Digital Dilemmas: Power, Resistance and the Internet

This book presents an ethnographic, mixed method approach to understanding the dynamics of power and resistance as they are played out around the future of the internet. The text looks at the way that publics, governments, and multilateral institutions are being redefined and reinvented in digital settings that are ubiquitous and yet controlled by a relative few. This is done through three case studies that get at the way that computer-mediated power relations play out “on the ground” through a mixture of overlapping online and offline activity, at personal, community, and transnational levels. Case studies include online activities around homelessness and street papers in the US and around the world, digital and human rights activism carried out though the United Nations, and the ongoing battle between proprietary and free and open source software proponents.