Disclosing and concealing: Internet governance, information control and the management of visibility

Abstract

The ubiquity of digital technologies and the datafication of many domains of social life raise important questions about governance. In the emergent field of internet governance studies, most work has explored novel governance arrangements, institutional developments and the effects of interactions among public and private actors in the emergence of the internet as a matter of concern in global politics. But the digital realm involves more subtle forms of governance and politics that also deserve attention. In this paper, I suggest that the 'ordering' effects of digital infrastructures also revolve around what I term the ‘management of visibilities’. Drawing on insights from science and technology studies and sociologies of visibility, the paper articulates how digital technologies afford and condition ordering through the production of visibilities and the guidance of attention. The basic tenet of the argument is that there is an intimate relationship between seeing, knowing and governing, and that digitalisation and datafication processes fundamentally shape how we make things visible or invisible, knowable or unknowable and governable or ungovernable. Having articulated this conceptual argument, the article offers a number of illustrations of such forms of ordering.