{"id":210,"date":"2009-01-27T16:33:38","date_gmt":"2009-01-27T16:33:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/?p=210"},"modified":"2009-02-02T14:06:37","modified_gmt":"2009-02-02T14:06:37","slug":"civil-liberties-in-the-network-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/?p=210","title":{"rendered":"Civil liberties in the network society"},"content":{"rendered":"

In yesterday’s post I reflected on how battles for civil liberties were ways for people with less power to try and gain more power.\u00a0 This is a fairly mainstream sociological perspective on power and the reasons that people engage in collective action. Today I’m going to ask how this changes in a network society.\u00a0 The theorist of social movements Alberto Melucci writes in his book Challenging Codes<\/a> that, “a social movement is an actor engaged in a conflict directly or indirectly affecting the distribution of power within a society.”\u00a0 But I’d like to know:\u00a0 is there some finite amount of power?\u00a0 If so, where are the places where it is most concentrated?\u00a0 What are today’s most significant struggles?<\/p>\n

If we think of our society as being characterized by 1.\u00a0 relationships structured by\/through networked forms and networked infrastructures and 2. the high value placed on information, then it is easier to see why today’s struggles over power involve things like media reform and privacy.\u00a0 Colin Bennett (among other privacy advocates) looks at how privacy is framed as a civil liberties issue.\u00a0 He writes in The Privacy Advocates<\/a> that “the protection of privacy has always featured prominently within the agendas of civil liberties organizations, historically concerned with the legitimate boundaries between the individual and state and with the protection of citizens from abuses of power” (p. 35).\u00a0 One limitation of this perspective, as Bennet notes, is that it focuses on individual rights rather than collective (civil) rights.\u00a0 We could imagine this perspective as a shield preventing the powerful state from abusing the powerless individual.<\/p>\n

Maybe its possible to think of the individual – or the collective – as having power that can be disruptive.\u00a0 Manuel Castells<\/a> argues that any exercise of power also produces “counter-power.”\u00a0 Any oppression produces resistance.\u00a0 For example, the consolidation of global capital and information that the internet made possible was balanced out by the development of new social movements that opposed that power using the tools provided (the internet, global interaction).\u00a0 Now that more of society can be thought of as working like a network, this power\/counterpower relationship is developing.\u00a0 Some of the important questions are:\u00a0 who figures out how networks of influence and networks of infrastructure are going to operate?\u00a0 Who makes the rules?<\/p>\n

Developing counter-power that restructures how networks work is a good way of framing why media reform has become a big issue — and even why technical standards and protocols are becoming objects of political discussion.\u00a0 But one of the big challenges of understanding power – and civil liberties – in a network society is actually determining where counterpower or resistance should be directed.\u00a0 Castells claims that a pressing question is: “against whom do I revolt”?<\/p>\n

This is exactly why issues of privacy and media reform are becoming more thorny.\u00a0 It’s not simply a question of shielding individuals from the burly oppression of the state.\u00a0 Many forms of power are ways of controlling our uncertainty about the world, and even a surveillance state can do that (the argument for surveillance cameras is often that they make people safer, as everyone is being watched).\u00a0 It’s a question of determining *where* abuses of power come from -in the multi-layered networks of infrastructure, content, finance, and politics – and *how* to use the same networks to disconnect<\/a> or route around<\/a> those abuses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In yesterday’s post I reflected on how battles for civil liberties were ways for people with less power to try and gain more power.\u00a0 This is a fairly mainstream sociological perspective on power and the reasons that people engage in collective action. Today I’m going to ask how this changes in a network society.\u00a0 The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[10,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-musings","category-oii"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pUfdR-3o","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=210"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":212,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions\/212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}