Emerging Digital Spaces in Contemporary Society

Our aim in bringing together this collection of papers is to uncover ways in which “the digital” is at once encroaching, reformulating and creating social spaces. Indeed, at times the digital may even reconfigure what it means to be social. In order to capture the complex dimensions of this digital shift we have included a comprehensive range of disciplinary fields—politics, sociology, science, philosophy, informatics, public policy, communications and media studies.

There are many claims and counterclaims in the academic literature on innovations in information and communication technologies (ICTs) about their relationship to power. Different disciplinary perspectives privilege various assumptions about the social consequences that are likely to accompany the innovation process. In this chapter, some of these competing analytical perspectives are considered briefly. This is followed by an assessment of some of the issues that are deserving of deeper investigation. Although some analysts envisage a relatively smooth progression towards equitable access and use of these technologies in ways that, on balance, are empowering for citizens and consumers, others do not. In many instances claims about the nature of this relationship are supported by weak empirical evidence or underpinned by a disavowal of the notion that technologies are political. In this contribution, my aim is to set out the foundation for the assertion that the ground is very flimsy for the claim that innovation in ICTs inevitably favors decentralization, the flattening of hierarchy, or the automatic empowerment of human beings.

The first Arab country connected to the Internet was Tunisia in 1991. Internet usage in other Arab countries did not take off until the mid-1990s, and in general the development of the Internet in the Arab region was slow and timid. The major impediments to Internet adoption among Arab countries have been the lack of infrastructure—primarily because of poverty, high illiteracy rates, the use of non-Latin script leading to the poor quality of Arabic content on the Internet, and the political and religious threats posed by the Internet. Among the strategies and initiatives to promote the development of e-content, the organizing body of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) suggested identifying success stories, stimulating competition and rewarding the best content to be set as benchmarks for the industry. This was done under the framework of the World Summit Awards (WSA),1 a global competition that aims to identify the best e-content practices and strategies considered as a benchmark for the region. Although it is based on the concept of “governance,” this case study reviews the rewarded Arabic websites and questions the outcome of the governance practice in this context.

The idea of e-participation is emerging as a possibility for redefining the field of politics. We must look to civil society as a construction zone for participa-tory political citizenship; in so doing we will perceive new places and forms of expression that are reorienting the relationship between politics and society (Alexander 1998, Warren 2001, Magnette 2003). We can foresee new forms of interaction between the representatives and the represented and yet, at the present time, we scarcely have even partial knowledge of these innovative scenarios.

As digital learning trends change the way we teach and learn, many educators are experimenting with and developing new tools for content delivery. They not only seek new ways to deliver traditional content via digital means, but they also are developing entirely new digital content to better harness the power of multimedia technology. “Visualizing Electricity & Magnetism” (http://web.mit.edu/viz/EM/flash/E&M_Master/E&M.swf) is one such example.

“Life is more and more about being glued to the screen or being online.” This is how Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy, authors of La pantalla global (The Global Screen), characterize the extent to which the Internet has altered our way of life. “Journalism Wounded but Not Dead,” “Death to the Leading Journalists!,” “Long Live Citizen Journalism!,” and “The Post-Journalism Era in the Digital Society.” Titles such as these from recent media studies conferences could make up this entire chapter, as a sign of the tremendous insecurity the new technologies have triggered in this field. No one foresaw this great revolution, not even a few years ago. One of the very few exceptions, perhaps, was Alvin Toffler in his book entitled The Third Wave (Toffler 1980), in which, for the first time, there is reference to “several-to-several” communication as well as to the progressive “demassification” of media production and the resulting emergence of personalized media communication.

CitizenShift (CS) and its French language sister site Parole Citoyenne (PC) are two award-winning web platforms exploring today’s social issues through films, photos, articles, blogs and podcasts. Born out of the National Film Board of Canada in 2004, and now housed at the Institut du Nouveau Monde, the CS and PC social media networks are community-driven spaces designed for filmmakers, activists and ‘ordinary’ citizens to share content and voice opinions.

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama was known early on for his tech-savvy campaign strategies, which included maintaining accounts on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, but the establishment of President Obama as the “first wired president” (Griggs 2009) was undoubtedly confirmed on January 19, 2010 when he personally submitted an update to the Red Cross Twitter feed—a first for a sitting president. Three months later Twitter again entered public discourse when the Library of Congress announced that it would house all of the so-called tweets posted on the rather expansive website—sparking almost instant public debate (Bliumis and Scoble 2010). Much of the controversy surrounding this decision was based on physical location, as it was the proximity of the archive to important documents such as the Gettysburg Address that caused concern. The critics questioned the need to archive arbitrary announcements such as banal statements of one’s sour mood in such a prestigious institution. But one thing that these critics do not address is how to archive new digital forms of rhetoric. The Library of Congress’ decision did clear up one relevant question: where the archive of President Obama’s collective rhetoric on Twitter would be housed.

While the definition of a museum is often contested, it appears that the notion of the museum has shifted and expanded from that of a storehouse or temple of objects to that of a visitor-centered educational repository of objects and information (Schweibenz 1998). This paradigm shift is evident in such books as Eilean Hooper-Greenhill’s Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture and Gail Anderson’s Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporaly Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift. Although many of the essays in Anderson’s book exhibit the shift from being a collection-driven institution to a visitor centered one, it is Hooper-Greenhill’s book that leads to ideas for the future of the museum, especially when it entails the use of computer technology in order for the museum to “play the role of partner, colleague, learner (itself), and service provider” (Hooper-Greenhill 2000).

The new millennium is proving to be a testing time for academic publishers (Thompson 2005). Whereas the “long decade” from the early 1980s to 2000 was a buoyant period for many presses that were active in the field of academic publishing, including many of the university presses, the period since 2001 has been a rude awakening. Growth rates of university presses have fallen to the lowest levels in many years, returns from booksellers have reached unprecedented heights, and some university presses have been faced with the prospect of imminent closure. Nor has it been plain sailing for the big college-textbook publishers. Accustomed to annual growth rates of 6-8 percent, textbook publishers have suddenly found themselves faced with declining unit sales and surrounded by allegations that they are fleecing students with inflated prices (Lewin 2003). Why do academic publishers find themselves in such difficult circumstances and what, if anything, can they do about it?

A growing movement by students, parents, and professors protesting at the high price of traditional textbooks in higher education, and denouncing the weight of textbooks in K-12, has given impetus to an increase in digital text-books. Scholars, publishers, institutions, and policymakers are struggling with trade-offs, real or perceived, which exist between open access and publisher-controlled content, as well as between fair use and the protections offered by copyright. Open source textbooks—many employing Creative Commons licenses that allow others to share and build on the work of content creators, consistent with the rules of copyright (see creativecommons.org)—are a growing trend making an impact on higher education, and to a lesser extent, thus far, on K-12 education.

Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities (1983) and Homi Baba in Nation and Narration (1990) contend that books capture the collective consciousness of a society and the zeitgeist of a community. In the process they reveal our cultural codes, providing insights into our consumption patterns, prefer-ences, tastes, and social make-up (Bourdieu 1984). In the digital age books have forged new forms of communities and communion. This has happened through the intertextuality between media platforms such as television and the Internet as well as the nature of the electronic environment, which has enabled new forms of communities to flourish.

In 1452, with the appearance of Johannes Gutenberg’s so-called 42-line Bible and the dawn of the incunabular era of the printing press, two seemingly unrelated realms—technology and culture—merged. The result was the new Renaissance society, where easier access to sources of information and knowledge led to the questioning of all assumptions of the medieval world. That wave has reached even unto our day although, in the 1970s, it was engulfed by another wave that was orders of magnitude larger, the one spawned by digital media.

Digital citizenship is an attractive concept, and mapping the properties of those technologies carrying its forms of enactment in contemporary society is imperative. Ranging from open online elections to surreptitious info-warfare attacks, turning from online match-making to text-message kiss-offs, or running with cell-phone video reporting to Twittering poetry slams, contemporary society is becoming more commonly recognized, in part, as interactions of digital beings. As Internet-life enters its fifth decade, the infiltration of bit-driven modes of action, as well as the insertion of bit-built modes of structure into the material practices of strong states, weak states, and non-states, cannot be denied. In the US, the growing numbers of new cyber-assemblies, ranging from this party.org, association.net, and issue.com, to that company.com, agency.gov, and mil.net, are interacting in concert and/or contention against comparable info-collectives operating at other sites in different established states. Often politics on the Internet is a bit more than the sum total of politics off the Internet as blogs, video servers, and archives enliven ongoing face-to-face debates, but at other times closed worlds of online organizing, debating, fund-raising, voting, managing, or ruling erupt in far greater political struggles.

Suppression of political opposition in Egypt is reinforced through mainstream media control and a 29-year-old state of emergency, which allows for arbitrary and indefinite detention, as well as prohibiting public gatherings of more than five people. Since the turn of the millennium, however, Facebook has been producing important arenas for political information and organization (Khaled 2009).

In a context where the grassroots and non-profit sector is argued to have been relegated to the remote margins of the Internet (McChesney 2007), popular online spaces potentially provide social movement organizations (SMOs) with possibilities for reaching wider publics, rather than merely connecting likeminded users and failing to challenge presumptions (Dahlgren 2005).

In Spain, Palacios and Romanach (2006, 2007) are currently proposing that a new perspective is needed: a new model of disability for society to con-sider, which is based on a definitive acceptance of human diversity.

Surveillance grows constantly, especially in the countries of the global north. Although as a set of practices it is as old as history itself, systematic surveil-lance became a routine and inescapable part of everyday life in modern times and is now, more often than not, dependent on information and communication technologies (ICTs). Indeed, it now makes some sense to talk of “surveillance societies,” so pervasive is organizational monitoring of many kinds. Fast developing technologies combined with new governmental and commercial strategies have led to the proliferation of new modes of surveillance, making surveillance expansion hard to follow, let alone analyze or regulate. In the past three decades traffic in personal data has expanded explosively, touching numerous points of everyday life and leading some to proclaim the “end of privacy.” But although questions of privacy are interesting and important, others that relate to the ways in which data are used for “social sorting,” discriminating between groups that are classified differently, also need urgently to be examined. Who has the power to make such discriminatory judgments, and how this becomes embedded in automated systems, is a matter of public interest. Such questions are likely to be with us for some time, because of what might be called the “rise of the safety state,” which requires more and more surveillance, and also because the politics of personal information is becoming increasingly prominent.

Recent controversy surrounding the “Lower Manhattan Security Initiative” has yet again breathed new life into the notion of the Panopticon. This initiative marks the latest development in an ultramodern policing strategy that saturates public space with cutting-edge surveillance devices, all linked into the New York Police Department’s (NYPD’s) central database (Buckley 2007). Indeed, the NYPD’s expanding surveillance apparatus sheds considerable light on the symbiotic evolution state power shares with technological innovation, drastically altering the scope in which governmental machinery monitors and regulates political subjects.

Our recent recognition and celebration of the body as a site of consumption means that we have allowed into our lives an array of technological and mobile artifacts designed to lure our cognitive senses away from the communal and into the personal. The personal space is a coveted commodity where new technologies, innovative designs and convergence occur and coalesce. The inbuilt surveillance mechanisms within mobile technologies and the constant circulation of bodies nevertheless constitute new forms of gaze, consumption and surveillance, which have wider implications for postmodern societies. This counter-gaze of the technologically connected bodies presents the potential for empowerment and connection with wider society, yet it inadvertently raises new conundrums where the politics of gazing present new ethical and moral dilemmas for humanity.

Images of face have been used as legal representation of individuals since the Renaissance when oils on canvas allowed for unprecedented detail and realism (Snyder 1985). However, it was not until well after the invention of photography that faces became integrated into identification documents. Although police departments in the UK began taking mug shots as early as the 1850s (Norris and Armstrong 1999), it was the Geary Act (1892), an extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), which became the first legislation to require photographs of faces to accompany identification documents for re-entry into the US. The nineteenth century proponents of photography argued that photographs established a concrete indexical link between the document and the individual. However, in practice, immigration inspectors found that “photographic truth” (Tagg 1988) could be co-opted to construct “paper families” (Pegler-Gordon 2009). Despite the experiences of immigration inspectors, in 1914 the US State Department called for photographs to be added to passports (Lloyd 2003), and since then facial images have become a dominant component of globally recognized identification documents

Over the last 30 years we have witnessed a number of consequential shifts in the various domains of intellectual property, such as copyright, patents and trademarks. One of the most important of these has been the use of intel-lectual property rights to articulate and formulate a new global economic regulatory order. Through international agreements such as the World Trade Organization’s (WTO’s) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement (TRIPS), there has been enormous pressure for nation-states to revise national frameworks to align with a singular definition of intellectual property as a private property right. This definition extends the logic of “real property” within a commodity-driven, market mediated economic system, into the domain of knowledge and information production. Importantly, this definition imposes the restrictions of economic scarcity onto a domain of infinite productive capacity.

Free software programmers have applied some of the values and principles that belong within the ideal of a pluralistic, transparent and collaborative knowledge society to their technological designs (Feltrero 2007). These principles are implemented by means of the licenses that cover their computer programs and the associated documentation. Such licenses, legally rooted on, and protected by, copyright laws, give the users the right to freely use, copy, study and redistribute the modifications of their software developments, provided that they keep those modifications free. In this way, free software supporters have transformed the usual meaning of copyright laws from the motto “Copyright, all rights reserved” to “Copyleft, all rights reversed.”

There was a time when finding a book involved a trip to the local library, reading it involved a search for a quiet corner with a comfortable chair, and a photocopier was necessary if one wanted to distribute it. The emergence of digital technologies has collapsed the boundaries between these three activities—accessing, using and copying—which are so central to our dealings with original and copyright-protected works, such as books. This has consequences for users, who comfortably but precariously can down-load, enjoy and forward such products. For producers and rights holders it means that while distribution is simple, control over content is difficult. And for those seeking to set the rules and regulations for such products, this collapse means that existing treaties and other forms of regulation no longer suffice. This case study sheds light on how the issue of intellectual property rights (IPR) has been constructed, handled and negotiated as a key concern in the ongoing process of addressing the global politics of the Internet, under the auspices of the United Nations.

Local health traditions, henceforth referred as to LHT, as used in Kerala State, south western India, consist of health traditions passed over generations through oral discourse. They fall under the broad realm of traditional medicine though they are distinctly different from classical medicine, which is codified and supported by written text. These health traditions include home remedies (“grandma’s medicine”) and country or folk medicine (Kumaran 2002) and are generally devoid of any spiritual beliefs.

In this chapter I present a study of how a new generation of “open access” scholarly resources is being taken advantage of by those contributing to popular sources of knowledge. The study explores Wikipedia’s citation of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), as an innovative and open project of the academic community. SEP was begun in 1995 by Edward N. Zalta at Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information (Perry and Zalta 1997). Zalta set out to create a “dynamic” encyclopedia that combined peer review with ongoing updating and revision. Entries offer internal and external linkages to related materials, as well as access to the author’s homepage and email. SEP is intended to be “useful both to professional scholars and the general public” (Perry and Zalta 1997), and, as an important part of that, it is entirely free to read online. This has been made possible by a variety of grants, with a current program to have it funded by an endowment, with support from research libraries and philosophy departments.

The intention of this project by the French Institute Pondicherry (http://www.ifpindia.org/histatlas/) is to prepare a historical atlas of South India, from pre-historic times to 1600 CE, in digital format, through a combination of maps, photographs, illustrations, texts and geographical information system (GIS) functionalities. The challenge was tofocus on relatively marginal localities in a sub-region of the present day linguistically unified state of Andhra Pradesh, which has historically been called Telangana (Reddy 1998).

Many people in developed countries take access to information and communication technologies for granted. Such individuals live and work in a well-connected information society with access to digital resources that is almost universal. However, a global analysis of the contemporary information society paints a much more complex picture (Chinn and Fairlie 2007; Fuchs 2009; Yates, Gulati and Weiss 2010).

The Secrets of Biblioland (http://www.biblioland.org) is a Flash-based educational interactive game designed to support university students in developing academic information literacy skills. The game is also intended to instigate a sense of belonging to the academic community, and to develop awareness of the historical value of academic work and the role of new generations in the interpretation and preservation of knowledge repositories. The game is designed to be embedded in a blended learning approach to information literacy; students and tutors should use it to explore the historical development of scholarship, issues on the role of libraries and information, as well as referencing and plagiarism, using the gaming elements but also the online materials available via the website. The choice of developing a Flash game is linked to accessibility and usability issues, as the game should be playable by a wide audience. The illustration and game design styles are also meant to address an audience of casual gamers (Juul 2010) and do not have the ambition of emulating or competing with commercial platform games.

Web 2.0 is a term that has come into widespread use in recent years to describe the emerging social dynamic that characterizes the creation and consumption of web content (O’Reilly 2005). The concept of Web 2.0 involves a new way of understanding the relationship between agents that play a role in the production, marketing, distribution, and utilization of digital content and highlights the steadily converging relationship between producer and consumer. Sociologist Alvin Toffler (1980) perceived this convergence and coined the term “prosumer.”

First Nations communities across Canada have historically faced numerous challenges. Over the past several years, the issue of reliable and safe drinking water has been particularly stressful for a growing number of aboriginal populations. According to a report from Health Canada (2009), the frequency of drinking water advisories in First Nations communities has risen from approximately 130 in 2003 to over 250 in 2007.

The recent debate over transgenic corn in Mexico has brought to light the different social agents that participate in the public debate on science and technology.

The 25th International Congress of Mathematicians held in Madrid in 2006 confirmed that the Russian mathematician Grisha Perelman, who was awarded a Fields Medal, had solved the Poincaré Conjecture (PC). In the process of solving this major mathematical problem, Perelman has also helped to create significant changes in publishing practices for mathematicians.

There is no single digital aesthetics. The term is plural. There is an aesthet-ics of code, and industrial design (Gelernter 1998), of specific software packages like Flash (Munster 2003), of programming and interface design (Fishwick 2006), of sound (Dyson 2009), of viruses (Parikka 2007). And yet there is, intuitively, something which seems to draw all these together. Now the majority of domestic media are digital, from radios to TVs, cameras to mobiles, and the vast majority of printed materials; now our vehicles, houses and furniture are designed in CADCAM systems; now we no longer make images look digital as a special effect; now we are ready to think about what is common, even if it is not essential to digital media.

Over the last two decades, culture has changed irreconcilably. No longer the ideological window dressing of cold war politics, it now finds itself at the core of a growing globalized economy. Politically aligned with local, national and international regeneration policies, culture often finds itself being used as a bridging mechanism between different and often conflicting social, political and economic interests. According to the theorist George Yudice (2003), culture is now expedient—there is no way of funding or producing small, medium or large scale art projects that do not bring into alignment a collection of inchoate and seemingly incompatible interests. Map on to this the digitally driven emergence of “convergence culture”—where, as Henry Jenkins (2006) argues, “old and new media collide,” “grassroots and corporate media intersect” and media producers and media consumers “interact in unpredictable ways,”—and you have the most sophisticated, complex and volatile cultural arena in human history. Within this capricious and frequently arbitrary milieu, art has long since lost its own self-asserted right to set itself apart as some form of omnipotent commentator on the ills of mass culture. The shock tactics of the avant-garde are now the stock in trade of advertising agencies and music producers the world over, and art, as we knew it, now has to fight for the oxygen of publicity with sport, daytime television, online social networking and game consoles. It is a losing battle.

In the new millennium digital artists have questioned the nature of human existence in complex spaces like the city. Themes of connection and alienation pervade digital art works, in the spirit of the times (Tofts 2005). In this case study I will discuss how digital art operates as powerful platform of articulation. With reference to Nebojsa Seric Shoba’s film BlowingZen (2003), I will explore a digital reconstruction of New York City’s Times Square.

Digital technologies are shaping cultural institutions in new and surprising ways. Much of the current research on the ways we look at the intersection of cultural institutions and technology focuses on the access to knowledge (through online databases and catalogues). This case study attempts to gofurther and suggests that digital technologies may, in fact, alter how we understand aesthetics more generally. It will do so via an examination of the NY Art Beat iPhone application and its use in the cell phone.

One of the most promising innovations predicated on information and communication technology, henceforth called network technology, is arguably the emergence of network production, enabled by a host of web appli-cations and organizational forms such as open source, peer-to-peer (P2P) production, wiki, social production, social networking, and crowdsourcing. In contemporary technology discourse, network production is described as revolutionary because it offers a more democratic, participatory, and collaborative mode of social and cultural production, and empowers individuals by allowing them more meaningful and creative engagement with the productive process. Network production harnesses human facets which have been hitherto excluded from production: authenticity, personal expression, and creativity. It facilitates the emergence of “prosumption” as a hybrid of production and consumption, rendering both practices more engaging, participatory, and fulfilling. Network production facilitates the crystallization of emergent, self-governed, and self-regulated collaborative projects, and its intrinsic flexibility allows for a more sophisticated utilization of resources such as play, joy, and free time, which can be harnessed into wealth creation.

The telecommunications industry has been transformed over the past 25 years. The switch from an analogue to digital and now IP-based architecture has created the core infrastructure of the information age. This is reflected in the growth in the share of national income it represents, from 2.3 to 3.0 percent in Britain. As a bellwether industry, it provides critical insights into the impact on society concerning changes in employment, its distribution among occupations, including technicians, and changing patterns of skills.

Although digital labor is often discussed in the context of the private sector, governments have also been closely engaged with the development of this element of the workforce. In America, there have been strong political links between digital labor and ideas of American power—both material and social—and these ideas have been instrumental in shaping digital labor. A study of US political history of the late 1980s and 1990s, when the Internet was still in its infancy, reveals a proactive policy and legislative approach designed to enhance the US digital workforce in order to ensure future prosperity.

The emergence of digital technologies and the transformation to a knowledge-based economy has created a significant demand for workers who are highly skilled in the use of information and communication technology (ICT). One of the significant impacts of the rapid growth and diffusion of ICT is a shortage of such highly qualified workers. However, the shortage is not just associated with there not being enough ICT workers. Currently, in Malaysia, there is also a major concern expressed by employers that the shortage of ICT workers is due to a skills shortage and employability issues, particularly among ICT graduates.

This chapter aims to give an empirical grounding to the argument for broadening how computing is considered. It explains why it is necessary to over-come the dominant, primarily technical perspective of academic computing studies via a technosocial view, in favor of a technosocial perspective. Along the way, it documents how a substantial portion of the problems people have in the design, implementation, and maintenance of computer-based systems that pretend to support human information practices is attributable to imbalances between and improper framings of the attention given respectively to social and technical perspectives on what it means to compute.

Media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan, Mark Poster, Arjun Appadurai (McLuhan 1967, Manuel 2001; Poster 1995; Appadurai 1996) and others have challenged the Frankfurt School’s denunciation of the electronic media as instruments of control by demonstrating that the digital media and satellite technologies can be democratizing, through increasing connectivity and accessibility across geographical boundaries. The debates on the new media in the new millennium have largely focused on concerns about the growing digital divide that excludes a large proportion of the global population in constructing the new mediascapes that connect global, cosmopolitan peoples. However, an increasing number of studies, such as those of Peter Manuel (2001) on Cassette Culture and Mark Poster (1995) on the Internet have successfully demonstrated how the new digital technologies can, in fact, lead to sonic democratization and to the expansion of the public sphere to include local peoples in addition to cosmopolitans. The global flows of Bhangra, a hybrid British music derived from a Punjabi harvest dance of the same name, and the convergence of multiple ethnic, caste, gendered, and sectarian subjectivities in the musical production of the Jat cultivator caste and the performing caste of mirasis, offers a classic case of the appropriation of new media and technologies by non-cosmopolitan players. Bhangra’s production, circulation, and consumption serves as the textbook example of the impact of digital technologies on the politics of culture and their role in altering relations of power between and within nations, classes, castes, ethnicities, and regions.

The museum is universally considered as an institution in the service of society. Museums are increasingly being developed in a postcolonial environment as civic spaces for critical community engagement, to safeguard intangible heritage and cultural diversity as the common heritage of humanity. However, the application of digital technologies has largely remained in the domain of tangible heritage and mostly monocultural contexts. In fact, the accelerated pace of digital globalization and the inadequate social contextu-alization of technologies has become a major threat to cultural diversity of the world.

The study of international relations is often an examination of foreign relations and world affairs from an ethnocentric perspective (Nossal 1998; Wendt 1999). Instructors accept their own values and then superimpose them on students. This ethnocentric analysis excludes a basic element for understanding international relations—empathy, the ability to participate in another’s values, perceptions, and feelings.

Is it a manifestation of the state of things, when a married, middle aged white transnational male and father writes a chapter about gender and identity in an anthology about the Internet? I suspect so. The fields of gender and identity have been created, populated, colonized perhaps, and protected by all sorts of recently vivified “weirdoes” who we can celebrate. They and we are included in the life of society. The fringe is with us—the “majoritorians”—who populate the center of civilizations, who live in the suburbs, worry about our children and mortgages and find the new iterations of everyday identity almost incomprehensible. And yet that is where we are: fully embedded in a restructured social world that has cast off many of the historical constraints of otherness, even while it imposes new ones. We sit endlessly, incessantly watching, searching, typing and reading at a monitor screen. What kind of life is this? Cultural studies would argue that life should be involved in claiming a “social order of self-clarification, resulting in a heightened responsibility of fact and experience” (Peters 2006: 58). With this new sense of instrumentalism to offset the patchy performance of liberal democracy, the state of things requires that a white guy must try to meet the self-clarifying challenge.

Bisexual-identified people commonly experience cultural invisibility and stigmatization within lesbian, gay and heterosexual discourses and communities. These feelings of un-belonging, combined with the desire for community with like-identified people, have been cited as key reasons why bisexual-identified people have begun to create and participate in bisexual-themed online social spaces. These digital spaces, through their dedication to bi-themed content and presumably bi-identified membership, have become safe spaces for community members to engage freely in identity discussions and publish personal narratives on experiences with bisexuality and bisexual-identification. With this in mind, the Internet is emerging as an important venue in which bisexual subjects, in particular, may meet to commune as well as to share their experiences.

Geographical remoteness, lower economic status and technological inexperience have often placed Indigenous Peoples on the “wrong side” of the digital divide. Notwithstanding these challenges, digital technologies provide a vista, from a grassroots position, that enhances their own visibility and permits the expansion of Indigenous Peoples’ sphere of influence and ability to “mobilize political support in their struggles for cultural survival.” The present case study of the Aboriginal Youth project UsMob (http://www.usmob.com.au/home.php) exemplifies such an indigenization of digital technologies, one that “invites kids from ‘elsewhere’ to come over and play on their side.” UsMob underscores a potential to permeate oral history and storytelling with the help of digital technologies that broadens and engenders understandings of indigenous realities and cultures for wider audiences in general, and, crucially, for indigenous cultural futures and identities.

During the past two decades the underrepresentation of women in IT education and employment has become an important issue. Starting in the early 1990s, this concern arose among women computer scientists worried about the shortage of students entering and graduating in computer science, while the number of women in other university courses was increasing gradually (Pearl et. al., 1990; Frenkel, 1990; Camp 1997). Recent data (NCWIT 2009) showed that this percentage is still declining. In 2008 women earned only 18 percent of all computer science degrees in the US and the same phenomenon occurs in IT-related occupations, although women’s presence in ICT study and careers has greatly increased, as has their Internet usage. In Europe, the European Union special interest group on information society technologies, within its Sixth Framework Program, funded the SIGIS (Strategies for Inclusion: Gender and the Information Society) Project, which showed that the situation in Europe is not much different from the US (Sorenson 2002; Sanz 2008).

The application of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in development policies—in short, information for development or ICT4D— follows ideas of “digital divide” and “cyber apartheid.” This discussion situates ICT4D in critical development studies and global political economy and argues that information for development is primarily driven by market expansion and market deepening. As the latest accumulation wave, digital capitalism generates information technology boosterism and cyber utopianism with the digital divide as its refrain. The first part of this discussion criticizes the discourses and policies of bridging the digital divide; the second section views information for development as part of a package deal in which cyber utopianism is associated, not exclusively, but primarily, with marketing digital capitalism. This is examined further in the third section on the relationship between digital capitalism and cyber utopianism of which ICT4D is a part.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are claimed to be a central engine for societal progress and prosperity and therefore in the last 15 years an increasing body of literature dealing with the interrelation between ICTs and development has been emerging (cf. e.g. Mansell and Wehn 1998; Braga et al. 2000; Okpaku 2003; Wilson 2004; Unwin 2009). Sofar, only the Western world has benefited from these technologies, while developing countries especially are facing the challenge that the already existing tremendous gap between them and the high-income economies in the West may still widen. In this paper the results of a research project in Malawi, which aims to identify strategies for closing this gap, are briefly summarized.

Traditionally, finding marriageable singletons in India was considered the prerogative of a few members within a community network. Later, this was augmented by the use of matrimonial newspaper advertisements (Gist 1953). Nowadays, Indians entrust this process to a new system of “virtual matrimonials.” This enables Indians to find that “perfect someone” in, homes, cafés or Internet parlors. Individuals and families can create web accounts of available brides and grooms, with practically nofinancial liabilities. They can compile a list of favorite profiles, post photographs and videos, and arrange virtual rendezvous via online video conferences and chats, and so on.

The key trend in ICT is that the nature of international flow of fees, and the resulting accumulations of net capital flow of patents, licenses and royalty payments, are asymmetrically distributed between the industrialized and developing countries (Bartel and Chiemeke 2008). Such a structure of flow and distribution is entirely consistent with the view that technology flows are externalized in markets and have a “North” and “South” dimension (Copy/South Dossier 2006), which may result in technological upgrading of the “South.”

The question raised in the title is ambiguous at best, absurd at worst. The word “reader” obviously creates ambiguity but here we are talking about devices, and not about humans. We are talking about devices that “read” digital documents in such a way that humans can then interact symbolically with them, and even read them if indeed this is their intention. The absurdity is linked to the word “understand”: how can a machine “understand” a document? Indeed, machines do not understand documents in the usual sense of the word; however, structured and constrained by their design as they are, they do treat and apprehend documents in particular ways. Furthermore, these modes of apprehension can be viewed as the technical translation of how designers or engineers understand documents: they refer to the ways in which the same engineers relate to documents, how they access elements of their meaning and how these documents ought to relate to each other, if at all. In short, a reading device incorporates a vision of what a document is and how it “lives” among humans. This opens the possibility of partial or even total misreadings, and this observation begins to explain the title and its slightly provocative and even cryptic form.

As history has clearly shown us, the introduction of any new technology sparks negative reactions—often because errors are made or promises take too long to materialize, among other reasons. The case of dedicated reading devices and how they have been received in Spain is marked by a number of rather peculiar features, however. Among them is a group of arguments to which I would like to call attention: arguments attempting to show that reading, and culture itself, could incur certain risks if the dedicated devices come to be very widely accepted and/or if new forms of reading arise that have the potential to ruin in-print publishing businesses.

I believe that the average reader will not be able to enjoy the advantages of a dedicated e-reader—convenience and access to a great number of works, among others—because the advantages of these devices are buried beneath their drawbacks.

The past 12 months have been marked by significant media attention to e-books, numerous e-reader devices have entered the market, and e-book sales have grown. Still, most e-books today are merely a “picture of a book”;—a book that has been digitized but adds little value besides portability, improved search and access (Warren 2009).

It is nearly impossible to find a common thread running through all the chapters in this book. For instance, although there are many authors who think that ICTs favor decentralization, democratization, development, and the flattening of hierarchy among human beings (see Chapters 2.1, 4.2 and 11.1), others believe there is no ground for these claims (see Chapters 1 and 13). However, there seems to be a “family resemblance,” as Wittgenstein would say, among the chapters, and it would be rather pretentious to try to predict how digital technology will shape social structures. There is no doubt that new material means of production and spreading information will radically transform social, economic, and labor relations—indeed, this is already happening (see Chapters 10, 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3)—but the Marxist characterization of history does not necessarily lead to a strict tech-nological determinism. In other words, the fate of the Internet society is still unwritten—it is not predetermined.