The Fabrication of Networked Socialities

This chapter is dedicated to analyse the fabrication of networked socialities, that is to address the complex interweaving of technologies of information and communication and the manifold instantiations of sociality. Networked socialities are digital formations being produced out of the intertwining of social logics outside and inside digital spaces and society. Such contribution is organized as follows: first, it will present the theoretical frame necessary to grasp the fabrication of sociologies in our information age, drawing on some concepts elaborated by the social studies of science and technology, together with the studies of the global digital worlds. Then, it will highlight the analytical fruitfulness of this perspective by describing some digital formations, such as social network sites, virtual communities of practice, and electronic markets. Finally, it will discuss the effects and the implications of such fabrication as a re-configuration of social, the emerging post-social relationships as well as the increasing fragility of knowledge societies.

Information Networks, Internet Governance and Innovation in World Politics

Political processes are undergoing profound changes due to the challenges imposed by globalization processes to the legitimacy of policy actors and to the effectiveness of policy-making. Building on a socio-political approach to governance and focusing on global information policies and networks, this chapter aims at developing a better understanding of the possibility of change in world politics nowadays, by critically analysing two innovative elements: the reality and relevance of “multi-stakeholder” practices and the growing role of information technologies as a complementary support to actors’ relations. Looking at Internet Governance debates in recent years, the authors reconstruct networks of interaction connecting actors in the virtual space, and look at actors’ communication modes. Thus they analyze the extent to which technological, as well as processual and cognitive innovation, shapes actors’ orientations and the structures within which they interact in the specific context of Internet Governance.

The Politics of the Governing the Information and Communications Technologies in East Asian Authoritarian States

China has vigorously implemented ICTs to foster ongoing informatization accompanying industrialization as a crucial pillar to drive its future economic development. The institutional and legal reforms involved were initiated and put into practice in order to meet the increasing demand for technological convergence and the negotiations for the expected entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). The Chinese government has nevertheless long been torn by the ambivalence brought about by the Internet. It regards the Internet as an engine to drive economic growth on the one hand, and as a subversive challenge to undermine the ruling Communist Party on the other hand. As soon as ICTs were introduced and Web sites mushroomed, the Party was so determined to harness the new medium to assure the Internet’s economic and scientific benefits. As a consequence, controls other than stifling ICTs would be critical for the CCP’s agenda to achieve the century-long modernization process and in the meantime, consolidate its power.

ICT Challenges and Opportunities for Institutionalizing Democracy in Ghana

Several African countries have begun to introduce and implement Information and Communication Technology (ICT) policies. In the context of such developing countries, it is important to assess the nature of research focus on the ongoing ICT revolution and its potential to stimulate institutionalization of democracy in Africa. This chapter reviews and integrates literature by scholars focusing on ICT in Africa in general and more specifically on Ghana. The authors incorporate several key points in their discussion. First, they provide a summary of ICT trends and policies in Ghana and their emphasis on helping to institutionalize democracy and its related free market system. Next, they provide a description of some of the major challenges to institutionalizing democracy that scholars writing about ICT in Ghana have identified. In addition, the authors discuss several opportunities for enhancing democracy that scholars writing about ICT in Ghana have highlighted. Finally, they make a few general recommendations for mitigating the potential problems and enhancing the opportunities of the ICT revolution for Ghana as well as the entire African continent.

Old and New Rights

This chapter offers a long-term perspective on citizenship, questioning one of the basic assumptions of most of the literature on this topic, that is, the nation-state as unit of analysis. Through the adoption of a world-systemic perspective, two basic aspects of the history of citizenship stand out. Firstly, the fundamentally exclusive nature of this category, as it emerged and developed over the history of the modern world-system, since at least the “long 16th Century”. And, secondly, that well before the so-called “information revolution” of the last decades, “technology” has shaped the Western social imagination, acting, in various and changing historical forms, as an effective instrument of control and supremacy, producing asymmetric and inegalitarian effects, and providing a yardstick of the different “levels of development” of Western and non-Western peoples. In this view, the most recent phase of the history of citizenship, his e-form, seems to replicate, in new ways, the explanations of the gap existing both between and within countrie—now conceptualized as “digital divide”—and, at the same time, the illusory universalistic promise of an expansion of the citizenship and the rights associated to it.

The European Administrative Space and E-Government Policies

The challenge of convergence has become a core issue in the European agenda, as the existence of widely accepted administrative standards represents one of the most important preconditions to promote sociopolitical development and to reinforce the single Market. Indeed many initiatives have been launched by European institutions to ensure uniformity in terms of administrative action and structures, and several communications by the European Commission have considered the impact of new technologies in creating systems of integrated and interoperable administration in the Old Continent. In this chapter it will be investigated the role of communication and information technologies in the formation of an European administrative space, the process for which administrations become more similar and close to a common European model. The contribution will consider ICTs as a key element of Europe’s economic competitiveness agenda as well as the interconnection between e-government programs and the social dimension of development. In addition to this, in the final part of the chapter it will be also analyzed the nature and implications of the process of uniformity produced by the new digital infrastructures, a peculiar mix of attractiveness and imposition.

American Electronic Constitution

The chapter is dedicated at analyzing the strategic use of new technologies in the United States. An evident synergy has been noted between the digital policy projects and the neo-liberal ideology wave that has traced origin in the fiscal crisis of the State in the 1970s. About four decades have transformed some political directions in true imperatives: public sector downsizing, cost-cutting in public agencies, decision-making privatization, and the principle of efficiency as a measure of collective action. If new public management has been imposed as a dominant paradigm for administrative restructuring, ICTs programs sustain reform objectives by putting emphasis on the sure advantages of technological applications. In addition to this, administrative reforms seem to be in continuity with some American historical tradition, in reasserting a central role of private actor in public activities and realizing a significant “fusion of political and economic power”. Digital era seems to have added a new chapter to the American corporate liberalism history, with the difference – and the aggravating circumstance – that private organizations have now more powerful instruments to control and regulate society. New technological instruments seem to be used essentially to produce a neo-liberal interpretation of government activities.

Virtual Nations

Virtual worlds are computer environments in which large numbers of human beings may interact, do useful work for each others, and build enduring social connections. For example, in World of Warcraft an estimated nine million subscribers form short-term action-oriented groups and long-term guilds, employing a variety of software tools to manage division of labor, spatial distributions, activity planning, individual reputations, and channels of communication, to accomplish a variety of often complex goals. A broader system of essentially permanent allegiances, comparable to current national governments and major corporations, frames the volatile forming and dissolving of small and medium-sized cooperative groups. New social technologies have a clear potential to supplement and render more flexible the existing structures of government, but they may also represent a significantly new departure in human social organization. The chapter will describe the diversity of information technology tools used to support social cooperation in virtual worlds, and then explain how they could be adapted to mediate in new ways between government and its citizens.

Who Governs Cyberspace? Internet Governance and Power Structures in Digital Networks

The Internet Governance debate has, for a long time, been influenced by a well-defined characterization of information networks. The depiction of a decentralized network, governed on a consensual basis by distributed forms of authority, has therefore focused, as a consequence, little attention on the coding and configuration strategies of the network architecture that is implemented in a conflictual scenario by a set of parties whose interests are rarely explicated in the internet governance debate or in institutional plans and policies inspired by it. It follows that some important structures of network government are not publicly recognized as constitutive places where processes of economic, political and social shaping on technology application occur. On the contrary this chapter will be dedicated to the analysis on those geo-strategic issues relating to international flows of data and to remote control activities deployed by a small group of software houses and hardware manufacturers.

A Research Agenda for the Future

This volume does not constitute yet another account of the blessings of ICTs. Nor does it add new criticism to the old, nurturing fears about the future. The goal of this book is to provide an overview and reinterpretation of the main issues on digital information technology in world politics, relating them to the processes of transformation of the current historical system. Inspired by the Braudelian concept of the multiplicity of time—and space—diachronic and synchronic and of the close-knitted unity of the phenomenon under investigation, i.e. the capitalist world-economy, an interpretative key is developed in an approach which could substantially enable advancement in this field of study both in theoretical and methodological terms. Despite the limited number of cases and issues investigated, the contributions to this volume show that the diffusion of new technologies engender transformations that go beyond declared political objectives. Often this is understood as an expression of the “unintentional consequences” of social action. However, this is not the case. What appears as “unintentional consequences”—socio-cultural tensions and contradictions— is instead, constitutive of the capitalist system in its historical development.