The various contributions to this volume have all dealt with cultural products by Latin American practitioners that engage with notions of cyberspace in a variety of forms, whether through their actual existence as online works, or through interaction with the key tropes of cyberculture or hypertexts. As can be seen from these chapters, approaches to cyberspace and the new practices it offers are varied, and are frequently inflected not only by their interactions with other, more established, cultural forms, but also by regional differences. Thus the strategic use in a São Paulo suburb of globalised Internet technologies (websites), and of cultural forms pre-existing the Net (rap music) to produce a localised expression of place has parallels with, and yet is distinct from, Gómez-Peña's cyberperformance art, for example, which elaborates and plays with border identities. Similarly, the practices of Latin American literary e-mags, for instance, which rely on some pre-existing norms of print culture, and yet create tentative cybercommunities through renegotiations of local and global space, share some concerns with the ‘social netwar’ of the Zapatistas and other NGOs, and yet have clearly different political and cultural aims. Thus each of the practitioners examined in this volume has engaged with cyberspace in different, although interconnected ways: rather than there being a Latin American cyberculture, it is instead a question of differing practices which make use, often strategically, of globalised technologies for temporary negotiations and representations.

Such strategic uses of technology must entail a thinking through of the common conceptualisations of online practice in itself. A brief survey of the metaphors used in English to describe Net activity, including terminology such as ‘surfing’, the ‘Information Superhighway’, or ‘blogs’, foregrounds issues of travel as the primary conceptualisation of the activity of the Internet user, as do equivalent terms used in Spanish and Portuguese – ‘navegar’, ‘la supercarretera de información’ / ‘la estrada super da informação’, ‘bitácoras’, or ‘cibernauta’/’internauta’. Arguably, these travel metaphors can be linked to the notion of the tourist gaze (see, for example, Nakamura 2002: 40), and even, as some have claimed, to an implied (neo)colonial perspective. David Trend, for example, points out that: ‘it takes little imagination to recognize the parallels between the unexplored territory of the cyberworld and the ‘new world’ imagined by the colonizers of the modern era.