Abstract
Digital technologies have been inducing political and social anxiety for some time now, those demarcating the first, second and, now, third-generation Internet especially. Marxian approaches to this anxiety favour macro-level critiques, whereby the galloping commercialization of all things digital is twinned with neoliberal globalization. With the patchy track record of ‘electronic democracy’ often serving as a case in point, this version of events underscores the premise that the Internet is inherently politically suspect.1 This undertow of techno-economic determinism also tugs at much postcolonialist scepticism of the ICTs For Development rhetoric, touted as the latest panacea for endemic disenfranchisement in the so-called Global South. While hyper-corporatization tendencies and evidence of a ‘digital divide’ lend support to this sort of robust circumspection about the democratic potential of ICTs (information and communication technologies), it is not the whole story. In both cases, it sweeps commentators by other (non-elite, non-corporate, non-Western) designs, uses, and adaptations of digital technologies — those of the Internet especially — which cast another light on the matter. Engaging with the heterogeneous, unpredictable, and hopeful aspects to Internet-mediated interactions, (hyper)texts, forms of onlineness unfurling from ‘below’, renders the Internet’s democratic deficit far less inexorable.
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© 2007 M. I. Franklin
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Franklin, M.I. (2007). Democracy, Postcolonialism, and Everyday Life: Contesting the ‘Royal “We”’ Online. In: Dahlberg, L., Siapera, E. (eds) Radical Democracy and the Internet. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592469_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592469_10
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