Going cyberqueer

The advent of the internet has revolutionized the way our society functions, but I would go a step farther to say that we do not live in an "information age," any longer--such was a society dominated by the dial-up modem, the home PC, the amalgamation of knowledge from various locations and made consumable at specific, dominant (geographic) sites. The culture of information age, a digital culture, is dominated by what Hayles calls "information losing its body," a removal of the physical nature of commodities. Digital culture certainly began a trend of change in society--one not merely technological, but socioeconomic as well (as Terranova points out). However, in "network culture," a geographic locale, burdened by the heavy CPU tower, the weighty cathode ray tube monitors, and connected by LAN lines, no longer becomes the priveleged site of access. Now the "cloud" has become dominant--we have e-mail on our Blackberries, the internet accessable through WiFi-enabled mobile laptop computers, all manners of gadgetry that utilize the internet on our iPhones.

However, as much as a Western priveleged culture, with 'privelege' potentially being read as white, heterosexual, middle-to-upper class, has been dominated by this shift to "cloud" access, there are certain subpopulations whose relation to the internet need to be coaxed out of such totalizing terms as "network culture." In particular, the use of various internet technologies of LGBTQ-identified people will be the subject of my final paper. It has been noted by several scholarz\s that such people took to the internet with great speed and ease. Yet, with this shift from a digitial to a network culture, LGBTQ people have been weighed down in their use of the internet, chained by their bodies to specific sites to use the internet--some call this "the closet." In a society still dominated by heterosexuality, the use of queer sites by queer people is something that cannot be done in the cloud, in the open, in the public. Chained by fear of judgment and reproach, perhaps out of fear of losing social status, LGBTQ users of the internet who want to network with similar individuals do so in the privacy of their own homes. Their bodies are still very much restricted in their use information technology.

I want to explore these connections in my final paper. In particular, because the term "LGBTQ" encompasses such a wide and diverse range of people, I will restrict my study to men who have sex with men, or MSM, perhaps an overly-clinical term but one I feel makes the most sense to use in this context. How do these men use the internet? What is at stake when they log on? Do they construct new identities, new bodies, for themselves on the internet? How do they use the internet to network socially with similar men, and why? Has this relation changed in response to a new network culture? And how is this different from how the "mass" use the internet?

I will use Terranova's Network Culture and Hayles' How We Became Posthuman to explore these questions.