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An impossible future: John Perry Barlow's 'Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace'
New Media & Society
Abstract
John Perry Barlow's 'Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace' narrates a world in which revolutionary politics are assumed to be immanent in the machines that structure and enable networked communication. Attention to the rhetorical strategies of the piece reveals a wealth of contradictions and misdirection: newness is rooted in history; revolution is effected by commercial transaction; and liberal democracy becomes libertarianism. The ways in which the Declaration establishes and resolves narrative conflict promote an 'impossible future' that is blind both to the history of the underlying technologies and to the American revolutionary politics on which it claims to base itself. Barlow's project would have been served better by a more pragmatic intervention into real-world processes.Ten years after its original publication, the Declaration is both widely reprinted and increasingly mocked: its language has become commonplace and its idealism has come to seem absurd.
... According to him, governments no longer have sovereignty in the digital domain (Morrison, 2009). However, this new understanding of the Internet, which is based on libertarian foundations and does not accept the absolute control and sovereignty of the state, was not suitable for all governments. ...
... John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" defines states as "weary giants of flesh and steel". According to him, governments no longer have sovereignty in the digital domain (Morrison, 2009). According to the Creemers (2020), technology businesses effusively embraced this narrative of openness which rejects strong government regulations and allows them to grow rapidly on a global scale. ...
... When he was asked in a recent magazine interview if he had sounded a lot more optimistic in the early 1990s, " with a much more 'nothing can stop us now' attitude, " he replied: " We all get older and smarter " (Doherty 2004, 5). More recently, Barlow's Declaration has been criticized for " contradictions and misdirections: newness is rooted in history; revolution is effected by commercial transaction; and liberal democracy becomes libertarianism " (Morrison 2009, 53). Nevertheless, some still cling to the mistaken notion, literally of the previous century , that the Internet is impossible to regulate and should be left that way. ...
... Nevertheless, some still cling to the mistaken notion, literally of the previous century , that the Internet is impossible to regulate and should be left that way. Three points are made in Barlow's 850-word Declaration that are relevant for Internet governance and still believed and even advocated by some: (1) globalization by the Internet makes it difficult for governments to regulate, (2) where technical experts agree and lead, governments will follow, and (3) globalization enhances the power of nonstate actors (Morrison 2009). All three statements have a kernel of truth in them, but they cannot be taken at face value. ...
This paper aims to sketch a road map for Internet governance based upon the state of development of various aspects of the Internet. The framework for analysis was developed by Deborah Spar in her 2001 book Prophets, Pioneers , and Pirates, in which she convincingly demonstrates that new technologies go through four phases of policy development: innovation, commercializa-tion, creative anarchy, and rule-making. The analysis suggests that Internet gov-ernance for three of four clusters has reached a level of maturity in policy development. The most developed aspect is the cluster of issues around physical infrastructure or what has been described as the ICANN issues. Two other clus-ters—Internet use and Internet-related issues—are less developed, with their state of development linked to economic advancement. The least developed aspect of Internet governance is that of the use of the Internet for economic, social, and cultural development. The analysis suggests that development aspects of Internet governance should perhaps not be addressed in the current framework but should be discussed separately, with, however, the same level of importance attached to this venue as to the Internet Governance Forum.
... This critical role of the internet became particularly evident during the Clinton presidency, prompting the American government to take measures aimed at regulating the advancement and dissemination of internet-related technologies. In response to the increasing involvement of governments in cyberspace during this period, John Perry Barlow, a cyberlibertarian activist, composed his renowned "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace" in 1996 [2]. In this declaration, Barlow contended that cyberspace should remain free from the interference of governmental entities, asserting that it is not a domain amenable to the practice of sovereignty by governments from the industrialized world. ...
This study explores the application of Power Transition Theory (PTT) to cyberspace, aiming to establish a comprehensive framework for understanding and measuring cyber power. Utilizing PTT's national power model, the research treats states as rational and unitary actors, integrating the rational actor model to assess state behavior in cyberspace. The objectives include defining cyber power, developing a novel metric for its evaluation, and categorizing states within a hierarchical structure of cyber power. By analyzing key components such as data resources, digital economic strength, and cyber political capacity, the study provides a nuanced understanding of cyber power dynamics. The results demonstrate that the traditional IR theories retain relevance in the cyber domain, offering a valuable lens for comprehending global cyber governance and geopolitical competition. This foundational work sets the stage for future analyses of power transitions within cyberspace, highlighting the critical interplay between traditional power metrics and emerging digital landscapes.
... The key ideas and principles of network libertarianism include individualism, which positions the individual as an intangible object; support for freedom of speech and information; rejection of intellectual property rights; techno-determinism; and self-governance based on ethical norms rather than legal ones (Barlow, 1996). In general, there are various comments on this issue: some authors note the influence of cyber-libertarianism on the nature, dynamics, and features of ideological construction in the context of the structural transformation of the modern world and the intensification of global political underground activities, while others believe that being inspired by poststructuralist rhizomorphism and postmodern relativism, this kind of libertarianism transforms into a trap of total devaluation and, as a consequence, lays the foundation for the potential emergence of pathological forms of identification (Morrison, 2009;Tomain, 2022). ...
The aim of the article is to analyse the phenomenon of modern mass culture and during this analysis find out its ontological status including scientism-technological imperatives of cyberculture and ideas of transhumanism. Results. Cyberpunk is an interesting, functional and new (in comparison with classical examples) form of mass culture, cultural-ideological movement, and sphere of translation and the intersection of protest ideas and meanings, due to its genre and sectoral pluralism (science fiction, film industry, music, design, video games, fashion, ideology, etc.), and also logics of technodeterminism, is still an important factor of transformation cultural-art space in the 21st century. Scientific novelty. In the article, for the first time, realised the philosophical-cultural analysis of cyberpunk including its peculiarities as a literary genre, phenomenon of mass culture and aesthetics. Conclusions. It is proved that cyberpunk appeared as a genre of science fiction literature in the 1960s-1970s and then later through conceptualisation of ideas in the 80s and agreeing of transcendental impulses counterculture of the 60s with computerisation and the specifics of technological evolution in the 90s, has evolved to the level of a metacultural movement. As the latter, it encompasses the literary genre, the film and fashion industry, architecture and graphic design (with a special aesthetic), technoanthropology, futurology and identity theory, and ideological discourse. It is confirmed that thanks to protest as a manifestation of freedom, the actualisation of the problem of corporeality, and dystopian high-tech projections, with the help of postmodern relativism and poststructuralist rhizomorphism, cyberpunk annihilates modern cultural narratives, thus creating many risks, including the potential formation of pathological forms of identification, declarative asociality, and cyber-prosthetics, which often develop into horrific manifestations of dehumanisation.
... However, at the same time, it can also be seen as a local manifestation of a global phenomenon. We Asiascape: Digital Asia 10 (2023) 137-152 are now a long way from the anarchic vision of the digital realm encapsulated in Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace (Morrison 2009). States around the world are assertively intervening in digital processes, sometimes in ways that are similar to those in China (Glasze et al. 2022). ...
Studies on digital Asia tend to cluster around certain interrelated core strands, which has led other topics to be largely overlooked, one of which is the state. Scholars neglect the state to their detriment. First, the article shows that the state is not a monolith but, rather, a venue for contesting and debating different concerns, in which various interests collide and various actors seek to gain influence. Second, the article claims that, to a significant degree, the state can create and shape the landscape within which other actors conduct their affairs. It does not do so in a vacuum but often in response to particular mobilized social and economic concerns. This contribution mostly focuses on China, but its findings – as the concluding section discusses – also apply to other countries in Asia and worldwide.
... Hence, it seems more meaningful to introduce the current state of the Internet, and what its users have made of it. The Internet 4 introduction as a free 1 platform, purposed solely for decentralized information sharing, has long passed (Morrison, 2009). The social web has put great emphasis on communication at a tremendous scale-particularly after the introduction of mobile devices. ...
This dissertation proposes a framework of user-centered security in Natural Language Processing (NLP), and demonstrates how it can improve the accessibility of related research. Accordingly, it focuses on two security domains within NLP with great public interest. First, that of author profiling, which can be employed to compromise online privacy through invasive inferences. Without access and detailed insight into these models' predictions, there is no reasonable heuristic by which Internet users might defend themselves from such inferences. Secondly, that of cyberbullying detection, which by default presupposes a centralized implementation; i.e., content moderation across social platforms. As access to appropriate data is restricted, and the nature of the task rapidly evolves (both through lexical variation, and cultural shifts), the effectiveness of its classifiers is greatly diminished and thereby often misrepresented. Under the proposed framework, we predominantly investigate the use of adversarial attacks on language; i.e., changing a given input (generating adversarial samples) such that a given model does not function as intended. These attacks form a common thread between our user-centered security problems; they are highly relevant for privacy-preserving obfuscation methods against author profiling, and adversarial samples might also prove useful to assess the influence of lexical variation and augmentation on cyberbullying detection.
... John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" defines states as "weary giants of flesh and steel". According to him, governments no longer have sovereignty in the digital domain (Morrison, 2009). ...
The invention of the internet by a group of engineers in the United States of America in the late 1990s caused enormous changes in people's lives and brought some major debates in the international arena. Undoubtedly, one of the most important of these debates was what should be the scope and limits of states' sovereignty in cyberspace that emerged with the use of the internet. This issue caused a serious disagreement between the US with a techno-optimistic approach, and authoritarian states such as China, Russia, and Iran. While the countries adopting the techno-optimistic view opposed the hegemony of the states in cyberspace, authoritarian states including China argued that cyberspace is a reflection of the physical territory of the state and that states should have full sovereignty in cyberspace. In this context, this article explains China's position in this debate through the explanation of the existence, development, and implementation of China's concept of cyber sovereignty.
... In international politics and political economy, the primitive unit of analysis is frequently the state. Early in the 1990s, popular rhetoric imagined that the Internet posed an intrinsic, perhaps even an insurmountable challenge to the power of states (Morrison, 2009). While the Internet has indeed challenged states to reconsider particular strategic aims (e.g., knowledge production, identity formation) (Rosenau and Singh, 2002), it is is increasingly evident as of this writing that the Internet has proven equally valuable as a vector for states to exert their power. ...
This work introduces a new metric of policy alignment between states: Web site blocking. Intuitively, we measure the degree to which states block similar content. This metric speaks to the flow of information in the digital layer of international politics, an element of international trade and cooperation that existing metrics fail to capture. In addition, our measure can be constantly scraped and updated, offering a higher temporal resolution than existing metrics. Our work suggests a link between Internet governance and other issues in international relations (e.g., trade). Since our metric can be updated in real time, future work could use our metric to detect geopolitical shifts more rapidly than would otherwise be possible.
... 8) argued for a radically free Internet existing beyond the grip of traditional governing institutions "where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity." Such ideas have since been dismissed as absurd and utopian (Morrison, 2009). Yet aspects of pre-commercial Internet, when individual computers connected with each other in a network without a centralized transit point (Musiani, 2015), are still highly relevant under the concept of the 'Decentralized Web' (DW). ...
Freedom of expression is regarded as a corner stone of democratic societies. Historically, traditional media has served as the principle forum for the public discourse, which is so imperative for upholding a democracy associated with deliberation and accountability. With the advent of social media and social networking sites, the conditions for this democratic discourse changed in several ways. New forums for political debates and discussions have evolved, forums that are governed by different norms and rules than those that were predominant in the pre-digital media world. Even though the possibility for the public to actively partake in the public discourse has increased significantly, actual participation is still often limited to certain groups and fractions. Audience fragmentation, personalisation of digital media output and the network principle imbedded in social media have nourished apprehensions about echo chambers and balkanization, and in the long run the demise of democratic discourse and democracy itself. The discourse of social media is governed by a logic of its own, different from the logic that we know from traditional media. However, the ramifications of this are not restricted to the social networking sites, the blogs and the discussion forums on internet—they spill over on the traditional media, for instance through the dissemination of fake news and when overinflated storms of opinion get turned into regular news. Furthermore, this is taking place in a social and political context that in many Western societies is undergoing an increasing polarization. This polarization is picked up by different groups on social media where it gets amplified and sometimes distorted. This interaction between traditional democratic discourse, social media and the political climate has altered the conditions for expressing different opinions and ideas in the public sphere. These changing conditions, and the consequences these changes may have on the public’s possibility to exercise their freedom of expression, are the main focus of this issue.
... 8) argued for a radically free Internet existing beyond the grip of traditional governing institutions "where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity." Such ideas have since been dismissed as absurd and utopian (Morrison, 2009). Yet aspects of pre-commercial Internet, when individual computers connected with each other in a network without a centralized transit point (Musiani, 2015), are still highly relevant under the concept of the 'Decentralized Web' (DW). ...
This article dives into the ongoing debate on how to address concerns of personal safety and respect online, as well as consequences for exposure to polarizing and in various ways harmful information, while at the same time safeguarding the democratic essentials of freedom of expression and participation. It does so by examining the issue from a less common angle, namely who governs the Internet and the platforms where much of the toxic material appears. By applying a model of free speech regulation conceptualized by legal scholar Jack Balkin (2018a, 2018b), the article explores different theoretical future scenarios of Internet governance involving three main players, namely governments, private companies, and speakers. The analysis finds that depending on which player is at the forefront, the outcomes from the standpoint of participation and freedom of speech may be drastically different. While there is potential for transformation that can enable more ownership, transparency, and agency for citizens and news media, some potential paths will place ever-increasing control over the interests of users.
... Claims that technology can bring about a broader process of social democratisation are longstanding, but have been particularly prevalent since the rise of the internet and the possibilities its ubiquity offers for bringing about a new form of citizenship (for example, Barlow 1996;Raymond 1999). However, such broad political claims are generally considered to be unsustainable and contradictory (Morrison 2009;Best and Wade 2009), and they are beyond the scope of this paper. We focus here on more modest claims that technological democracy, through the related processes of 'disruption' discussed earlier, undermine incumbent gatekeepers to allow the entry of participants to various economic and social processes into which they would have previously been denied access. ...
‘Crowdfunding’ is a method of raising money and finance to capitalise projects of various kinds. Drawing on the networking capabilities of the internet and software platforms, those seeking project funding appeal to potentially diverse audiences who are collectively referred to as ‘the crowd’. What practitioners, advocates and policymakers typically identify within crowdfunding is its ‘alternative’, ‘disruptive’ and ‘democratising’ qualities; that is, it is held to be a novel, digitally-rendered economic space which has the capacity to challenge established funding practices in banking, capital markets and venture capital networks, offering a more open and egalitarian source of capital for economic, social and cultural entrepreneurship. The paper develops the concept of ‘ecologies’, drawn from the geographies of money and finance literature, to advance a critical understanding of the crowdfunding economy that is sceptical of its apparent qualities. First, the concept of ecologies encourages the analysis of diverse and proliferative monetary and financial forms, enabling an understanding that avoids the binary opposition of ‘capitalist/alternative’ economic forms and which differentiates between the variegated crowdfunding ecologies that have emerged to date. Second, by foregrounding the intermediation processes and credit-debt relations of monetary and financial ecologies, it is argued that crowdfunding may largely replicate rather than disrupt the extant institutional and debt dynamics of funding practices. Third, by emphasizing the socio-spatial effects of monetary and financial ecologies, attention is drawn to the need for further research into the unevenness that mitigates against crowdfunding being as open and egalitarian as its advocates claim.
... The emergence and fast adoption of the internet by a wide range of individuals, groups, and protest movements has given rise to a vast literature discussing the democratic potentialities of the internet. Many scholars note that cyberspace provides an open forum for individuals as it shifts power away from governments and corporations into the hands of the citizenry (Brighenti 2010;Morrison 2009;Whitson 2010). The reasons for individuals coming online vary as do the cultural perspectives these users possess. ...
The internet is considered by many to be a boon for political activists, such as cop-watchers—a free, open, and widespread medium in which to disseminate political messages. While there is truth to these claims, the internet, like any technology, can be used for many purposes and comes with its own arrangement of limitations. To elucidate these limitations and to provide a word of caution about the political potential of the internet, particularly for video-activists/cop-watchers, the theoretical work of Marshall McLuhan is used to understand how the internet, as a medium, shapes and limits political messages. Using McLuhan's tetrad, this study examines how the internet is problematic for cop-watching groups. In particular, the internet is said to yield consequences through how it (1) enhances or intensifies how the viewer experiences political messages through speed, (2) retrieves the importance of the narrator, (3) renders previous media increasingly obsolete, yet opens up new avenues for commercial dominance, and (4) creates additional reversals or other problems for video activism, such as the mass proliferation of surveillance and formatting discussion in counter-productive ways.
... Concurrently, others see hackers as the vanguard of the 'technological sublime' of capitalist societies. Indeed, when the statements of hackers have been analysed by scholars, what has been observed has pointed to a commonsensical, liberal or libertarian understanding of the world and a strong bent for explaining social change with reference to technological development (Borsook, 2000;Liu, 2004;Morrison, 2009;Wyatt, 2004). It has often been assumed in the academic literature that such ideas stand in opposition to political engagement. ...
This article takes the political engagement of hackers as a prism for examining the relations between technological determinist thinking and collective action. The concept ‘collective action framing’ is borrowed from social movement theory to describe how hackers have appropriated notions of a post-industrial, information society in their struggles against intellectual property laws and state censorship. Hackers have reintroduced an element of conflict and antagonism into otherwise politically innocuous visions of post-industrialism. This residual of antagonism can be traced back to the roots of the post-industrial myth in Marxist, historical materialist theory. By exploring these origins, the article proceeds to compare the hopes invested by hackers in the emancipatory force of information technology with the earlier beliefs of labour movements that the forces of history were on their side. Building on this comparison it is argued that technological determinism does not always lead to political resignation, but can also serve as a foundation for collective action.
I don’t write unless I get invited to. It’s not that I’m so important or famous or in demand. It’s that I tend to have a comically bad time getting through blind peer review, to the extent that it takes me years sometimes to get an article accepted. In at least one instance, I had a conference paper proposal rejected by a reviewer acting on behalf of the same program committee that, simultaneously and on the basis of the same research, had invited me to deliver the keynote address. An editor at a flagship new media journal very strongly pushed me, in the first piece I had written as a new professor, to take out all the things that had made the article fun for me to write, things that made it more readable, vivid, and effective. It was a paper about rhetoric and metaphor that was forbidden from employing rhetoric and metaphor to make its argument. The fate of the following sentence was the subject of a surprisingly long email chain: “Language may shift our view of the world, but a popular consensus on vocabulary and metaphor does not necessarily alter the material operation of that world: tucking a flower into a gun barrel creates a powerful visual symbol, but does not preclude the florist being shot” (Morrison 74). These editors, and others since, operationalize the idea that scholarly writing has a specific voice in which its arguments must be expressed, which seems to be much flatter, less spiky or silly,1 literal rather than figurative, impersonal, distinguished from my own style of writing by its formality and earnestness.
Digital media platforms are becoming increasingly subject to the sway of geopolitics, as seen during the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the US-China trade war. How are platforms becoming geopoliticized? What perspectives shall we use to make sense of the process? This theoretical paper reformulates conceptual apparatuses of liberalism, realism, and constructivism, each represented by a metaphor: the cobweb, billiard balls, and ant societies, respectively. The approaches are introduced, critiqued, and compared to understand platform geopoliticization more historically and imaginatively on global as well as regional and local scales. The discussions propel platform studies to be grounded and multi-layered, concerning not only the apex of politico-economic power but also grassroots and communal praxis, for example, metis. While the pendulum is swinging from transnational capital to nation-states, it is insufficient to restrict our thinking to (neo)realism vis-à-vis (neo)liberalism. A moderate version of constructivism—the “ant societies” model—hence needs articulation, which holds important conceptual and methodological implications.
This study critiques the way in which journalism and other media used John Perry Barlow, an early Internet enthusiast, as a source to make common sense of cyberlibertarian ideology as the Internet emerged as a dominant communications technology in the 1990s and early-2000s. During this period, journalists used Barlow, someone with no technical expertise but a reputation as a prophet of the new technology, to translate the deregulatory, conservative ideals of free markets and speech so central to cyberlibertarianism for mass consumption. In the process, Barlow and these journalists depoliticized a central political question about the Internet that remains today: how and how much it should be regulated. This amplification of cyberlibertarianism as doxa in popular discourses during this period helped foreclose on alternative conceptions of the Internet not only in the press but also in discussions of policy.
Many scholars have hailed the democratic potential of the internet. For some the network of networks would empower individuals and foster genuine political discussions, for others, it was perceived as a threat, a Machiavellian tool that would inevitably lead to increased State surveillance and monitory of its citizens. After the turn of the century, a growing body of literature reveals the gap between the supposed democratic potentialities of the internet and the practices that are emerging in the field. This paper reviews recent literature on online activism and e-mobilisation and argues that each potentiality recovers a continuum rather than a binary division. In order to deconstruct the democratic potentialities of the internet, we base this reflection upon the three axes proposed by Vedel for making sense of the political uses of the internet (2007): information, discussion and mobilisation. For each of these dimensions, evidence can be found that assesses an empowering aspect of the technology (e.g.: increased access to information can lead to a better informed citizenry) while similarly containing a demobilisation aspect (informational access also leads to issues of information overload and practices of disinformation).
The digitally crowdsourced law for same-sex marriage was passed in Finland in 2014. Activists produced the draft text of the law on digital collaboration platforms, and support for the law was petitioned using strong digital identification. This article analyzes how the campaign for the Equal Marriage Law used new digital tools and created practices that affect democratic citizenship and power making. The campaigners succeeded in introducing to the national political debate the idea of a bill that had been twice rejected in the political process. This article introduces the typology of the mediating citizen to describe civic action that is able to affect representative politics in a constructive way and reprogram power. The radical legal framework, the Citizens' Initiative Act, offered a channel to pursue meaningful civic agency in Finland and counter the legitimacy crisis of representative democracies. In future efforts for enhancing digital civic participation such a channel for real impact should be part of the design.
Este trabajo analiza cómo estudiantes universitarios mexicano-americanos que residen en Estados Unidos se presentan en Facebook, explorando la incorporación de la mexicanidad en sus identidades digitales. Desde enfoques teóricos como el interaccionismo simbólico, la fenomenología y la psicología social, y con base en las perspectivas de Goffman, Mead, Schütz y Cooley, se investigan las estrategias de construcción del yo digital, así como las razones y consecuencias de la presencia o ausencia de elementos culturales mexicanos en sus perfiles. El estudio adapta teorías tradicionales sobre la interacción cara a cara a un entorno digital, examinando cómo el self se transforma dentro de una esfera postmoderna, globalizada y digitalizada, revelando las complejidades de la identidad en el contexto de las redes sociales.
Many scholars have hailed the democratic potential of the internet. For some it empowers individuals and fosters genuine political discussions. For others, it is perceived as a threat, a Machiavellian tool that inevitably leads to increased State surveillance and monitoring of its citizens. After the turn of the century, a growing body of literature reveals the gap between the supposed democratic potentialities of the internet and the practices emerging in the field. This paper reviews recent literature on online activism and e-mobilization and argues that each potential conceals a continuum rather than a binary division. In order to deconstruct the democratic potential of the internet, we base this reflection upon the three axes proposed by Vedel (2007) for making sense of the political uses of the internet: information, discussion and mobilization. For each of these dimensions, one can find evidence of an empowering aspect of the technology as well as of how it poses new challenges to citizens. To name just one example, increased access to information can lead to a better informed citizenry but may also lead to issues of information overload and practices of disinformation.
Cybercrime and its potential ramifications exemplify ‘one of those things that nobody wants’ (Popper 1963). From today's perspective it would have been easy to foresee and at least partly prevent the mischief of cybercrime. One therefore wonders what early developers and users of the Internet actually envisioned, and how malpractices such as spreading damaging viruses relate to these visions. This essay approaches this question by interpreting cybercrime as an unintended consequence of the utopian dreams that flourished during the early days of the Internet. This essay approaches this question by linking the occurrence of cybercrime to the early days of the Internet's development. It explores the dominant orientations of two groups, the engineering community which developed the Internet and the first generation of academic users, both of which largely shaped the public understanding of the socio-technical constitution of the Internet around the time when spam and viruses became a common issue in the late 1990s. In itself a highly innovative activity, cybercrime can be seen as an ironic counterpart to the expectations of an egalitarian cyberspace whose technical and social norms condemned discrimination against any type of applications and uses.
The author analyzes the types of metaphors that are used to describe the Internet in issues of Wired magazine from before and after the dot-com collapse to understand the perceptions and expectations of some of the actors involved in the shaping of the Internet. In addition, the metaphors deployed in economics and geophysiology are used to demonstrate how metaphors can influence public debate, policy, and theory. The author argues that metaphors do not simply have a descriptive function but that they also carry normative connotations. Language, alongside social practices and material objects, is an important tool in attempts to construct the future. Six overlapping metaphorical themes are identified: revolution, evolution, salvation, progress, universalism, and the "American dream." A. critical analysis of these metaphors, informed by a critique of the metaphors used in economics and geophysiology, leads the author to challenge the universalist claims made by some Internet enthusiasts for the inclusive potential of the Internet.
This article examines the architecture of public access and of private digital networks in order to establish in what ways they might be (a) subject to regulation, (b) alter the authority of the national state, and (c) have positive or negative impacts on liberal democracy and on the political potential of civil society. Two of the key issues explored in this context are the meaning of regulation, which is likely to be quite different from our historically grounded understandings of state regulation, and, second, the sharp and often overlooked differences between public access and private digital networks.
Electronic democracy rhetoric has proliferated with the growth of the internet as a popular communications medium. This rhetoric is largely dominated by liberal individualist assumptions. Communitarianism has provided a resource for an alternative vision of electronic democracy. A third model, deliberative democracy, has recently been employed by electronic democrats who want to move beyond the individualism/communitarianism opposition. In this article, I outline each of these visions, describing the democratic assumptions and electronic democracy practices that each embraces. In particular, I explore the ways in which each vision sees the internet as aiding its cause. I conclude by pointing to the relative lack of research into the possibility of the deliberative position being realized through cyberspace. I suggest that a more regorous analysis of the intersection between the internet and deliberative democracy would not only be sociologically fruitful but may provide interesting possibilities for enhancing contemporary democratic forms.
The internet and its surrounding technologies hold the promise of reviving the public sphere; however, several aspects of these new technologies simultaneously curtail and augment that potential. First, the data storage and retrieval capabilities of internet-based technologies infuse political discussion with information otherwise unavailable. At the same time, information access inequalities and new media literacy compromise the representativeness of the virtual sphere. Second, internet-based technologies enable discussion between people on far sides of the globe, but also frequently fragmentize political discourse. Third, given the patterns of global capitalism, it is possible that internet-based technologies will adapt themselves to the current political culture, rather than create a new one. The internet and related technologies have created a new public space for politically oriented conversation; whether this public space transcends to a public sphere is not up to the technology itself.
Utopian societies exhibit a variety of ways of organising the financial, political, and emotional relationships between people. For all this diversity, however, one thing that exhibits far less variation is the story, the framing narrative that accounts for how the narrator reaches the more perfect society and obtains the opportunity to witness its distinctive excellences. This book is about that story, the curious hybrid of the traveller's tale and the classical dialogue that emerges in the Renaissance, but whose outlines remain clearly apparent even in some of the most recent utopian writing.
Significant changes in the nature of social life are being brought about by computer, information, and biological technologies, to the extent that-some argue-a new cultural order, ''cyberculture,'' is coming into being. This paper presents an overview of the types of anthropological analyses that are being conducted in the area of new technologies and suggests additional steps for the articulation of an anthropology of cyberculture. it builds upon science, technology, and society studies in various fields and on critical studies of modernity. The implications of technoscience for both anthropological theory and ethnographic research are explored.
DANIEL W. DREZNER assesses the current state of global Internet governance. He challenges the common assumption that the Internet leads to a decline in state autonomy relative to other global actors. Drezner argues that the great powers remain the primary actors shaping the governance structure and regulatory standards of the Internet.
Our present electronic culture has emerged from a conception of Western democracy, which can be seen as dialectically grounded in contradiction and potential inequality. We should expect, therefore, that a ‘democratic’ electronic culture will manifest itself in a similar dialectical form. It will be both more and less liberating, participatory and interactive than was the case with previous, technologically mediated cultural forms.
This paper explores the development of the Internet, from its earliest incarnation as an experimental site for wide-area networking of computers to its present transformation into an international commercial network. We outline the stages it has gone through, highlighting how patterns of stabilisation and closure in design and use have been undone. Using the concept of `closure' from the sociology of scientific knowledge, we suggest these stages were not inevitable. There were alternative ways to distribute information globally which have been forgotten or abandoned. We argue that closure is never final and that its provisionality is necessary for socio-technical change. The closure achieved at the end of the 1980s has been blown open, but now new actors are trying to close the Internet in different, and perhaps incompatible, ways. We explore what this means for the future of the Internet through an examination of both the metaphors currently being used by different actors and the areas where different interpretations are contested.
We present a critical appraisal of the impact of the Internet (and related information technologies) upon processes of democratization and de-democratization in contemporary society. We review accounts of `the information revolution' as these have become polarized into mutually exclusive rhetorics of future cosmopolitan or citadellian e-topias. We question the Manichean assumptions common to both rhetorics: particularly the fetishism of information technology as an intrinsically democratizing or de-democratizing force on societies. In opposition to this new technological fetishism we focus upon (1) Internet historicity; (2) the human/machine nexus; (3) Internet policing and appropriation presenting a different story of the Net, emphasizing contingent, indeterminate and negotiable characteristics of sociotechnical systems, preparing for a more radical critique of existing theories of `global technological citizenship'. Refiguring `culture' as technopoiesis, we argue that an alternative approach to global civil society minimally presupposes a cultural sociology of the Internet: approaching information technologies as the product of specific sociocultural practices and as historical sites of ethico-political transformation and reflexive self-figuration.
Postcards from the Net: An Intrepid Guide to the Wired World
- J P Barlow
Is There a New Political Paradigm Lurking in Cyberspace?
- J Kinney