| What is the character of social and political organization in a society connected by the Internet? While this question does not lack responses, the most popular---virtual community and networked society---replay either the longing for lost community or the anxiety over a fragmented society that has dominated modern social thought since its inception. Online communication is imagined as encouraging more reciprocity and enhancing democracy or, conversely, further disseminating instrumental control. To move past this reductive "duality of communication" it is necessary to avoid defining communication as a potentially transparent interaction between already constituted subjects and, instead, understand how different media contribute to the practical organization of human interaction and the material and symbolic institution of social and political life. In the case of the Internet, governments, associations and social movements each construct the Internet differently, and thereby contribute to the institution of a variety of different social relations and political subjects, both private and public. The theoretical object "the Internet," therefore, cannot be reduced to a single function, technical quality or political tendency. Instead, it stands for a constellation of practises---some which control people and others that enable people to assert their own control. By investigating the various ways in which governments, associations and movements come to interact with the Internet---specifically in terms of democratic practice---this dissertation will explain how the public citizen is displaced by the private client-consumer, how participatory community is trumped by the exchanges between categorical identities, but also how the activity of social movements both propagates private factions and, potentially, institutes a new public. On the way, a case will be made for the importance of disseminating---as opposed to reciprocal---communication in encouraging an online politics that is attentive to difference. As a complex of communicative institutions, the Internet is also the institution of a potentially global, self-reflexive attitude that supports an expanding democratic politics and serves as a model for developing a truly comparative theory of the media. |
