Displacements
While some of the sites
of virtual radio continue to invoke rhetorics
of
community and
"home" that
are associated with localized place, such rhetorics
seem literally "out
of place" in a medium whose logic of connection is dispersed
rather than localized,
centrifugal rather than centripetal.
On the other hand,
a number of virtual radio sites have dispensed entirely with
the theme of the "local"
in their discourse, in effect producing, also
problematically, the
sound of "homeless-ness." What are we to make
of virtual radio on
the World Wide Web as it participates in
what Wilson and Dissanayake
call the "new world-space of cultural production,"
a space simultaneously
becoming more globalized as it moves across formerly
sealed borders and more localized as consumption habits continue to fragment
and distribute across
expanding niches?
