Exile and the Electronic Frontier

Abstract

Much of the rhetoric that surrounds the so-called `electronic frontier' of the new communication technologies has emerged at a moment when discourses about borders, margins and exiles are also proliferating in the arts and in critical writing. What Mark Poster has called the `second media age', which he sees as constituting a mode of information fundamentally different to broadcast media, can also be seen as defining a period in which electronic technologies service individuals and populations who are culturally and geographically displaced on a scale previously unknown in history.

The article critically interrogates the writings of Mark Poster, Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen as theorists of the new media and draws from different articulations of exile by Edward Said, Theodor Adorno and Hamid Naficy to present an alternative theoretical response to contemporary electronic culture.