Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide. Pippa Norris. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 303 pp. $60 hbk., $20 pbk. Forecasts that the Internet heralds a world of more democracy and less poverty seem as inflated as dot.com stocks. This rosy view has electronic voting, political chat rooms, and email access re-engaging apathetic publics in politics. Digital technologies redress economic disparities, and the benefits of the Internet percolate down to transform poor societies. Equally exaggerated is the gloom of naysayers. The Internet Age has done little to narrow the gap between rich and poor countries, the information haves and havenots, cyber-skeptics contend. Indeed, digital technologies could create new inequalities and reinforce the dominance of power elites. In her new book, Digital Divide, Pippa Norris, associate director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, steps into this fusillade of cyber-hyperbole, lowers the decibel with a well-written and thoughtful examination of Internet use and access in 179 countries and dissects the claims and counter-claims. Her research and findings place her on middle ground, somewhere between current reality and optimism. The Internet era seems to be changing "politics as usual" in a number of countries, expanding and loosening information about governments and politics, allowing the entrance of new political players, and fostering international movements on the environment, women's rights, and other issues across borders. The disappointment is that digital technologies are activating the already politically active and passing up the disengaged and uninterested. A major challenge to digital democracy is the gulf between the United States, Scandinavia, and other early Internet adopters and the rest of the world. That gap is now so wide that at the turn of the century, more than three-quarters of the online community lived in the developed world. Internet use tracks the path of economic and technological development. But that situation could begin to change, Norris says. The Internet is in its technological adolescence. Costs of access are falling. And governments can make a difference if policymakers take the initiative. We have the historical patterns of other communication technologies to study. Norris examines theories of technological diffusion and points out that the American response to the Internet is more akin to the rapid spread of televisions and VCRs than the slower adoption of telephones and radios. American dominance could recede as Internet access grows worldwide. Contrary to what officials of the Bush Administration contend, Norris finds that the digital divide between rich and poor within the United States remains substantial. Europe mirrors that trend. In the long run, the Internet could become more accessible to the excluded: lower income families, minorities, and women. …

Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide

A new wave of smart cities projects is underway that proposes to deploy sensor-based ubiquitous computing across urban infrastructures and mobile devices to achieve greater sustainability. But in what ways do these smart and sustainable cities give rise to distinct material-political arrangements and practices that potentially delimit urban “citizenship” to a series of actions focused on monitoring and managing data? And what are the implications of computationally organized distributions of environmental governance that are programmed for distinct functionalities, and are managed by corporate and state actors that engage with cities as datasets to be manipulated? Working through an early and formative smart cities design proposal, the Connected Sustainable Cities (CSC) project, developed by MIT and Cisco within the Connected Urban Development initiative from 2007 to 2008, this paper discusses the ways in which smart city proposals might be understood through processes of environmentality, or the distribution of governance within and through environments and environmental technologies. Revisiting and reworking Foucault’s notion of environmentality in the context of the CSC smart cities design proposal, this paper advances an approach to environmentality that deals not with the production of environmental subjects, but rather attends to the specific spatial-material distribution and relationality of power through environments, technologies and ways of life. By updating and advancing environmentality through a discussion of computational urbanisms, this paper considers how practices and operations of citizenship emerge that are a critical part of the imaginings of smart and sustainable cities. This re-versioning of environmentality through the smart city recasts who or what counts as a “citizen,” and attends to the ways in which citizenship is articulated environmentally through the distribution and feedback of monitoring and urban data practices, rather than through governable subjects or populations.

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Programming Environments: Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City

Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.cpt.9300081.pdf

Publicity's Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy

Emerging media technologies and applications have accompanied by an explosion of diverse means and practices for engaging in public life, raising the possibility of an invigorated and improved democratic politics. Investment in this possibility is premised on acceptance of the norms associated with publicity, specifically access to information and enhanced communication. Starting from the premise that democracy is a term whose defining attributes are best understood as the politicization of moral and ethical questions and equality (as opposed to a characteristic set of procedures and practices), the discussion in this paper investigates the potential for democratic participation via Web 2.0 platforms such as Facebook and other social networking sites. What emerges from this exercise is the recognition that within the contemporary context, information, communication and participation stand-in for motivation, judgment and action when it comes to democratic politics. This implies, in turn, that we may be settling for publicity in the place of the more the demanding democratic goods of politicization and equality. Somewhat more ominously, the popular embrace of these surrogates via emerging media technologies may actually undermine the prospect of a politics aimed at more radical outcomes.

Darin Barney

Papers

Politics and Emerging Media: The Revenge of Publicity