Communication Between Real-World and Cyber-World: Conceptual Thinking on Cyber-Racism!

Introduction

If cyber-world ‘irreversibly’ exists in current and future realities in which there are no possibilities to be a Luddite, then it is critical to study what ‘cyber’ is serving and as to whether or not cyber-world (currently online) is different from real-world (currently offline)! Whatever the answer to this question, there are many academic arguments suggesting that cyber-world has remained virtually indistinguishable from real-world; we signify them to represent ourselves and we are represented by them indistinctly! Whenever someone is in real-world, s/he is also in cyber-world this means that we can be offline and online at the same time because everyone is affected by both online and offline events as “…history matters for understanding why information systems function in the way they do…” (Campbell-Kelly & Garcia-Swartz, 2013, p. 18). In this sense, internet governance is for the purpose of illuminating its orchestrating mechanisms in which the advance and request of mutual norms and values (e.g. instructions, decision-making procedures, and platforms) cherish and preserve the advancement and usage of the Internet. Nonetheless, it does not mean that norms and values of real-world must apply to cyber-world (Wall, 2007). Unarguably, cyber-world is interdependent and interlinked with real-world; both worlds have similar social issues within respectable and/or disreputable matters. Arguably, technology governs human existence towards increasingly unknown futures. For instance, being an individual as a free and responsible agent with irresponsible technology is to be in the age of singularity.

Racism is one of the oldest, most oppressive and disturbing issues, along with other extreme forms of techno-social communications. Nevertheless, the internet has already led to the opportunity for cyber-racism to occur ever more surreptitiously and aggressively. Therefore, introduction of new technology can bring conventional issues to a new environment. Knowledge, in that sense, is not only a new ‘panacea’ but also new ‘disease’ (Williams, 1999). It would be compared as ‘like-with-like’: conventional-social issue points to essence of social-issue, whereas techno-social interactional issue points to a context -online context- in which conventional (or unconventional) social-issue could take place. This study commences by unravelling the abstractions of conventional-racism and cyber-racism, not because the concept of cyber-racism has become motivating to study hate, but because it is profoundly challenging to study real and cyber word. This study thereby introduces global stakeholders’ approaches and countermeasures, in particular the EU, the USA, and their regulated and non-regulated practices to combat cyber-racism. This study shall then bring forward informative argumentations on how the global stakeholders’ perspective on cyber-racism can be scrutinised by focusing on both values of being human (individualism) and a reconciled global-society (cosmopolitanism) towards contemporary debates in the sociology of education and technology. The critical enquiries are whether or not scope and nature of cyber-world are supposed to be as safe and protected as real-world, or whether cyber-world is needed to be approached in the same way and scope as real-world? In this conceptual thinking, even though hate-mongers are using technology to spread their hate anonymously and/or pseudonymously, targeting their various targets (see International Network against Cyber Hate (INACH) Annual Reports); what is the acceptable action for us to take in the subject of internet governance? The inquiry into that question is the subject of this paper.