Exploring the Virtual South: The Idea of a Distinctive Region on "The Web"

The notion of a culturally distinctive South is an ideology that has long served as a way of organizing, representing, and structuring life in America. Functioning as electronic folklore, the mass media creates distinctions between places and thus operationalizes the idea of a distinct regional culture. The emergence of the Internet, particularly the World Wide Web, offers a new conduit through which images, meanings, and identities of people and places are constructed and conveyed symbolically. The purpose of this article is to explore, theoretically and empirically, the Virtual South—the production of the idea of a distinct American South through the cultural discourse and new electronic folklore of cyberspace. Specifically, our objectives are: (1) to show what the Virtual South looks like and where on "the Web" the idea of a distinctive South is being (re)constructed, (2) to identify some of the social contexts, groups, and interests underlying the use of the Web to advocate the ideology of a distinctive southern regional culture, and (3) to reflect on the possible differences between the cyber-representation of place and more traditional mediums of geographic portrayal. Using evidence from sites on the Web. the authors investigate three cyber-contexts in which the ideology of a distinct South is developed and deployed: promoting/marketing cities in cyberspace; preparing for the 1996 Olympic Games in cyberspace; and expressing regional identity in cyberspace. This work attempts to build a greater understanding of the cultural geography of the Web, the place of the South in current American social thought/practice, and the politics of representing this region and others in the telecommunications media.