Abstract

What gets overlooked amid the hype surrounding the Internet/world-wide web is that these are a newer communicative means and medium for people to gather from all over the place, not only to meet each other but also to discuss a wide range of issues. Discussion Forums and News Groups are important and long-standing examples of these sorts of non-commercial online interactions. This article argues that this sort of onlineness constitutes emergent (cyber)spatial practices of everyday life. These entail complex gender-power relations that encompass struggles for ownership and control of ICTs, on the one hand, and the intimate, public and political nature of online discussions visà-vis lived lives offline on the other hand. One way of seeing these dynamics at work in everyday life online is when women from non-western diasporas talk about their personal-public lives and changing sociocultural obligations on Internet discussion forums. Such discussions provide newer, electronically mediated (re)articulations of the 'public-private' problematic and a (re)articulation of how the 'personal is political'. In so doing they recall feminist and postcolonial critiques of the androcentric and eurocentric nature of the public-private dichotomy itself. The article explores the intersection between these critiques, the practice of everyday life for postcolonial diasporas and the advent of the Internet/world-wide web. Through the reconstruction of someof these open andintimate online discussions between older andyounger women from the Samoan and Tongan diasporas, the article argues that postcolonial everyday uses of the Internet/www are challenging assumptions about what constitutes access, ownership and control of ICTs. These have implications for equitable research and development of ICTs in terms of the practice of everyday life online and offline and the future of public cyberspace(s) in a neo-liberal world order.

Full Text
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