Circling the wagons: the net politics of exclusion

Before you finish off your community group assignment, worth having a look at an article written by Will Davies, "Circling the wagons: the net politics of exclusion" in the Register, Nov 8th 2004:

"I think we have a difficulty in viewing the net sociologically and critically partly because it is a global system with very remote governance structures. Rather than see it as a constructed social system, driven by politics, it is far easier to see it as an entirely neutral and indeed natural social space, within which new political units can be created....

The real politics of the net does not consist in creating new communities, with new forms of governance, moderation and values. It consists in mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion, that tend to follow pre-existing sociological and economic divisions....

There’s an analogy often made between the American settlers and internet dwellers, and it’s a good one (things like ‘the cyber-frontier’). Like the American settlers, internet dwellers create a myth that there was no politics before they arrived. In order to establish entirely new and egalitarian communities, American settlers had to ignore the fact that the land was already occupied. To the same end, Internet settlers choose to ignore the historical and sociological facts of how the Internet is run, who can't get on to it and why, and the mechanisms used online to divide people.The risk is that the politics of the net follows America towards gated communities, each having only an inward-looking, group-based notion of politics, and ceases to question the macro institutions and systems around them."