In Poster’s discussion of citizens, digital media and globalization, he proposes that the primal citizenship is deprived of its power since the world of Internet is technically borderless (though I still feel that language is still serving as the final frontier and border, where the sense of belonging and unity as mobilized bodies is still retained), and a new citizenship is being forged by the advent of Internet — the netizenship. It’s partial, temporary, but crucial to the globalized sociopolitical environment. It is “more practically dispersed across the globe… inherently bidirectional and ungovernable by existing political structures” (Poster, 84) , and is capable of organizing social orders and generating movements in a much more participatory way.
It is clear that digital technology is changing the society by altering the ways of thinking. It has created a new digital logic, which is quite different from the previous analogic one. It does not create order from chaotic, but generates from the existing order to order. The uniqueness of humane is not that important anymore, which reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s idea of the lost “aurora” in arts. Digital era is the era of replication. Therefore what contributes to the value of art is no longer the authenticity, but the reframing it does through copying. Through the process of making art and letting people interact, or even purchase and possess art pieces themselves, the normally unseen hierarchy framing is revealed. People start to notice the Pierre Bourdieu’s term of “field”, or the constitution, which essentially makes art legit. The same things happen within recombinant theatre, where “participation in the theatre of everyday life can make the transparent codes of gender separation/hierarchy opaque and impossible to miss. Once these codes are perceived, a critical understanding quickly follows through dialogue” (CA Ensemble, 160) .
Internet has also changed our ways of consuming information as well as the transnational circulation of messages. In Edwards’s writing, the one man’s narrative created by Trump through Reality TV shows and Twitter is not only about its content, but also about its ways of presentation and circulation. Political tweets are now part of the American popular culture, and Internet, along with interactive social media, have greatly empowered its potency of transnational circulation. Such popular culture used to serve as soft power, probably with ideology implied and coated with entertainment, while now the line between soft power and hard power is continuously blurred (Edwards, 40). Therefore, when interacting with digitalized internet space and information, the political intention is projected to us more strongly than ever.