Book Review: The Virtual Transformation of the Public Sphere: Knowledge, Politics, Identity, edited by Gaurav Desai

Abstract

Transformation of Public Sphere: Knowledge, Politics, Identity. Gaurav Desai, ed. London, UK: Routledge, 2013. 307 pp. $105 hbk.To participate in today's public sphere, one must necessarily participate virtually. To have any agency as a world citizen, one must engage with individuals and communities through conduit of virtual space. proverbial conversation begins, ends, and extends in perpetuity in cyberspace.So what is public sphere in digital era? What are its rules of engagement? How and why do identities, artifices, and intertextualities of digital communication intertwine to yield a virtual space for deliberation of political, social, and cultural?Editor Gaurav Desai's compendium of eighteen essays originally presented at a conference in Chandigarh, India, in 2010 offers a variety of perspectives and disciplinary approaches to ponder topic of possibilities for public deliberation and civil society in cyberspace. Desai states that the book is best read as a freeze frame on how a particular group of scholars were thinking about issues at a very specific time and place. Well enough.Although perspectives in Desai's compendium are certainly diverse, authors share an overarching sense that today's virtual public sphere (VPS) is rhizomatic, a multiplicity of interlocked networks of (more-or-less) mutual influence. Fittingly, essays in collection overlap and/or intersect just enough to justify their inclusion in this collected work.The book examines ways that participating in VPS impacts communities (both virtual and in lived world), aesthetics, identity, commerce, subject positions, subconscious, and unconscious. essays are consistently sharp, well written, and provocative.Like VPS itself, volume's many articles are broad in subject matter and scope. As such, for me to attempt to summarize eighteen dense, highly theoretical essays in limited space of this review would be to give them all even shorter shriftthan what I will provide in brief synopses of select essays to follow. For expediency, I will focus on articles (with truncated titles) that match my own interests- both as a scholar and as a (at times reluctant and begrudging) participant in VPS.Nicholas Mirzoeff's The Right to Choose contrasts act of looking upon one another from a perspective of love and friendship with regimes of overview imposed by panopticons of slave states, repressive societies, capitalist states (after all, we are surveilled as consumers) and, especially, militaries. Mirzeoffasserts that today's televisual recognizance of the enemy yields modern warfare that is something like a video game-distanced, disconnected, and deployed from a point of remove.Sukhdeep Ghuman's The Ever-Expanding Sphere of Cyber Communities examines political engagement (or simulation of political engagement) in VPS, positing that much of communication touted as political empowerment and engagement actually serves to isolate, disengage, and disempower.Contrastingly, Hiba Aleem's Virtual Activism, Real Repercussions notes that while sites like Facebook and Twitter can indeed facilitate faux political engagement, these forums are also capably used to transcend cyberspace. …