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E-book Politicizing Digital Space: Theory, the Internet, and Renewing Democracy
n the wake of the so-called ‘Arab Spring,’ Occupy, and Anonymous move-ments, attention has increasingly been paid to the intersection of politics and the internet. In the popular media, commentators such as Roger Cohen of the New York Times took a technological determinist approach, as he declared Face-book founder Mark Zuckerberg to be the true leader of the protests spreading across North Africa (Cohen 2011). The internet was positioned as causing the protests, as technological modernity was positioned as bringing with it politi-cal modernity, thus leading to the overthrow of long-standing dictatorships. Against this technological determinist view, many scholars swung to the oppo-site side of the spectrum and declared that the internet was not really important at all, and positioned it as merely another useful tool among many for political activists (Burris 2011). What is missing from these two positions is an apprecia-tion of what the internet could mean for a reinvigorated idea of politics itself. These movements are interesting not simply because they used social networksand mobile phones as part of their protests, but because they demonstrated some of the latent possibilities of using the internet to usher in a new form of radically democratic politics.
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