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Background: Internet scholars are uncovering and connecting histories of early internets across the globe, but the Canadian context remains underexplored. Drawing on unpublished and declassified documents of the Canadian Armed Forces at Ottawa's Directorate of History and Heritage, this article investigates the history and significance of SAMSON (Strategic Automatic Message Switching Operational Network), an early Canadian internet that experienced a series of setbacks beginning almost immediately at its advent in 1965, until the project was completed in 1984. Analysis: Canada's internet infrastructural techno-politics are examined through Brian Larkin's framework of examining technical ways through which the political is constituted. Conclusions and implications: This paper shows how this early internet was a techno-political system that shaped and was shaped by Canada's pursuit of its national identity amid fears of U.S. influence and rising demands for self-determination within the Québécois and Indigenous nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In conversations surrounding technology and the future of politics, Adam Smith is a valuable resource for evaluating the subtle relationship between technology and freedom. Smith explores the tendency of specialization occasioned by the advancement of machines to cause "mental mutilation" where the worker's human faculties are stunted through overspecialization or narrowing of scope of opportunities to judge. Smith's treatment of the development of sympathetic judgment as necessary to the practice of liberty illuminates the depth of the harms caused by this mutilation; it is the very freedom of the worker that is at stake when the development and the exercise of judgment are restricted. Taken together, Smith's discussion of the advancement of machines and free and independent judgment can aid contemporary thinkers in understanding the relationship between technology and freedom in commercial society, particularly if new technologies substitute for the judgment of the worker or prevent the development of their judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, Never Let Me Go (2005), describes a society in which organ transplantation utilizing human clones is realized owing to technological advancement in the field of regenerative medicine. This paper, through considering the work as a dystopian novel with an ecological theme, explores the subject of the author's critique and what his ideal vision really was. In this novel, universal themes such as love, friendship, memory, and a view of life are foregrounded by means of a first-person narrative and backgrounded by a dystopian world view of cloning. In addition, criticism of consumerism and nuclear policy are embedded in the narrative of the story's protagonist, whose reluctant narration implies the ruined landscape of Nagasaki. This paper attempts to expose such themes, while at the same time it becomes clear that Ishiguro's ideal view of the world is an ecological one where people are satisfied with older analogue technologies and clean energy is promoted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses the role of critical ethics in technological innovation processes, specifically in the context of the implementation of the Online Mobility platform in Medellin, Colombia. It highlights the persistence of mediations in digitalization processes, both inherited and new, that affect the relationship between citizens and access to government services. It proposes an ethics of technology that includes citizen participation in the design and creation of technological artifacts, with the aim of influencing the exercise of participatory citizenship in electronic governments. The article analyzes the case of the Online Mobility platform of the Traffic Secretariat of Medellin, Colombia, to understand how a new public space mediated by information and communication technologies is configured. It emphasizes that the relationship between citizens and the state in the digitalization of administrative services is completely mediated by various actors, such as private companies, public officials, and intermediaries. Three groups of transitions are mentioned in this process: the "liquidification" of administrative relationships, the transition to digital citizenship, and the reconfiguration of mediations. It is noted that these transitions redefine the relationships between the platform state and the citizen, generating complexities and challenges in state services. In addition, the need for interaction and human intermediation in the use of digital platforms is highlighted. Finally, the importance of building digital governance in this process of transition and transformation is mentioned. This article discusses the importance of digital ethics in the governance of technological developments. It suggests that digital ethics should guide technological developments in a way that allows citizens to shape strategies related to the use of digital technologies. However, it is noted that existing regulations can be a barrier to digital transformation, especially in electronic governments. The need to think about the ethics of design, implementation, and use of technologies, as well as the development of new forms of critical citizenship in relation to the use of new technologies, is emphasized. In addition, it is mentioned that the digitalization of administrative procedures can generate adaptive differences among citizens, highlighting the importance of including citizens' practices in relationship processes with the state. The article analyzes citizen participation in digital transition processes and its relationship with government services. The importance of citizens' critical participation and their ability to adapt or evade prescribed models is highlighted. The influence of regulations on the dematerialization of procedures and the transformation of public space is mentioned. In addition, the impact of technology on social interactions and people's daily lives is discussed. Finally, the role of technological artifacts in the moral analysis of communication technologies is reflected upon. According to Verbeek's philosophical perspective, technological artifacts are not neutral but morally relevant, as they have a sense of agency and participate in our perceptions and actions. Technological artifacts are morally relevant because they create new options for possible actions and affect the way we relate to the world. Ethics plays a critical role in the use of technologies, and it is important to ethically accompany technological innovation. Citizens can intervene in design processes and make decisions regarding the development of technological artifacts. In digital transitions, multiple mediations occur that affect administrative relationships, digital citizenship, and forms of intervention in administrative services. The article analyzes how the Online Mobility platform becomes an intermediary in the relationship between citizens and the state, especially during the pandemic. The platform digitalizes communication and administrative procedures, but also pl [Extracted from the article]

Rapid technological advancement is changing the way that political parties, voters, and media platforms engage with each other. This along with cultural change has led to an emerging era of disinformation and misinformation driven by both domestic and foreign actors. Political deepfakes, videos created through the use of artificial intelligence, allow individuals to rapidly create fake videos indistinguishable from true content. These videos have the capacity to undermine voter trust and could alter electoral outcomes. Regulating disinformation however raises significant free speech concerns, as well as questions about where liability should fall. In particular, holding large technology and media platforms accountable for content could lead to unintended chilling effects around freedom of expression, harming rather than protecting democratic institutions. Proposed regulations should therefore be carefully analysed through the framework of the implied freedom of political communication, ensuring that any new laws are proportionate and tailored to the threat they seek to prevent. This article analyses how current Australian law interacts with political deepfakes and proposes two targeted amendments to our federal electoral regulations to reduce the threat they pose to elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legal regulation of politics has, at its core, the aim of preserving three fundamental democratic values: liberty, equality and deliberative political participation. Yet, the reference point for examining these values is rooted in 19th and 20th century practices: where political campaigning and mobilisation follow terrestrial principles of organisation and regulation is undertaken by the state. Using the most recent empirical evidence drawn from political science on the changing nature of political participation and organisation, this article analyses the challenges of regulating digital politics. It argues that while the major focus of current interventions centres on political disinformation, this obscures more fundamental regulatory concerns such as capturing the diversity of new modes of participation and reconceptualising equality. While a model of co-regulation holds promise by institutionalising communities and individuals within technology companies' policy decision-making processes, firms' ultimate authority to define and control their user base presents challenges for effective participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Socio-Technical Imaginaries (STI) approach in Science and Technology Studies (STS) has illuminated the central role of social imaginaries in shaping the politics of technology. Its emphasis on the multilinear forms of socio-technical development is a useful corrective to universalist explanations of technological change. However, STI lacks a clear account of how inter-societal interaction shapes the imaginaries of any given political community. Synthesizing STI with the theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) can correct this shortcoming. UCD offers an ontology of universals and accompanying methodology of incorporated comparison, enabling STI to integrate inter-societal causality into its theoretical framework. A combined UCD and STI framework is examined in this paper through a focus on imaginaries of technological innovation in contemporary American foreign policy. Responding to the 'whip of external necessity', US foreign policy seeks to upend technological diffusion and impose global regulatory evenness on national forms of technological innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The record high number of women who ran for the U.S. Congress during the midterm elections led many journalists to proclaim 2018 as another "Year of the Woman." Although not every female candidate was successful, this large number of women running for office provides the opportunity to advance our understanding of the ways in which women present themselves to their voters. Using the "Biography" pages of more than 1,500 2018 congressional campaign websites, we use a structural topic model to examine how these candidates present themselves to their constituencies. In doing this, we find great variance in the presentation styles of women running for Congress in 2018. We also find that prior political experience, more so than gender, is the primary driver in influencing how candidates (both men and women) present themselves. Experienced candidates use similar styles that highlight their past political work while amateur candidates are more likely to use "values-driven" language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the practical symbol of "hacking," computer expertise has been translated into renewed forms of political action in the past two decades. In this article, I examine this phenomenon through the study of self‐organized collectives for technoscientific experts who identify as "hackers." Based on multisited field research in global cities of the Pacific Rim, I describe the formation of a network of community spaces called "hackerspaces" with a focus on their exchange practices and transnational ties. The alternative globalization of hacking through these convivial spaces for socialization and self‐training has created new political locations and horizons, shifting the moral valence of hacking toward more open and collaborative practices. The hackerspace network is one of the key sites for the observation of this transformation for prefiguring new technical and political practices, hence its relevance for anthropological studies of technology and politics in the contemporary moment. [computing, expertise, hacking, technopolitics, hackerspaces] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the history of the United States (U.S.) census between 1790 and 2020. Topics include the data capture and processing technology for the U.S. census, the federal response to various technical challenges experienced over the centuries, and the political aspects of census demographics.

Scholars have offered important critiques of the socio‐spatial processes of contemporary technological development, including the rise of "smart city" urban development models. While these critiques have been essential for understanding contemporary forms of techno‐capitalism and their reach into new areas, this paper calls for a consideration of alternative modes of digital development in urban life beyond the logics of securitisation and capital accumulation. In particular, I examine the critical discourses and experimental practices of a grassroots movement focused on claiming "technological sovereignty" (TS) in Barcelona. The TS movement is a broad, de‐centralised network of cooperatives, associations, and community initiatives experimenting with alternative practices of locally rooted, open‐source digital development. These groups explore democratic and cooperative practices of work, property, production, and consumption in relation to digital technology, based around an ethics of care and a commitment to working through and within local communities. In examining the values, beliefs, and practices of the TS movement, I bring ongoing discussions around digitalisation and the "smart city" into critical conversation with the extensive literature on prefigurative urban politics and postcapitalist economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the use of a geographically site‐centred, flat ontology to justify contemporary anarchists' predisposition to espouse exclusively prefigurative forms of action. By considering the anarchist, post‐capitalist potential of a technologically enabled peer‐to‐peer (P2P) economy and Collaborative Commons movement, the case is made for the need to acknowledge and engage the higher‐order (emergent) nexuses between state apparatuses and capitalist flows. Doing so, it is argued, makes envisioning the process of creating anarchist oriented, post‐capitalist futures significantly more tangible and convincing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the current vogue of Carl Schmitt among political theorists who read him as an antidote to the depoliticizing force of economics and technology in the age of neoliberalism and its algorithmic rationalities. It takes Schmitt's sparse reflections about cybernetics and game theory as paradigmatic of the theoretical and political problems raised by any theory positing the autonomy of the political. It suggests that this ultimately misunderstands the role of cybernetic representations of political decision-making in shoring up in the 1960s and 1970s the autonomy of the political that Schmitt so vehemently defended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital revolution invites a reconsideration of the very essence of politics. How can we think about decision, control, and will at a time when technologies of automation are transforming every dimension of human life, from military combat to mental attention, from financial systems to the intimate lives of individuals? This article looks back to a moment in the 20th century when the concept of the political as an independent logic was developed, in a time when the boundaries and operations of the classic state were in question. At the same moment, a whole new technological era was opened up with the emergence of intelligent machines and computers in the postwar cybernetic age. Technology, and cybernetics in particular, loomed large in Carl Schmitt's articulation of the concept of the political, while the problem of radical open decision was at the heart of influential cybernetic approaches to politics. Linking these was the idea of entropic decay. Schmitt's invocation of the theological concept of the Katechon, who restrains chaos in the time before Christ's return, in fact exemplifies the new understandings of order in a cybernetic age facing new challenges of technology in a globalized condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been much work done investigating the adoption of online campaigns in UK general election campaigns. Although some research has focussed on the candidate-level (Gibson, R., W. Lusoli, and S. Ward. 2008. "Nationalizing and Normalizing the Local? A Comparative Analysis of Online Candidate Campaigning in Australia and Britain." Journal of Information Technology and Politics 4: 15-30; Lee, B. 2014. "Window Dressing 2.0: Constituency-level Web Campaigns in the 2010 UK General Election." Politics 34 (1): 45-57; Southern, R. 2015. "Is Web 2.0 Providing a Voice for Outsiders? A Comparison of Personal Web Site and Social Media Use by Candidates at the 2010 UK General Election." Journal of Information Technology & Politics 12 (1): 1-17), this is an under-researched area. This is despite early web-campaign scholars (Margolis, M., and D. Resnick. 2000. Politics as Usual: The Cyberspace Revolution. Sage) maintaining that e-campaigning could provide the most important advantages to campaigns at the candidate level. In light of this, the paper aims to provide the most comprehensive study of candidate-level online campaigning carried out in the UK to date. This paper employs original data, measuring website and social media use by candidates during the 2015 UK general election campaign. These data allow for a detailed explanation of the normalization thesis, one of the leading theories in the field of e-campaigns. The findings here are significant as there are several instances where normalization does not hold, suggesting that online tools are contributing to campaign change. Green Party candidates subverted normalization to a significant degree, particularly on social media. Assessing the campaign content, a quarter of candidates adopted more than one interactive feature on their website and furthermore, interactive use of Twitter was the most common type of Twitter use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of settler irrigation systems and water governance in establishing and reinforcing tenacious imperial geographies of whiteness. Through an analysis of the lives and work of two powerful men who made foundational contributions to establishing irrigation economies and water governance systems in Australia and the Western United States, we investigate the racialized sociospatial processes that bound whiteness to water. Alfred Deakin (1856-1919) and Elwood Mead (1858-1936) were men of science, technology, and politics who actively circulated in and shaped transnational flows of knowledge about whiteness and racial hierarchies. As Deakin and Mead vigorously promoted particular social and political systems associated with irrigation, steering water flows toward uses regarded as modern and productive according to taken-for-granted norms, they imagined, naturalized, and privileged a white water citizenry. In the process, they contributed to the dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples as well as marginalizing Other water users, most notably Asian migrants. These men's hydro-imaginaries, which were endorsed and enacted by their respective governments, served to motivate a form of state protection of family farms, inculcate civic self-reliance and local organization, and establish the white water citizen, a baseline against which others were expected to conform. By examining the making of white water citizens, we hope to contribute to Indigenous geographies and studies of racialization in rural places, as well as the effects of irrigation in settler nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article develops digital constitutionalism as a common term connecting a constellation of initiatives that seek to articulate a set of political rights, governance norms, and limitations on the exercise of power on the Internet. We start by reporting on insights from an analysis of the substantive content of over 30 such documents, and make reference to the political and technological changes to which they may relate. We offer an overview of the core actors in the area of digital constitutionalism and a brief exploration of the processes by which their initiatives aim to entrench rights into law and practice. We discuss the changing sites of political and legal intervention, including a more recent focus on domestic and regional initiatives. Finally, we consider what a future research agenda could entail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attempts to establish constitutional provisions for the Internet have been promoted since the late 1990s, mainly by the global civil society and intergovernmental organisations. More recently, a new wave of digital constitutionalism has emerged from the nation-state level, and particularly from national parliaments. In order to better understand this process, the article seeks to investigate, from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective, whether and to what extent parliamentary initiatives exhibit specific political features compared to constitutional attempts emerging from other kinds of sources. Further, the study aims to assess if drafting initiatives overlap or, rather, respond in different ways to different constitutional concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, based on structured interviews with fifteen of the main national observation groups of Latin America, shows that the most active civil society groups have been applying a variety of tools involving new information and communication technologies since 2005 to conduct what is known in English as crowdsourced election observation. According to those interviewed, the new technologies have mainly served to raise awareness among the general population of the importance of elections, to have people involved in observation activities, and to introduce election observation to areas where it would have been impracticable without these new technologies. Crowdsourced election observation now faces the challenge of setting a commonly accepted standard for verifying the information potentially collected by an anonymous crowd of observers who might not have received enough training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Projections indicate that, as an industry, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, commonly known as drones) could bring more than 100 000 jobs and $80 billion in economic growth to the U.S. by 2025 [1]. However, these promising projections do not account for how various publics may perceive such technologies. Understanding public perceptions is important because the attitudes of different groups can have large effects on the trajectory of a technology, strongly facilitating or hindering technology acceptance and uptake [2]. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Taking up experiments in “civic innovation” as windows into the making of new urban worlds, I attempt in this essay to map out the parameters of a novel framework for municipal rule and account for the conditions underlying its ascendance in San Francisco, CA. I explore how productions of urban space and nature today serve as the means and objects of an emerging mode of government premised on yoking all forms of urban activity to the dictates of innovation. When proponents of civic innovation pursue particular forms of intervention in the built environment to constitute urban subjects as human capital, they imbibe, reproduce, and enact normative notions about the nature of the city as a problem to manage. Though the project of civic innovation is neither complete nor inevitable, the political vision animating it entails the subsumption of urban life as such within a rubric of decision making modeled on the market. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This collection of articles contributes to the growing body of research on how technology is affecting peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, and research methodologies in the field. Assumptions about the use of technology for peace are interrogated, such as the purported deepening of inclusivity and widening of participation that technology provides to peacebuilders and communities. It frames the discussion from a peacefocused perspective, providing a response to the work done by others who have focused on the ways technology makes violence more likely. This supports a holistic discussion of the ways that technology can have an impact on contentious social and political processes. By expanding the base of knowledge about how technology can be used for peace and violence, we hope this collection increases the understanding of the circumstances under which technology amplifies peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on theories in organizational sociology that argue that transpositions of people,/ skills, and knowledge across domains give rise to innovations and organizational foundings that institutionalize them, we conducted a mixed-methods study of the employment biographies of staffers working in technology, digital, data, and analytics on American presidential campaigns, and the rates of organizational founding by these staffers, from the 2004 through the 2012 electoral cycles. Using Federal Election Commission and LinkedIn data, we trace the professional biographies of staffers (N = 629) working in technology, digital, data, or analytics on primary and general election presidential campaigns during this period. We found uneven professionalization in these areas, defined in terms of staffers moving from campaign to campaign or from political organizations to campaigns, with high rates of new entrants to the field. Democrats had considerably greater numbers of staffers in the areas of technology, digital, data, and analytics and from the technology industry, and much higher rates of organizational founding. We present qualitative data drawn from interviews with approximately 60 practitioners to explain how the institutional histories of the two parties and their extended networks since 2004 shaped the presidential campaigns during the 2012 cycle and their differential uptake of technology, digital, data, and analytics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers information on the political aspects of Filipinos in foreign countries. Among the topics discussed include the participation of overseas Filipinos in the 2016 Philippine Elections, the impact of technology for political power of Filipinos, and various issues that affects the political participation of overseas Filipinos such as lack of livelihood opportunities in the country, poverty, and human trafficking.

One of the more persistent Cold War memes, the so-called dictator's dilemma refers to a worldview in which technology is a threat to dictatorships and a beacon of prosperity to free societies. But is this a valid dichotomy? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Appropriation is the process through which technology users go beyond mere adoption to make technology their own and to embed it within their social, economic, and political practices. The appropriation process is a negotiation about power and control over the configuration of technology, its uses, and the distribution of its benefits. The negotiation surrounding technology appropriation echoes earlier creative tensions in the New World regarding the appropriation of cultural objects and ideas from abroad. This article reviews existing theoretical approaches to the study of technology appropriation and draws inspiration from three Latin American cultural traditions, baroquization, creolization, and cannibalism. It proposes a new theoretical framework that informs an in-depth study of the social, economic, and political impacts of technology appropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the relationship between computer technology and politics. The author comments on the implementation of this technology in democratic political systems throughout the world and examines its influence on the democratic process. The ability to promote direct democratic processes through information and communication technologies is also explored.

The Spanish 15M movement (also known as the Indignados) was very critical of political parties and the current system of political representation. However, the protest cycle has evolved into a growing and complex process of institutionalization in which activist have been participating in the creation and development of a number of new parties (Partido X, Ganemos and Podemos). This paper analyzes the role played by new technologies in this process. The basic hypothesis is that the extensive use of digital tools, which encourage participation and deliberation in the creation and development of these new parties, in some ways reproduces essential values and practices of the movement, thus facilitating the identification between the 15M activists and the parties. In this way, the transition between movement and party has been conditioned by, among other things, a component of technological mediation, generating an environment of horizontal deliberation, participation distributed and decentralized structure. The use of these tools has been accompanied by the development of a certain technophile frame that stresses the potential of new technologies for social and political change. Thus, the classical notions of representation or participation are redrawn allowing a smooth evolution from the squares to the Parliaments. This article examines the construction of technophiles frameworks, which influenced by the presence of free software and open source, help us to understand the organization of the new movement-parties and the transition between the different forms of collective action. Likewise, some of these digital tools are mentioned and outlined and the role that they have played in order to forge new organization models for these movement-parties are described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of information and communication technologies in democratic processes, often summarized by the term e-democracy, has seldom been analysed from a global perspective. Although the United Nations E-Participation Index provides one of the few examples of an international measurement of e-democracy, it has been thoroughly criticized; at the same time, however, a number of studies have broadened our understanding of the global determinants of e-democracy by using this very index. In this study, I approach this problem by considering (i) whether the UN E-Participation Index is a valid measurement of e-democracy and (ii) whether any alternative measurements of e-democracy present themselves. In answer to these questions, it would seem that the index, despite its flaws, is not necessarily as problematic as is assumed, although there are observations that violate essential theoretical assumptions and so reduce its validity. Furthermore, its use in combination with measurements of democracy agrees with the emphasis in the literature on e-democracy being embedded in democracy, and results in a measurement that better corresponds with theoretical ideas of e-democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The IT revolution is transforming politics and opening up a new dimension of inequality. The Labour party can be as technologically savvy as it likes, argues David Runciman, but it cannot become a vote-winning machine again until it sets out a role for the state in the political economy of the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1990s, when the Internet became a common communication medium in the United States, its history was recounted in numerousworks that were intended for popular American audiences. In the context of the new legitimizing discourse of the technopolitical order of post-Fordist society, which views network technology at the center of an emancipatory social transformation, this article critically analyzes the role of the authors, as well as the main characters, actions, plot, and narrative of these works. The authors wrote for specific intended audiences, casting the history of the Internet into the mythopoetic form of the technological romance that dramatizes the eroticized prodigious work of the so-called Internet pioneers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at a 1957 memoradum written by art and architecture critic Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. to industrial designer Eliot Noyes and a 1964 memorandum written by ergonomist Serge Boutourline, Jr. to Robert S. Lee, director of research at International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), both regarding the design of computer interfaces. According to the author, these documents illustrate important moments in the history of computer design. Details on the spatial separation of computer operators from certain computer components and on the rhetorical and political aspects of computing are presented.

This article focuses on digital surveillance ideology by examining specific empirical examples drawn from media reports of the Snowden affair, in order to explore the politics, ethics, values and affects mobilised by governments and corporate elites to justify the collect-it-all practices of the three 'trusted' global networks that dominate this field - corporations, governments and co-opted civil society groups. It charts this political space as a sphere of action emerging against the backdrop of what we call 'quasitotalitarian' mechanisms that are fostered by the alignment, collusion and imbrication of these networks. This approach illuminates a particular problem in the articulation of digital politics: the process of political disenfranchisement brought about by corporations looking to profit, governments looking to regulate information flows, and co-opted groups in civil society looking to appropriate the legitimate concerns of users for their own political and financial subsistence. The distinct features of this quasi-totalitarianism include: the monopoly of digital planning on surveillance that rests on backchannel and secret communication between government, tech corporate elites and, sometimes, NGOs; the use of civil society NGOs as mechanisms for circumventing democratic processes; 'enterprise association' politics, aimed at ensuring that the dual goal of state (security) and capital (profit) continues unabated and with little unaccountability; the unprecedented scope offered by total structural data acquisition on the part of western intelligence matrixes; the persecution and prosecution of journalists, whistle-blowers and transparency actors outside the scope of civil society groups; and the significant if insufficient contestation by members of the public concerning the infringement on civil liberties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of computing in India is inextricably intertwined with two interacting forces: the political climate (determined by the political party in power) and the government policies mainly driven by the technocrats and bureaucrats who acted within the boundaries drawn by the political party in power. There were four break points (which occurred in 1970, 1978, 1991 and 1998) that changed the direction of the development of computers and their applications. This article explains why these breaks occurred and how they affected the history of computing in India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Internet has an impact in almost every aspect of the society worldwide. This paper intends to demonstrate that this ICT can have a positive influence to strengthen democracies. It presents a brief historical resume of technology's intervention in politics. Subsequently, it explains the structural basis of electronic democracy. Finally, it analyses the challenges that technology must address in order to facilitate democratic participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1990s, as the Internet went public, a throng of technological utopianists began declaring the coming of an authentic social, political and democratic revolution. In the reflection of instantaneous, unregulated flows of information and countless self-generating channels of communication, a growing group of pundits saw the promise of an empowered and engaged citizenry that could rewrite the balance of power in society. Breathing life into these quixotic visions, young, white, college-educated men across North America, Europe and Australia flocked to the Internet. These computer programmers-cum-activists took to the Internet with the vision of protecting the non-hierarchical nature of this new communications medium, while harnessing its powers to support a myriad of political organizing projects. In this paper, I look at three of the most critical media activist projects of the 1990s: BURN!, Z Media Institute and CounterMedia and make two interrelated arguments. First is BURN!, then ZMI and CounterMedia, as well as other activist laboratories, were the central sites where the cultural logic and media practices of contemporary social movements began to take shape, particularly as this logic was actualized through technology. Second, I argue that the class position of the new media activists led to a specific understanding of resistance and, correspondingly, the role of technology in social change. Thus, while the activist laboratories of the north created critical new media tools and open, participatory communications platforms, there was a tendency for technology itself to become the answer to social ills. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]