domain names. To be registered as "www.economist.com," therefore, suggests a global company, while "www.economist.co.uk" marks a business as a purely British concern. As a result, a rising proportion of names in the ".com" category do not designate U.S. companies. The official Chinese news agency, for example, has registered the name of "Taiwan.com" (to the indignation of the Taiwan government). (199-200)

Domain names are valuable; inevitably, organizations have begun to fight over them. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is trying to deal with this "sure recipe for conflict: an international naming space and multi-dimensional trademark law rooted in national law" (www.gtld-mou.org), but the traditional policy of InterNIC, the organization responsible for the registration of .com domain names, and of all registry services has been "first come, first serve," a principle with an anarchist's disrespect for trademark law rather than a lawyer's concern for prior claims. This disputed ownership of cyberspace must be understood as a question of colonial motivations: the goal is to "raise your flag on new territory in cyberspace, put your name (or the name you choose) on the 'land.' But whose land is it? Is the first person there the one with the right to claim it?" (Leventhal). Increasingly, American courts (under whose jurisdiction fall most of the contested trademarks as well as InterNIC itself) are ruling in favor of 'real world' trademark holders over first-comers; see Related Sites for examples.

This consideration for the implications of domain-names extends beyond the boardrooms of companies with economic interests in the new world of the internet; out in the social internet world, particularly UseNet, individuals have to deal on a personal level with the reactions of others to their monikers. Arguably, such community as can be said to exist through UseNet (a community of "netizens") does not hold racial stereotypes in the same manner as non-virtual communities, but domain-name prejudice is the 'new racism' of the internet, with the most notorious example being UseNet ostracization of users of the American OnLine (AOL) service ("aol.com") who 'immigrated' en masse in 1994 from the isolated AOL system to UseNet access. See, for example, two typical letters, one in alt.gothic and another in rec.games.video.sony, two 'cliquey' newsgroups, where the welcome or lack thereof of AOL immigrants is discussed.

 Do country code suffixes trigger the same reaction? Many people, not content to signal their geographic location through an email code, state their country in their .signature (sig) -- which is, again, rendered a banal statement by the nature of the .signature file. A .signature file must be deliberately created but can then be (and often is) completely forgotten, because it is included automatically in every article made public on UseNet and often not even visible during the article's writing; like a flag, it is hung with a certain amount of ceremony, then forgotten even as it continually reappears. According to the alt.fan.warlord FAQ by Sven Guckes, "[p]eople on Usenet may not have a life - but they usually admit living in a country. And some of them have to tell everyone in their sig. Thus maps and flags have popped up everywhere in sigs." ('Maps and Flags') In particular, "The map which appears most often is the map of Australia. And somehow, the city which has been marked far more commonly than any other is Perth, a small village in the south-west of Australia:"

                   .-_|\
                  /     \
         Perth -> *.--._/
                       v

Commenting tongue-in-cheek on this phenomenon, the FAQ quotes Hong Ooi hong@manga.com.au as philosophizing, "Sure, the actual physical object, 'Perth', may have a fixed geographical location somewhere on the planet, but that's simply irrelevant on Usenet. Perth, to put it bluntly, is now a metalocation. It's a symbol. It has transcended mere corporeal existence." ('Perth - the world's sig capital') Despite the rather silly tone of the discussion, this could easily be considered an "ironic joke" that is "both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth" (see "ha ha only serious" in the Jargon File). Certainly, one of the most popular webpage providers, GeoCities (geocities.com), organizes its members' private homepages by "neighborhood," where anyone can set up a "home" in the "SoHo," "Paris," or "Hollywood" districts of the GeoCities website: metalocations again. (It is interesting to note that the other common use for flag icons on the internet -- specifically on the web -- is indication not of nationality but of language: for example, the World Intellectual Property Organization uses the UK, French, and Spanish flags, respectively, to mark English-, French-, and Spanish-language webpages.) What is the significance of access statistics which, in sorting the number of times a webpage has been accessed according to domain-name, in effect sort access according to the country of origin of the request? Is it the geographical location of the webpage readers which matters to the programmers who tell the server to announce: "...14 requests from Sweden, 2 from Singapore, 2 from Turkey..." ("World-Wide Web Access Statistics for [www.emory.edu]/WHSC/MED/CME/CCB")? Or, as the infamous British Telecom ad proclaimed, is geography history, replaced by a national identity formed through repeated and banal assertion?

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Author: Caitlin Shaw, Spring 1998
 

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