Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2006, Qupperneq 71

KJATT Á ALNETINUM í FØROYUM
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not just in the Faroe Islands, because chat
communication, according to several inves-
tigations, is primarily going on between
friends and acquaintances (ibid). Those try-
ing to be totally anonymous chatters do not
participate in the community’s social activ-
ities.
In many respects the virtual community
reflects the real social society. As mentioned
earlier, the personal relations are very im-
Portant in the Faroe Islands, also after the
introduction of intemet and mobile phones.
The chatters are very interested in knowing
who they are chatting with and ask in detail
Where you come from, where you live, what
you are doing, who you know, etc., until it
becomes an almost impossible task to hide
behind a mask. If you don’t tell a lot about
your real identity, the other chatters become
'npatient and end the dialogue. People want
to know who they are chatting with. If you
are from Torshavn, the capital with 18 000
mhabitants, then it is obviously easier to hide
your name than it is if you live in a small
village with 40-80 inhabitants. The personal
relations - family, friends, colleagues - that
befine the Faroe Islander’s role and status
1,1 society, and which are characterised by
being close (emotionally and geographi-
Cally) and strong can be interpreted as a con-
trast to the abstract and distant relations that
connect a person to a national or interna-
l|onal community or a community of inter-
ests. Chat is fascinating because you can get
111 touch with individuals located outside
y°ur geographical, social and cultural
boundaries; chat can also be characterised
as a limitless dangerous venture, an expedi-
t'on into unknown territories.
Public sphere
The bourgeois public sphere, which Eyðun
Andreassen relates to the twentieth century
modem Faroese society, has with the new
forms of interaction and communication that
the technologies of information of today
make possible (primarily the internet), lost
its opinion-forming power on the cultural
discourses in society. The popular public
sphere, says Andreassen (1992: 117), is
...a part of the bourgeois public sphere, but it
expresses itself outside this public sphere’s
primal fora, i.e. fora where the authorities and
state control lie, and fora usually considered to
present the cultural public in the bourgeois
society.
During the twentieth century, especially
after 1945, the Faroese society became in-
creasingly centralised. Local variations in
culture and traditions disappeared, An-
dreassen argues, as the developnrent of the
centralised state apparatus, based on bour-
geois ideals, took shape and the nationali-
sation of the culture was completed. The
popular public sphere is a local public sphere
attached to a local culture. There was a fíerce
battle between the popular and bourgeois
cultures, says Andreassen, up through the
twentieth century, and televisions and satel-
lite dishes, which were introduced to the is-
lands in the 1980s, symbolised the death of
Faroese popular culture. But in the 1990s the
internet emerged which I think, is incom-
patible with the bourgeois cultural comrnu-
nication process, as this process goes from
a central “sender” to “receivers” (all citi-
zens) through a “medium” like e.g. televi-
sion or radio (Andreassen, 1992: 120). The