Techno/Cultural Identities:
from Ships to GigaBits

Peter d'Agostino and David I. Tafler

Introduction:

This paper and its accompanying presentation will explore the shift from the Age of Exploration to the Digital Age within the context of technologies, cultures and the identities they embody.

A popular book, No Logo (N. Klein, 2000), widely read especially by college students in the US and Europe during the summer of 2001 captures the spirit of exploration and its boding transformation in the digital age. The first quotation in the book, by Indonesian writer Y.B. Mangunwijaya, sets the tone: "You might not see things yet on the surface, but underground, it's already on fire."

In the wake of September 11, many issues concerning globalization that emerged in the 1990s after the Cold War, resurface once more, ranging from the roles of governments and multi-national corporations to terrorist networks. But the first modern globalization movement may have occurred four centuries before World War I, when Spain and Portugal divided the world between the West (for Spain) and the East (for Portugal) with the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. Globalization has moved from this divide to new electronic bridges. These bridges stretch the historic connections, for instance those made by the Magellan expedition's circumnavigation of the earth completed in 1522.

Emblematically, European culture now reaches out beyond the globe with the launch of two spacecraft in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One called "Giotto" rendezvoused with Haley's Comet, and another probe "Galileo" visited Jupiter. Both spacecraft names embody the historic genesis of one part of European identity and its ties to ongoing and future exploration and discovery.

European chronicles, their metaphors and representations, date back to the cradle of Greek Civilization. The Homeric narratives chart the explorers' passage to strange, abstract, and imaginary worlds. The rhapsody that the singer of tales wove together pre-destines several centuries of European expansion pushing out the boundaries of the world and engaging the exotic "other." Later tales speculated on the world beyond the material universe. Dante's Divine Comedy constructed a multi-dimensional inhabited world invested with cultural and historical values.

From the period of the Renaissance throughout the enlightenment, scientists reconfigured the prevailing paradigms shaping global identity, expanding the parameters to include the solar system and the stars. More recently, the evolution and dissolution of some multi-national corporations and the growth and threat of global terrorist networks contributes to the contested issues of emerging technologies, cultures and the identities they embody.

The terrain in this new millennium has shifted. Now the digital age moves from the interconnectedness of a World Wide Web (created at CERN and serviced by Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer) to the new creative challenges introduced by Internet2 and the DANTE
(Delivery of Advanced Network Technology in Europe) organization's GEANT Project offering new backbones for fortifying high speed global connectivity and geographical expansion. Europe expands and its culture implodes across the old North/South, East/West cleavages, intertextually within Europe, and extratextually with the rest of the world.

Followed by a presentation of research projects.