Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies
Bulgarian and those who disagree with the official history of the Republic of Macedonia.
Often, the posts are signed by “bloggers from Bulgaria”, “Bulgarian bloggers” or “bloggers
that write in Bulgarian”. Deleting or ignoring such comments is usually followed by
comments such as “first learn Macedonian and then comment”, “I don’t understand
what you are trying to say”, “write in our language because this is our blog”, or similar. In
spite of all these comments, bloggers understand what other bloggers are saying. A proof
of this are the long (both time-wise and space-wise) blog-debates between bloggers who
write in Bulgarian and those who write in Macedonian. The call to censor or block
“Bulgarian bloggers” actually points to the real motivation behind such acts – to define
cyberspace as OURS. In such cases, the virtual community is defined both nationally
and linguistically. Considering the fact that cyberspace is defined as a world without
actual borders, the question that arises is: “What defines ‘blogosphere’ as a Macedonian
blogosphere, when the term ‘Macedonian’ refers to a particular country, territory,
people and nation” On the other hand, it is confusing that many of the bloggers on
this particular network, Blog.mk, do not live in Macedonia. In addition, we cannot
claim with certainty that all bloggers who are active participants on Blog.mk feel like
Macedonians (regardless of their ethnic, national or any other identity). One of the
rules of the biggest Macedonian blog service is that, for example, in order to log in,
you have to use the Cyrillic alphabet. If you use the Roman alphabet, your comment
will not be posted on the blog. The posts written using Roman script are not shown
on the main page, which reduces the number of people who will read your post. Irena
Cvetkovik (2010), an author who has been studying the Macedonian blogosphere, says
that “this is one of the most literal implementations of the message “I write in Cyrillic,
I exist”. This is actually one of the slogans of a popular campaign in Macedonia which
says, “I protect what is mine when ‘I write in Cyrillic-I exist’”, which was launched by
the Idea Plus Communications marketing agency and the Macedonian Information
Agency (MIA) and supported by the academic, cultural and state institutions as well as
the business community and media in the Republic of Macedonia. Cvetkovik (2010)
poses the question: “Where does the need to construct national identity in cyberspace
or computer-related space come from when cyberspace offers a world beyond borders,
nations and ethnicity” Her answer to this question is that there is “a virtual national
identity” which is represented through pictures and discourses and which by the ways
in which it is expressed is more or less different from national identity construction in
reality. The difference lies in the absence of the physical body, or the non-existence of
a body, that prevents biological and genetic identification and proving national and
ethnic togetherness. Ethnic identity in cyberspace can be proven through being part of
a collective interpretation of a mutual past and shared ancestors. This does not allow for
someone to drastically distance themselves from the construction of the national and
ethnic identity that exists in the physical and real world. In other words, the choice of
pictures, topics and myths in representing one’s national identity is almost identical in
both the virtual and real world.
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