Description

Digital Dilemmas looks at the dynamics of power and resistance surrounding the internet. It focuses on how publics, nation-states, and multilateral institutions are being continually reinvented in local and global decision-making domains that are accessed and controlled by a relative few. Importantly it unpacks the ways in which computer-mediated power relations play out as "on the ground" and "cyberspatial" practices and discourses that collude and collide with one another at the personal, community, and transnational level. Case studies include homelessness and the internet, rights-based advocacy for the online environment at the United Nations, and how the ongoing battle between proprietary and open source software designs affects ordinary people and policy-making. The result is an innovative and groundbreaking critique of the way new paradigms of power and resistance forged online reshape traditional power hierarchies offline, at home and abroad.