Like everything else, cyberspace is racialized: Enormous numbers of young "WHITE" people are online. Young Black people are, for all intents and purposes, out of the loop and getting more pissed by the day. Who is more likely to disturb the political status quo? Cyberitized "white" kids or marginzlized and enraged Black kids? I'm betting on Black while simultaneously hoping that increasing number of "white" kids publicly denounce their assigned racial identity and stuggle hard against the relative entitlements, priviledges and power that come with it.
The incredible potential for informing, misinforming or disinforming people via cyberspace is, indeed, too damn obvious to ignore and I don't. But one could say the same for newspapers, magazines, television and radio, mediums that people struggling to make ends meet, both here and certainly abroad, are much more likely to depend on as their sources of "information" than the web.
Obviously, I appreciate the value of cyberspace for people old and young or else I would not be having this "converstation" right now. But a lot of what happens on line in political chat rooms is the noisy clashing of (usually male, usually "white") egos. The fact is that doing stuff online HAS become a substitute for other kinds of work. SOME of that is good but a lot of that is really bad. I mean, I dig some of the approximate benefits that come along with owning a computer and having nearly instant access to incredible resources around the globe. But what about the implications of mass computer production and use for computer industry workers and the ecology?
And hey, what about the Y2K problem? The so-called left-press seems to be studiously ignoring it... -30-
"If you think you are white, then there is no hope for you." James Baldwin