Christensen, Neil Blair, 2003 Inuit in Cyberspace - Embedding Offline Identities Online, Copenhagen, Museum and Tusculanum Press and University of Copenhagen, 152 pages.

Neil Blair Christensen has conducted an on-line field work on the use of cyberspace partly through a net survey from March till June 1998 in Alaska, Canada and Greenland, partly through nine months of e-mail correspondence with participants from the Aleutian Islands across Arctic Canada to East Greenland. One hundred and thirty-one persons out of about 1,000 potential participants across the Arctic responded to the survey and out of these, 70 persons supplied their e-mail address. Moreover, Christensen has analysed more than 300 Arctic Web sites. Christensen has included an appendix with results from the questionnaire which has 20 standardised questions and two open questions. Looking at some examples from this list, 57% males and 43% females responded to the survey, mostly from Canada (37%) and Alaska (35%)—22% of the respondents came from Greenland, 6% from “other places.” It also appears that 83% of the respondents use the Internet for e-mail correspondence and for surfing, and that 80% of the respondents connect to countries outside the Arctic (p. 113). Even so, more than half of the respondents think that the Internet will bring people in the entire Arctic closer together (p. 115). On the question whether information through the Internet brings the world into the Arctic or the other way round, 71% of the respondents think it works both ways. Moreover, 71% of the respondents think that cultural contents are important on Arctic Web pages. Christensen’s declared intention with this fieldwork is to “discuss the cultural and identity affirming use of the Internet amongst Inuit—mainly in relation to the Web” (p. 12). Moreover his intension is—at a general level—to demystify the Internet and instead to show that there is in fact a correlation between the on-line cyberspace universe and the off-line physical universe (ibid.), which is shown through various examples from the fieldwork. However, reading the book leaves the impression that another important issue on Inuit in Cyberspace seems to be a reaction against the general stereotypical view of Inuit as gatherers and hunters living a static traditional life, which might be endangered by new technology like the Internet: “[…] While most research on cyberspace is focusing on the construction and power of new (cultural) identities on the Internet, my approach is quite the opposite, focusing on examples where modern information technology is used to assert those cultural identities that already exist offline: what I choose to call offline culture” (p. 13). In his criticism of general research on cyberspace, Christensen agues against the constructed dichotomy between technology and culture, which “[…] connotes the idea of the fragmented and ‘dissolute self’ in the age of postmodernity […]” (p. 12). On the contrary, Christensen argues, this idea cannot be applied to analyse most of the Inuit Web pages he has come across in the cyberspace research as these Web pages are characterized by “strong links to offline sociality, culture and physicality such as landscape” (ibid.). While the general theoretical rhetoric on the Internet is focused on globalisation, global processes, homogenisation, McDonaldsization, disembodiment, separation of mind and matter and on an abstract world theory, Christensen thinks that the outcome of his fieldwork among Inuit shows that Inuit generally relate to the global in a local manner (p. 99). Inuit, in spite of surfing the Net, watching foreign broadcasts and buying goods of all kind from countries far away, still “relate their cultural identities to spaces ranging from the rest of the world, the circumpolar region, down to the space of nucleus of relatives or friends within a specific community” (ibid.). One of the overall criticisms put …