2004

Sassen Saskia

Electronic Markets and Activist Networks: The Weight of Social Logics in Digital Formations

http://transnationalism.uchicago.edu/ElectronicMarkets.pdf

Interactions between digital technology and social logics can produce a third condition that is a mix of both. When this mixed domain gets structured in electronic space we call it a digital formation (see Latham and Sassen, this volume). This chapter focuses on two such formations, the global market for capital, and global electronic activist networks. In both cases my organizing question concerns the operation of social logics and how they shape and are in turned shaped by these technologies. The focus is, then, on both the transformative capacities of these new computer-centered technologies as well as their limits, limits partly set by social logics. The two very different types of cases examined in this chapter make legible the variable ways in which this socio-technical interaction produces outcomes.