Being Digital Citizens by By Engin Isin & Evelyn Ruppert

Author:By Engin Isin & Evelyn Ruppert
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
Published: 2012-06-10T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Closings

Filtering, Tracking, Normalizing

For some, openness is the very essence of the Internet.[1] Yet whether the practical workings of the Internet conform to this imaginary has been called into question. Evgeny Morozov, for example, argues that openness is configured by political choices and in relation to specific ‘digital technologies’ and that those choices should be both resisted and politically debated. But like the misfires of critics we noted at the end of chapter 4, control is given over to how digital technologies are configured without accounting for how people act through the Internet, the conventions they repeat, iterate, cite, or resignify, and the performative force of their engagements. In this chapter, we consider closings as configured not simply by platform owners in the design of algorithms and databases but also by both authorities and subjects in their decisions about how they act and what they share. These decisions result in struggles over laws or politics of information use, as scholars such as Julie Cohen argue.[2] We consider how closings are dynamically configured by the play between all of these actions, including those of citizen subjects that arise in response to the callings to participate, connect, and share. It is through the interrelated actions of citizen subjects, governments, corporations, and others and their repetitions, iterations, and citations that cyberspace comes into being and knowledge about it is produced and disseminated. Three acts express most strongly the play of obedience, submission, and subversion that citizen subjects engage in the constitution of closings: filtering, where citizen subjects submit to regulate and protect themselves or agree to be protected by authorities, tracking where citizen subjects enter into games of evasion, and normalizing where the ways of being citizen subjects in cyberspace are iteratively modulated towards desired ends by private and public authorities.

FILTERING

Acts of filtering involve numerous actions and conventions (sociotechnical arrangements that embody norms, values, laws, ideologies, technologies, and desires). Although blocking and censoring (‘the denial of access to information’) have received much attention, we want to attend to subtle yet effective actions through which citizen subjects participate in governing themselves.[3] Acts of filtering, for example, are accomplished through sorting (ranking, ordering, trending, indexing, categorizing) and redacting (deleting, refusing, reporting, burying). It is not that we neglect blocking and censoring. These actions are often performed to ostensibly protect citizens from exposure to pornographic, offensive, or political speech. These are often performed by blocking access to search results, webpages, chat rooms, newsgroups, and so on, not only in authoritarian but also in democratic states.[4] A series of global studies by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) has documented how states—especially in the Global North—are creating borders in cyberspace by building firewalls at key ‘Internet choke points,’ an action that is so widespread that ‘[s]tates no longer fear pariah status by openly declaring their intent to regulate and control cyberspace. The convenient rubric of terrorism, child pornography, and cyber security has contributed to a growing expectation that states should enforce order in cyberspace, including policing unwanted content.’[5] The

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