Bloomsbury Academic Caribbean and Western Cyberculture: Strategic Space and Pathways to an Age of Smart Machines

Curwen Best offers readers a perspective on the expansion of digital culture through the prism and within the context of Caribbean culture by examining major technologies impacting Caribbean and Western society and discusses the ways that Caribbean creatives and others have employed, deployed, and reshaped technologies for their own purpose in proximity to new digital plantations. This book argues for a new dimension to cyberspace, the strategic-space Web, as a counter balance to concepts such as the digital divide and the attention economy. If those concepts privilege visibility and equality of access, the nurturing of strategic space engenders invisibility and strategic access. As part of its pervasive subtext, this book questions more conventional ways of thinking about cyberculture, suggesting that Caribbean societies were cyber before the late-20th century iteration and expansion of digital culture. Best suggests that technology is a fluid construct and that the more conventional tendency to place designated nations and institutions at the center of discourses around such terms (and of the world) has possibly encoded a fractured way of seeing the universe. Best supports and combats this idea by exploring popular culture and global issues ranging from global affairs, religion, politics, knowledge economies, entertainment, video games, music, music technology, literature, communications, sports, digital identities, hacking, the news media, the end times, representation, simulation, virtual reality, augmented reality, Internet of things, Apps, memes, to selfies. Ultimately asking if humanity embarks on a real, metaphorical, and virtual quest for salvation, redemption, or the ultimate discovery, is it possible that some key pathways reside outside the spaces and nations that we tend to locate at the epicenter of human activity?