Configuring the Networked Citizen
Configuring the Networked Citizen
This chapter considers two interrelated questions that flow from understanding sociotechnical change as (re)configuring networked subjects. First, it revisits the way that legal and policy debates locate networked information technologies with respect to the public/private divide. The design of networked information technologies and communications devices is conventionally treated as a private matter. The classification of “code” as presumptively private has effects that reach beyond debates about the scope of constitutional guarantees, shaping views about the extent to which regulation of technical design decisions is normatively desirable. That discursive process is reexamined, using lenses supplied by literatures on third-party liability and governance. Second, the chapter considers the relationship between sociotechnical change and understandings of citizenship. The ways that people think, form beliefs, and interact with one another are centrally relevant to the sorts of citizens that they become. The gradual embedding of networked information technologies into the practice of everyday life therefore has important implications for both the meaning and the practice of citizenship in the emerging networked information society. If design decisions are neither “merely” technical nor presumptively private, then they should be subject to more careful scrutiny with regard to the kind of citizen they produce.
Keywords: sociotechnical change, network subjects, information technology, information society, citizenship
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