Abstracts

Seth F. Kreimer, “Technologies of Protest: Insurgent Social Movements and the First Amendment in the Era of the Internet,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 150 (2001)

With the passage of time, each new generation finds different means in which to organize publicly. With the advent of the internet, new opportunities and legal boundaries emerge. Does the internet cover what Supreme Court Justice Black called “essential to the poorly financed causes of little people?” The internet gives organizational power to groups outside the mainstream discourse, but access is limited to those who can afford it. Furthermore, traditional rules of advertising and capital apply when it comes to viewer access. These methods include begging, borrowing attention through networking, and direct hacking. Websites still fall under the rules of libel, and under with risky political discourse many ISPs or internet rings may choose to self-censor their content to protect from legal issues. While anonymity may protect the identities of those involved legally, it also disassociates their message and potentially weakens it.

Barney Warf and John Grimes, “Counterhegemoic Discourses and the Internet,” Geographical Review 87 (1997)

The internet can be harnessed for political discourses that remain outside the mainstream, although most of the internet serves as a reinforcement of the mainstream ideology. The quantity of voices that exist within this new sphere can be cacophonous at times, creating issues of space and directionality. While the new medium to capture new audiences, the digital attention span is comparatively shorter. Furthermore, the internet removes the need to converse directly with those one may be attempting to politically support, instead conversing with only like-minded people. The powers of the internet lie in its ability to cross disciplines and subjects rapidly and fluidly while remaining within task.

Douglas Rushkoff, Open Source Democracy. Project Gutenberg (2004)

Many of the theories encompassing the internet fail to encompass the volunteer effort that brought the world wide web into existence today. While investors attempted to bring mass commerce and products onto the internet, the efforts largely failed and the internet has reverted back to its roots as a powerful networking tool. The internet represents the apex of interactivity in the electronic age that began with the simple invention of the remote control, and much potential exists to create a sustainable society based on the ethos of the open source community. While many efforts have been made for “teledemocracy” and political organization, the open source ideal holds people to a higher responsibility by keeping their contributions to society’s “programming” in the open.