Transnational Rhetorical Circulation in the Splinternet Age

ABSTRACT

The splinternet continues to chip away at transnationally networked publics and reconfigure the digital landscape along national borders. What would a fractured cyberspace mean for conceptualizing transnational rhetorical circulation? How might we rethink our approaches to tracing transnational rhetorical circulation in the splinternet age? This essay begins by contextualizing the infrastructural and geopolitical conditions for transnational circulation, focusing on the implications of the splinternet, and then discusses how we may reconceptualize the notion of place in tracing transnational circulation in a splintered cyberspace. The reconceptualization of place is illustrated with an analysis of how the global online campaign in the name of “stop Russian invasion” and “stand with Ukraine” in 2022 was suspended, repurposed, co-opted, and rejuvenated across the border of the splintered network of China.

KEYWORDS:

• Circulation
• digital media
• splinternet
• transnational

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the journal’s editorial team for collectively making place for this essay.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ It’s worth noting, too, that 2.9 billion people, or 37% of the world’s population, were still offline in 2021, as the UN’s International Telecommunication Union estimates.

² Due to my inability to read the Russian language, I was not able to investigate the sources firsthand.

³ Note: Due to concerns with user privacy which may bear serious political implications in China, I refer to users by the first word/character of their username only. Translations are all mine.

⁴ “A form of rhetorical energy, potential, or trajectory that is inherent to, emerges from, and in turn transforms the propensity of material things and that reconfigures the power dynamics between humans and between humans and things” (Wang, “Activist” 246).