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Chapter 5 | Serge Proulx (continued) Everything is there to say that henceforth it would be necessary to introduce a third term for thinking about the Québec’s identity and cyberculture — i.e., the process of cultural globalization. Here again, information and communication technologies play a major role in the carrying out of that process. Enrolling themselves against the trend to cultural homogenization (as criticised by Mattelart, 1999), the networks allow the instant and global circulation of numerous diverse bits of information, and heterogeneous cultural models, so that each individual can define himself these days as simultaneously being part of a set of cultures (Wallerstein, 1997; Proulx and Vitalis, Eds., 1999). This process of planetary diffusion of cultural models is provoking an explosion in the re-thinking of identity. A thorough study of globalization’s process would presuppose taking into account at least four levels of concern (individuals, nation-states, transnational systems of regulation, civilizations). Looking only at individuals, the process of cultural globalization affects the social construction of individual identities (Robertson, 1997). Globalization is opening up “affinity communities” of a new kind: for example, members of a group considered a minority in a given society can find it easier to identify themselves with similar groups all over the globe. Those minority groups will then develop a new transnational identity. Their situation of being in a minority is thus relativized. We can see, on a planetary level, the expansion of a movement toward the deterritorialization of cultures (King, Ed., 1997) and the complexification of identity referents, which are becoming plural (Hall, 1997). Out of that, we could formulate the hypothesis that this process of globalization will provoke, at some future time, an important transformation of what Québécois will call the constitutive elements of the hard core of their primary identity. Since the Second World War, some layers of that core have slowly disappeared: among them, the agricultural component of French Canadian society disappeared with the coming of modernity, and then the religious component diminished with the coming of the Quiet Revolution. Today, the French language is at stake in the struggle to define the hard core of Québec’s identity in a context where the demographic weight of Francophones is diminishing in favour of Allophones who often prefer to adopt English as the language of their daily life. The expansion of cyberculture could weaken that identity element. Is there a danger to the linguistic security of Francophones when they devote themselves overwhelmingly to the games of “virtual floating identities” appropriate to cyberspace? If it exists, the risk of identity dilution would be found at the level of individual users of the network. Would the danger of identity destabilization of users (who are part of a territorial collectivity) increase with increased and intensive use of the network? Or, on the contrary, would this expansion of interactive planetary communication networks, to repeat an expression of Jocelyn Létourneau (1998), become a privileged place for “in-thinking” the question of Québec’s identity — that is for defining a radical alternative to the customary history of our collective memory? The symbolic traffic of Internet users would constitute then, for an observer, a revelation of the boiling up of identity referents — as individuals and as a group — both in their plurality and their ambivalence. In an era of cultural globalization, it is time to have radical second thoughts about what would constitute the hard core of Québec’s identity, multicultural and in constant transformation. Furthermore, should we retain the metaphor of “hard core” as a category to think about cultural identity? In such a context of radical reconsideration, the ways of doing and the values of “Americanicity” become one source of influence among many others in the process of the social construction of contemporary Québec’s identity. |
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