Internet Politics: States, Citizens, and New Communication Technologies – By Andrew Chadwick

Abstract

Review bezieht sich auf zwei Bücher, nämlich Internet Politics: States, Citizens, and New Communication Technologies von Andrew Chadwick sowie Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge von Cass R. Sunstein. That the internet is having a profound effect on politics has become a commonplace in academia; now with Internet Politics, Andrew Chadwick has provided us with an authoritative and well-argued guide to the shape of the field. Balancing the demands of a textbook with the need to provide an authoritative establishing statement for this emerging sub-discipline of politics, Chadwick has produced an accessible and informative text that will likely find its place on numerous reading lists. Covering such key themes as the history of internet politics (longer than many more casual authors have presumed) as well as ways of thinking about technology in society, Chadwick carefully lays out the terrain over which contemporary debates about openness and the perennial question of the digital divide range. Chadwicks work has previously dealt with issues around e-democracy and e-government, and alongside a detailed account of research into the internets use by, and impact on, more traditional political institutions, claims about the internets transformative effect on political processes comprise the central section of the book. Here, Chadwick presents a nuanced and far from merely celebratory account of the deployment of information and communication technologies across various political institutions. The final section deals with the wider world of the (global) information society that for many has been brought into existence by the internet, and indeed might be regarded as its single most obvious sociopolitical manifestation. Here Chadwick deals with many of the key global disputes, including issues of internet governance, the impact on state sovereignty of attempts to regulate online activities and the major question of the increasing potential for surveillance. Nor does Chadwick shy away from more technical issues around law and intellectual property and the attributes of the technologies themselves. Like all textbooks that survey a complex and contentious field Chadwick at times has to move quickly from issue to issue, from concern to concern, and in the main this is very well handled; further reading and clear, extensive referencing provide sufficient signposts for any reader to take their investigation of particular issues further. If Internet Politics represents an important entry point to a burgeoning field of political research, Cass Sunsteins Infotopia is another attempt to convince us of the value of openness and e-mediated collective knowledge production. Eric von Hippel andYochai Benkler have already to a large extent mapped out this terrain from the perspective of business processes (looking at collective processes of innovation and The Wealth of Networks, respectively), but Sunstein wants self-avowedly to move (back) into a mode of prediction based on the current vanguard of internet-mediated communicative development. Here he joins a literature (surveyed briefly at the beginning of Chadwicks book) that seeks both to celebrate new initiatives and processes in the information society, while arguing that these need to be more widely adopted to fulfil its potential. Since the mid-1960s the literature has been promising us that the new information age is just around the corner, if only we would get on board, and thus Sunsteins view of the forthcoming Infotopia joins an already crowded bookshelf. That said, Sunsteins argument, balancing a critique of various closed deliberative groups (with examples ranging from business to politics and foreign policy) with a celebration of aggregated knowledge networks, is one of the better calls for the new world of knowledge. Allowing that there may be problems with collective knowledge development, ranging from the amplification of mistakes and the polarisation of positions, Sunstein nevertheless wants to argue that a more extensive marketplace for ideas will serve society better than the relatively closed current systems. In this call for openness, Sunstein builds on an already popular and growing contemporary literature, but like much of this literature the conception of the global information society is peculiarly North American. While he recognises that European thinkers such as Habermas and Hayek might have interesting things to tell us about these collective activities, the examples that are used to illustrate and develop the argument about the utility of collective knowledge production are all drawn from the other side of the Atlantic. I have noted in previous reviews for this journal the extraordinary myopia of US academics dealing with (supposed) global phenomena, and would note that this is one more example. Overall this is a book that, while offering a reasonable one-stop shop for ideas about open approaches to knowledge, in the last analysis is a little light and insufficiently international for a European political science audience. If you are new to the issue and want to think about the politics of the new information society, read Chadwick and follow the development of open knowledge production online.