Performing the Internet: Post-Internet Folklore

Introduction

Over the past decade, miniature computing devices with wireless antennae able to connect seamlessly to user-friendly digital platforms have entered the everyday lives of many Internet users. Once an elite, privileged or expensive form of information access, ubiquitous computing the availability of the Internet almost anywhere and anytime and being online, have both become mundane experiences for an increasingly large percentage of Singapore’s population (and beyond). Similarly, the Internet has arguably become a site for archiving traditional cultural practices as well as the production and emergence of new ones. Likewise, knowledge production around software studies and digital humanities is always already emerging, continuously being formulated and negotiated; depending on the practitioners’ level of engagement the developments in technology. As disciplinary backgrounds affect what scholars bring to, and how they outline the field, these boundaries are fluid. Therefore, this chapter is couched in a methodology that defines how experiential digital literacy endeavors and experimental pedagogy validate radical diversity, and as a result, offers a thoroughly different communication premise. Through highlighting the importance of digital literacy among scholars in the new form of humanities and arts (programming and computing competencies) it argues that we should look beyond an instrumental approach to technological engagement, advocating for a feminist approach that challenges the official mode of knowledge production and dissemination over the Internet sanctioned by state and commercial interests. Addressing the computer as a processual medium where wired terrestrial and wireless extra-terrestrial communication takes place, one can imagine other transnational possibilities for twenty-first-century arts and humanities theories and practices. Willard McCarthy urges us to “turn for help to the arts because like digital humanities they are experimental and materially innovative” (McCarthy, 2014). As long as it does not matter, art is tolerated to be as radical as it wants. There are other performative ways to participate with other modalities of being, more-than-human life forms and systems and networks which allow people to intersect and form tangential assemblages with those of whom are both corporeally distant and local (Mauro-Flude, 2018). Beyond technological pragmatism, the inquiry instead points to a more comprehensive engagement with technology and hence shapes digital humanities that can occur through the application of cultural practices from insightful traditions and subcultures that embrace feminist critical theory, experiential pedagogy in digital literacy and post digital culture.

Figure 1.

Towards a Feminist Internet. (©2013, Nancy Mauro-Flude. Used with permission.)

When applied to the field of digital humanities, feminist critical theory addresses current technopolitics. “Is the 4th Wave of feminism is Digital?” asks Ragna Rök Jóns (2013) who further conjectures, that if it is so, it “would have to be in part discursive and would require a restructuring of legal, institutional, educational, economic, social, religious, geographical, corporeal and cultural barriers…”. Fourth wave feminism has a particular history of chewing on the cables and fibers of control and domination, nodding to Angela Davis (2015) who reminds us that “radical simply means grasping things at the root”. Therefore, it is proposed that one must refer to the (many) beginnings of culture when the notion of matriarchy was prominent and was said to be subsumed by patriarchy by the division of art, crafts, technologies and ritual.