The fundamentally political nature of the Internet is currently asserting itself with a directness and an insistence that has rarely been seen before now. But, again, the nature that is asserting itself is fundamental–it is not a new aspect of the Internet, but has been part and parcel of it since its inception. The panel over which I have the pleasure of presiding, “Augmented Engagement – Global Politics by Digital Means”, focuses on this aspect. It examines how the technological roots of the Internet’s past have helped to shape the role it plays in modern politics, as well as what is considered both possible and appropriate in the Internet as a political space. The Internet as public space is also held up for analysis, both in terms of its nature as a space in which political action can be performed, and in terms of the actors who perform within that space. Political actors obviously perform political acts, and some entities may regard those acts as threats and risks–threats and risk may be understood as cultural constructions, and those constructions are affected and shaped in turn by the technological environment in which they exist. Finally, the Internet is examined as political space in which political actors understand, mediate, construct, and maintain identities, and form communities around the identities that they construct and maintain, as rapid flows of both people and information across national borders become more and more commonplace.
Ultimately, what unites all of the papers on this panel is the way in which they address modern global politics as an augmented phenomenon–a kind of politics in which the line between the digital and the “real” is quickly vanishing, if it ever existed at all. Actions, actors, and meanings online and offline become so fluid and so deeply intermeshed that, as Nathan Jurgenson has written on this blog, the concept of “digital dualism” becomes a fallacy, a framework for analysis rendered useless by its inability to capture the richness of the subject. In global politics as they are practiced now, “online” and “offline” can no longer be understood separately–they must be addressed as aspects of a complete picture situated within the long history of humanity’s engagement with technology. These papers make powerful contributions to a deeper understanding of that picture.
Julia Schroeder, “A Cultural Sociology of Technological Risk and Cyber Terrorism”
Recent events, such as the DDoS attacks on Burma, and the Stuxnet virus attack on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear facility, point to a global diffusion of anxiety about cyber terrorism. In response, attempts have been made by the U.S. and the EU to crystallize the technological risks faced by modern nation-states as more and more services are located online. This paper will suggest an outline for a literature with which policy-makers and academics may begin to address the weighty issue of cyber terrorism from the perspective of a cultural sociology of technological risk.
This analysis asserts that a sociological understanding of risk grounded in culture is a necessary remedy to the way in which technological risk analysis has been undertaken in recent research directed toward policy-makers. Oftentimes researchers operate with an implicit framework for technological risk which is divorced from any in-depth analysis of the culture which produces the very categories of analysis. I suggest that a closer inspection of the mechanisms by which popular conceptions of technological costs and benefits are created will make a significant contribution to both academic and policy-oriented literature on solving problems which involve technological risk.
This approach has the potential begin bridging the sizable gap between the expert knowledge of quantitative cost-benefit analysis that occurs at the policy-making level and the lived experiences of risk which are perceived by individuals who may be affected by those very policies. The literature outlined in this paper is an attempt to open up a space in popular narratives about technology that exists between extremes of hyper-optimism and neo-Luddism.
In order to outline a literature of the cultural sociology of technological risk, I will first review the intellectual roots of this literature in sociological theory which critiques modern technology (Ellul 1954, Marcuse 1964, Beck 1986). The sense of caution that these authors exhibited provides theoretical heritage for an approach to technology which walks the fine line between both extremes of the spectrum of cultural narratives of technology, both the naively celebratory and overly critical. Secondly, I will examine Douglas and Wildavsky’s (1982) framework for the cultural perception of technological risk. Thirdly, I will argue that Douglas and Wildavsky’s contribution reflects the fundamental way in which academic conceptions of risk were changed after the contribution of Thomas Hughes’ systems theory (1998). Lastly, I will suggest that the case of cyber terrorism as a “test case” for this new cultural sociology of technological risk. I believe that this case is particularly useful because the population of the United States has not experienced, what I call, a “risk realization event” that exposes a vulnerability to cyber terrorism. This case also illustrates a tension between the image of the internet as a Hughesian physical ‘system’ held by its creators which is at odds with the popular image of it held by its users as a non-physical network. Therefore, the popular perception of the technological risk of cyber terrorism provides an interesting case which to understand the socially constructed nature of risk.
Louis Sagnières (@niespika), “The Internet and the rise of a transnational public space”
In two decades, the Internet has established itself as a forum for political discussion and action. The fantasies of a global public space allowing for the emergence of a transnational democracy have backfired and though they are not supported by any empirical data this view is still prevalent in the media. This does not however mean that the Internet does not change anything, quite the contrary.
During this presentation, I would like to clarify the role of the Internet on the international stage and defend the following ideas. First I would like to reframe the meaning of public space. I will argue that the Internet can be understood as a transnational public space but not in a habermassian way. Rather we have to look at it from the perspective of H. Arendt. The Internet, I will argue, is a public space because it is a place where we live our political lives, thus anyone can become a transnational political actor. And this is the second idea I will try to defend. With the advent of the Internet as a global public space we are experiencing the advent of a new type of transnational actor: “citizen initiatives” (CI), with characteristics very different from those of traditional representatives of civil society at the international level such as NGOs.
I will start by giving a definition of what counts as political action. I will argue that there are two dimensions to it. The first one is “relational”, it has to do with a political entity “fighting” with another one for power, justice, rights or recognition. The second one is “internal”, it has to do with how members of a political entity act. Building on this conception of the political, I will offer a characterization of what is to be understood as a public space. I will then show how the use of this concept allows us to make better sense of Internet politics than when using the habermassian public space concept.
One of the reason I think the Internet qualifies as a transnational public space, is, I will argue, that it allows for anyone to act on a transnational level, but mostly because it allows for a new form of political actors that are inherently transnational : what I call Citizens Initiative. In order to do this, I will start by legitimizing the distinction I make between NGOs and what I call CI, demonstrating at the same time why, in my opinion, they are a novelty on the international stage. I will illustrate my point with an analysis of the website Wikileaks.org. In my opinion the difference between NGOs and the IC is mainly based on their structure. While the former are hierarchical organizations that have a « territorial » and legal existence, the latter are often just websites behind which individuals scattered throughout the world are brought together that do not particularly want to be recognized as an association. I will also show that while there are CI of national scope, there are plenty of transnational scope.
Joseph Obi, “Cyberspace, Place Polygamy, and the Distributed Self: An African Viewpoint”
The internet has forced an interrogation of our notions of community and identity. If anything, it has compounded the fluid, polyvalent, and distributed nature of its users’ selves. Many scholars have drawn attention to (a) the specter of a flattening “McWorld” global culture, (b) a valorization of the local in the face of the former, and (c) a syncretic “glocalization” or “creolization” emerging from the relentless forces of transplanetary integration characteristic of our times. In the wake of political and economic deregulation across the world, there has been an intensification of trans-border flows of human traffic , thus enhancing centuries-old processes of diasporic-community formation. Our concern here is what the internet might mean for such groups. How does the use of this complex of technologies play out against the backdrop of the cultural homogenization / heterogenization / hybridization debates by globalization scholars? By extension, what might be the implications of the internet for processes of assimilation and pluralism amongst diasporic groups in their host countries? We begin from the premise that, in comparison to the pre-network society period, there is a different quality to the immigrant/diaspora experience . With the compression of time and space, the globalization of biography enters new realms. We join with Ulrich Beck who argues that “what is coming to the fore is the inner mobility of the individual’s own life, for which coming and going, being both here and there across frontiers, at the same time has become the normal thing.”
Speaking of African immigration in the US, the Migration Policy Institute says: “The number of African Immigrants in the United States grew 40-fold between 1960 and 2007, from 35,355 to 1.4 million. Most of this growth has taken place since 1990.” Auspiciously, that year, 1990, coincided roughly with the fructification of windows-powered pc technologies which would later launch robust global platform-based connectivity in what Tom Friedman has since called the “Netscape moment.” As with many immigrants in the US, the potential of these technologies to alleviate the challenges of adapting to a new environment was not lost on Africans. Using preliminary indications from an African online community representing one of the continent’s largest countries , this paper attempts to answer the questions posed above by considering some of the ties between technology, place polygamy, and identity in the age of the internet.
Miles Townes, “The Spread of TCP/IP and the Political Origins of the Internet”
This study describes the spread of TCP/IP and therefore the diffusion of the Internet, beginning in the 1960s until the early 1990s. Understanding how TCP/IP emerged and spread provides insight into the changes and challenges brought by the Internet into world politics. Against arguments that the Internet reflects primarily economic or military concerns, I argue that notions of “academic” freedom are embedded in the fundamental technology of the Internet, TCP/IP, and that this embedded norm is essential to the Internet’s consequences for modern political life.
In its first twenty years, the Internet grew from a novel experiment among a few scholars to a global phenomenon, connecting millions of people and changing the way people look at the world. This was achieved on a largely ad hoc, informal basis, with minimal guidance from government leaders. The source of this spread was the work of computer scientists associated with the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, and the diffusion process followed closely the alliance patterns of the Western bloc in the Cold War. Within the international relations literature, the best descriptive analogy for the process comes from Finnemore and Sikkink’s ‘life cycle’ of norms—emergence, cascade, and internalization. From this perspective, this study argues that academics served as ‘norm entrepreneurs’ working in an ‘organizational platform’ established by ARPA.
I document this process through extensive use of primary sources, as well as published and online sources, to examine the motives and incentives behind the spread of the Internet. I argue that neither military necessity nor economic reward drove the process, but rather an academic desire to solve problems for scientific prestige. I show that the process unfolded at an interpersonal scale across the group of industrialized countries anchored by the United States, without being driven by U.S. government policy. In this process, TCP/IP competed – and beat – alternative technologies proposed by international standards bodies and private corporations to become the backbone of the modern Internet.
Understanding this process and its product is crucial to proper adjudication of contemporary debates regarding the ownership, neutrality, accessibility, anonymity, and security of the Internet. Many of the alternative configurations proposed to remedy ‘problems’ of the Internet in fact duplicate previous alternatives which TCP/IP proved superior to. Moreover, I argue, any change in the underlying technology which diminish the embedded normative commitments risk diminishing the Internet’s transformative power in the world.