SELECTED THESES ON THE CIRCUMPOLAR ARCTIC

This thesis inestigates how together with other negotiate the identification of personal, cultural and local identities in the part of cyberspace known as the World Wide Web. There, I have found that the meaning of identity is expressed and negotiated in texts, images and symbols that assert social as well as symbolic boundaries of difference; but the diversity of Inuit within the Arctic as well as their differences in regard to the rest of the world. Yet, contrary to their doings, an existing (post)modern myth envisions cyberspace as a non-space; a space without boundaries of difference, of unthinkable complexity and without the physical constraints of human bodies. the boundaries of class, nation, ethnic identity, religion, geography, language, gender and more are said to be transcendent in cyberspace, i.e. they evade the eye and our attention. This myth, when held together with a widespread notion that technology threatens culture, imagines a social vacuum where Inuit web users do not identify with the social organization of their off-line lives when they are in cyberspace, but instead assert themselves in new cyber cultures. the imagined divide between what goes on off- and on-line sustains two separate worlds. However, some Inuit are breaking down these walls of mystification by constructing web pages that negotiate and identify the social meaning of cyberspace in regard to the completeness of the world they live in. In this thesis I discuss some selected dynamics of identifying cultural and local identity in cyberspace.'