Virtual Vita Nuova

The Invisible Idiot

27 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment

by jasminatesanovic in Uncategorized Tags: blogging, globalization, Internet

I have had the email address politicalidiot@yahooo.com for eleven years. I first opened it when I started touring with my book, “Diary of a Political Idiot.”
It was useful to me to have a Yahoo! account — actually, I had two of them — because my email address in Serbia, mermaids@eunet.yu, was undependable and often could not be reached at all. My friend Stephanie Damoff opened the account for me in New York.
The old geographical political scheme of the former Yugoslavia was often simply not recognized by Internet service providers. Serbia, as the country of the aggressors, was commonly unrecognized, an outlaw state simply not in the databases. For instance, I could not enter the US Library of Congress because my national ID was invisible to librarians. Submitting visas at airports was commonly troublesome, not because the visa was wrong because my country was simply absent from the airport computers. More