La cultura politica odierna è affetta da un virus malevolo: mancanza di dibattito e partecipazione. Il processo democratico si è (meglio: è stato) sostanzialmente ridotto a dare deleghe in bianco, a tapparsi il naso nell'urna elettorale, o ancor peggio a far finta di nulla. In maniera indipendente da strutture o entità di qualsiasi tipo, questo spazio vuole sfruttare l'interazione del blog per avviare un esperimento di comunicazione a più voci. Una sorta di finestra aperta sulle potenzialità odierne insite nella riappropriazione del discorso culturale politico, dentro e fuori internet - onde impedire l'ulteriore propagazione di un virus che ci ha già strappato buona parte del processo democratico.

Internet censorship and surveillance are growing global phenomena. ONI’s mission is to identify and document Internet filtering and surveillance, and to promote and inform wider public dialogue about such practices.

On the notion of the political in postmarxist theory. Research project by Katja Diefenbach

The Internet Governance Project (IGP) is an interdisciplinary consortium of academics with scholarly and practical expertise in international governance, Internet policy, and information and communication technology. The Project is conducting research on and publishing analysis of Internet governance. Syracuse University, Georgia Institute of Technology.

In occasione dell'apertura del forum mondiale per la Governance di Internet patrocinato dall'Onu, Vint Cerfmette in guardia dalle «manovre politiche» di governi ed enti internazionali per imporre l'uso di lingue non occidentali ai nomi dei domini dei siti Internet e ciò potrebbe portare a un collasso del sistema di indirizzamento della Rete, è il suo allarme al Forum di Atene.

Il libro che avete in mano completa una “trilogia” iniziata con Incantati dalla Rete (Cortina 2000) e proseguita con Mercanti di futuro (Einaudi 2002). Il lungo intervallo fra la seconda e la terza tappa di questo percorso di ricerca teorica non è casuale: i quasi sei anni che separano il secondo dal terzo saggio sono stati impiegati a raccogliere ed elaborare un abbondante materiale di riflessione - di cui troverete qui solo una parte1 - ma anche e soprattutto a maturare un ripensamento critico in merito ad alcune ipotesi avanzate in Mercanti di futuro. Come suggerisce il titolo volutamente “provocatorio” (parlare di cybersoviet in tempi di diffuso conformismo neoliberale rivela esplicite intenzioni “eretiche”), questo lavoro si occupa di politica, e in particolare degli effetti della rapida diffusione delle nuove tecnologie per la comunicazione sull’evoluzione dei sistemi democratici. Argomento che avevo già affrontato sia in Incantati dalla Rete - nel quale delineavo alcuni elementi di “antropologia culturale” della Rete, analizzando l’impatto dei nuovi immaginari tecnologici su relazioni sociali quotidiane, mondo del lavoro, cultura dei movimenti, sistema dell’informazione e nuove forme di creatività artistica - , sia in Mercanti di futuro - in cui l’attenzione era viceversa concentrata sulla Net Economy. Negli ultimi capitoli di quest’ultimo lavoro - completato nei mesi successivi alla crisi finanziaria di inizio millennio e all’inizio della “guerra al terrorismo”, innescata dall’evento epocale dell’11 settembre 2001 - avevo azzardato un’ipotesi: malgrado la massiccia perdita di potere contrattuale che la classe dei knowledge workers stava subendo a causa della crisi, e malgrado i tentativi di “normalizzazione” della Rete che i governi occidentali (Stati Uniti in testa) avevano avviato subito dopo l’attacco alle Twin Towers, sostenevo, restavano margini per la ricostituzione di quello che definivo Quinto Stato, vale dire il “blocco sociale” fondato sulla convergenza di valori culturali e interessi economici fra i soggetti sociali (ricercatori, hacker, comunitari virtuali, ecc.) che avevano guidato la rivoluzione digitale, e l’imprenditoria di Internet, che ne aveva sfruttato il potenziale economico. Se tale ipotesi si fosse rivelata corretta, aggiungevo, esistevano buone probabilità di un’evoluzione in senso “postdemocratico” dei sistemi politici occidentali, intesa come integrazione degli istituti della democrazia rappresentativa con nuove forme di democrazia diretta e partecipativa.

Multi-stakeholder governance is a fresh approach to the development of public policy, bringing together governments, the private sector and civil society in partnership. The movement towards this new governance paradigm has been most marked in areas involving global networks of stakeholders, too intricate to be represented by governments alone. Nowhere is this better illustrated than on the Internet, where it is an inherent characteristic of the network that laws, and the conduct to which those laws are directed, will cross national borders.

New Political Communication Unit, Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London, April 17-18, 2008.

The workshop ‘Parliaments in the Digital Age’ was hosted at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) (University of Oxford) in June 2007, with the aim of bringing three communities of experts together: parliamentary officials, academics from the Internet studies field and academics from the legislative studies field. This is a collection of the papers presented as part of the day’s discussions.

Globalization, the information era and non-governmental organizations are highlycomplex, much debated topics that may be considered as causes and results of many changes in political, social, cultural and economic contemporary life. I want to explore the entwinement of these issues to shed light on the emergence of another dimension of political and cultural life, the emergence of the virtual-imagined transnational community that can be better understood through an analysis of cybercultural politics.

The discussion of the political impact of the Internet has focussed on a number of issues: access, technological determinism, encryption, commodification, intellectual property, the public sphere, decentralization, anarchy, gender and ethnicity. While these issues may be addressed from a number of standpoints, only some them are able to assess the full extent of what is at stake in the new communications technology at the cultural level of identity formation.

Social software, software that supports group communications, includes everything from the simple CC: line in email to vast 3D game worlds like EverQuest, and it can be as undirected as a chat room, or as task-oriented as a wiki (a collaborative workspace). Because there are so many patterns of group interaction, social software is a much larger category than things like groupware or online communities -- though it includes those things, not all group communication is business-focused or communal. One of the few commonalities in this big category is that social software is unique to the internet in a way that software for broadcast or personal communications are not.

Weblogs occupy an increasingly important place in American politics. Their influence presents a puzzle: given the disparity in resources and organization vis-à-vis other actors, how can a collection of decentralized, nonprofit, contrarian, and discordant websites exercise any influence over political and policy outputs? This paper answers that question by focusing on two important aspects of the “blogosphere”: the distribution of readers across the array of blogs, and the interactions between significant blogs and traditional media outlets. Under specific circumstances – when key weblogs focus on a new or neglected issue – blogs can socially construct an agenda or interpretive frame that acts as a focal point for mainstream media, shaping and constraining the larger political debate. These arguments receive support from a network analysis of blog links, as well as a survey of media professionals about their blog preferences.

It was not long ago, in the not so long history of information and communication technology (ICTs), that the Internet was hailed as an emerging new democratic medium to undermine authoritarian regimes. Whether considering the increase in competence of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) on a global scale or the effect of information on local politics, cyberspace, understood as a digitally constituted means of communication, provided an exciting new frontier where political power manifested itself in a radical democratic way.

he World Social Forum (WSF) emerged in the wake of a global wave of protest against capitalism characterized, in part, by the expression of broader political ideals through network-based organizational forms. The WSF was thus conceived as an “open space” for exchanging ideas, resources, and information; promoting initiatives; and generating concrete alternatives. At the same time, many grassroots activists have criticized the forums for being organized in a top-down fashion, including political parties despite their formal prohibition, and favoring prominent intellectuals.

Networked Politics is the product of a collaborative research process for rethinking political organisation in an age of movements and networks. In a world where the traditional institutions of democratic control have been weakened by an unconstrained global market and superpower military ambitions, it uncovers diverse forms of resistance with the potential to create new institutions for social change. The authors set out the principles upon which such transformations should be based, and the challenges that stand in the way of their realisation.

The workshop ‘Parliaments in the Digital Age’ was hosted at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) (University of Oxford) in June 2007, with the aim of bringing three communities of experts together: parliamentary officials, academics from the Internet studies field and academics from the legislative studies field. This is a collection of the papers presented as part of the day’s discussions.

JULY 15 2004. The Convergence Center releases its pioneering research on the role of citizens groups in shaping communication and information policy. The research was funded by the Ford Foundation’s Knowledge, Creativity and Freedom Program.