Cyberspace Essay

While some observers see these developments as signs of the impending ‘end of privacy’ and the rise of ‘surveillance society’ (Castells, 2001; Lyon, 2001), others point to the insufficiency and, ultimately, the futility of governmental interference in cyberspace. The Internet has, right from the beginning, challenged conventional notions of policing and sovereignty which are inevitably linked with territoriality; also this challenge is coming from multiple directions, most important from transnational organized crime. The problem of governing a global space is magnified in cyberspace because, here, social interaction is free from the constrictions of physical space. As illustrated by the case of child pornography, the victim and the offender may be located in different countries. Unlike most ‘real world’ crimes, cybercrime does not require physical proximity between the victim and the offender. The lack of ‘physical’ evidence and the lack of spatial connections make these types of crimes especially difficult to investigate (Brenner, 2007). Policing of the Internet marks an important shift from the policing of territory to the ‘policing of suspect populations’ (Sheptycki, 2002a). Information and communication technologies fundamentally transform the very way in which policing is practiced. Policing cyberspace not only demands inter-governmental intervention, but also needs to organize a number of responsibilization policies on the part of the users of Internet and the service providers. The idea of ‘plural policing’ and the diffusion of regulatory tasks is therefore one of the hallmarks of cyber-governance (Jewkes, 2003).

Cyber communities

Information and communication technologies have been credited with creating virtual or cyber...

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...ally been associated with bounded local and national societies. The Internet is therefore also a space for constructing images and notions of ‘the other’. To take an example, the image of Iran as an alleged ‘axis of evil’ is solidified in ‘real’ terms mainly through different forms of virtually mediated reality such as videos, recordings posted on, say, YouTube. Afzal Guru’s hanging made it to the headlines of not just Indian leading dailies but also The Guardian and The Washington Post. An image of India being ‘tough’ was created thereof.

Cyberspace is a part of the ‘mediascapes’ and ‘technoscapes’ (Appadurai, 1996) and are becoming increasingly salient for constituting identities. Online technologies therefore need to be analyzed within the wider framework of how they are etched into everyday life, including political mobilization, crime prevention and control.