The rhetoric of "fronting" and "representing" is widespread on the internet and though the use of these phrases have decreased in the last year or so, their ideology is still very prominent in cybersocial dynamics. New members who make comments on being hard-core are quickly flamed and people who are respond harshly to a less-experienced person's questions are criticized for teaching newcomers to hide their ignorance. Humility is encouraged and honesty is emphasized. In this way, the emphasis on being "real" sets up informal codes for the cybersociety and makes sure people maintain the foundation of hip-hop.

This is all good and well, but there is another dimension of these dynamics that demand exploration. The internet is a postmodern medium that allows for a disembodiment of situated identity and a separation between representation and reality that is directly contradictory to the hip-hop's ideology. In postmodern politics, it is argued that with the cyborgnetic use of the internetic identity, the body can be transcended and that presentations of a reality are perceptionally-based creations that do not necessarily reflect any inherent truths. Can these hip-hop newsgroups, with their fundamentally post-modern structure, really operate in this medium and still maintain hip-hop's spatially and racially-grounded politics?

I hope that the contradictions I have presented within this cyborg document would show that there is no easy answer to this question. Like hip-hop, there are many complexities between these contradictions that internet headz must continually grapple with. However, despite the many tensions that issues like race, class, language and space present in cyberspace, I think that unlike some other post-modern creations, these hip-hop groups have a real foundation in a tangible body and space that will always limit possible abuses of the internet newsgroups. Hip-hop is based on a specific body (characterized by lower income, younger, black males) and a specific space (a certain rappers' inner city environment) and the oppressions and culture that go with it. And because someone in this body and space has their life defined by these factors, one cannot configure a reality or an identity without it. Unlike white middle class people who might not feel much of a connection between their body and their cuture and thus see technology's potential disembodiement as liberatory, I think those who define their culture and experience through a specific and significant space and body would see its transcendence as a great loss. Since hip-hop is the expression of a coporal and spatial identity, I would believe that no hip-hop community, no matter how post-modern in form, could really be hip-hop without this physical connection.

The hip-hop internet newsgroups alt.rap and rec.music.hip-hop work within this mindset so that, although possible abuses of anonymity exist, they are also communally-regulated. By exploring the various ways these groups deal with issues of the disembodied self, we can see a concerted effort to base cybersocial relations in a street-reality where there is neither the privilege or the loss of forgetting the space and race-identified self.

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Representing the Real

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