Digital Cosmopolitanism

Digital cosmopolitanism engages with digital contexts from a perspective that looks to consciously go beyond methodological nationalism, conceptualizing this in terms of older discourses brought under the rubric of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is a long-established set of discourses with roots in ancient Greece, generally linked to Diogenes and the Cynic movement. The term “cosmopolitanism” comes from κόσμος, or kosmos, i.e., “world” or “universe” and πολίτης, or polites, meaning “citizen” or “of a city.” Thus, early forms of cosmopolitanism may be seen as a conscious rejection of available identity scripts in favor of being a “citizen of the world.” During the Enlightenment in Europe in the eighteenth century, cosmopolitanism reappeared and was conceptualized by a number of philosophers, most notably Immanuel Kant, who looked toward cosmopolitanism as a possible philosophical basis for world peace. Enlightenment forms of cosmopolitanism have often been criticized as actually harboring a type of domineering European universalism. More recent authors have looked to de-Europeanize cosmopolitanism and have argued that discourses based around the notion of belonging to something broader, “beyond the local” may be seen in a variety of global contexts, and not just in Europe. Cosmopolitanism became a fashionable term in academic discussions in the 1990s—with the fall of communism and the advance of globalization and new digital technologies—with a proliferation of new adjectival cosmopolitanisms, e.g., from subaltern cosmopolitanism to feminist cosmopolitanism to postcolonial cosmopolitanism. It has been suggested that there may be close to 150 adjectival cosmopolitanisms in circulation. The term “digital cosmopolitanism” may be seen as an adjectival cosmopolitanism that has had a degree of sustainability. There have also been a number of macro-categorizations of cosmopolitanism. These generally are oriented around three categories. Cosmopolitanism discourses may be grouped around (1) political philosophical discussions, often ethically- and morally based with a normative critique and, at times, visions of world institutions; (2) a more descriptive wider perspective drawn especially from sociology and history that looks at lived forms of cultural mixing and solidarity beyond the national; and (3) a cultural studies and social theory approach, drawing partly on both normative and descriptive approaches, often conceived as a critical cosmopolitanism and/or processual, and that views cosmopolitanism not only in terms of transformation, but also in relation to multilayered connections. Digital cosmopolitanism may also be seen in terms of a similar macro-categorization, applied to the digital context. There is also a degree of crossover between digital cosmopolitanism and areas such as cyber-utopianism, globalized activism, and postcolonial resistance. These discourse lines also use, at times, the language of digital cosmopolitanism.