Infopolitics: Questioning the politics of information
Since early 2006, I'm exploring the social and political dimensions of global information society in a series of public programs at the Amsterdam centre for culture and politics De Balie. The program title infopolitics refers to informational politics, Manuel Castells' term for the transformation of democratic processes in society where electronic media become the privileged space of politics. A very plain example is the replacement of ballot boxes by voting machines in many countries, by which governments outsource the democratic election process and its verification to the business world. Yet another example is the way in which information on the internet is ranked or recommended by search engines, as web epistemologist Richard Rogers shows in his study Information Politics on the Web. So far I organized a few collaborative public debates, including one on the wiretapping of investigative journalists by the Dutch secret service AIVD; one on the cumulative effects of privacy-invading government measures against organized crime and terrorism; on the slippery slope of political interferences with internet filtering in The Netherlands...
Now that rapidly developing countries like Brazil, India and China are turning into challenging knowledge economies, informational politics is becoming 'global domestic affairs'. Globalization — fuelled by ICT processes — has not yet created a single world state, but has set conditions for an embryonic world polity being fought over on a supranational level. This includes decision-making processes about the principles and rules of global internet, intellectual property regimes, surveillance and identity management systems — new information regimes that have great impact on people's lives. Yet critical debate on who's in charge, who's included or excluded, essential questions about management and control, access and freedom of choice, is mostly limited to the well-informed circles of experts and professionals, seldomly reaching the playground of mass media. Social and political counterweight in The Netherlands is rather low-profile, with the notable exception of the efforts made by digital rights organization Bits of Freedom, initiator of the Dutch Big Brother Awards. Bits of Freedom discontinued activities in 2006, but the urgence for public awareness has not waned. A lack of privacy concerns characterizes the introduction of electronic patient records, the public transport chip card (OV-chipkaart), the Citizen Service Number (burgerservicenummer), and data retention regulations (bewaarplicht). The Netherlands is classified as a country that fails systematically to uphold safeguards when it comes to privacy protection, according to the annual Privacy and Human Rights survey of Privacy International and EPIC. However, that is a worldwide tendency which is displayed just a bit more pushy in this country, and the Infopolitics series does not restrict its focus to the Dutch situation.
What I find particularly important is the encouragement of a sort of informational citizenship, which doesn't only refer to the right to media access and the provision of information on issues that matter, but also the provision of agency. As Klaas Kuitenbrouwer of Mediamatic Foundation outlines, agency is a concern which goes way beyond the concern for the eroding limits of privacy — it refers to the ability of an individual to act in a determinate way, including the ability to disconnect oneself from this ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate (UCaPP) world. In the present scenario, agency is mostly concentrated in the corporate world — hence the considerable mistrust and hostility among citizens towards corporate use of RFID technology, as a recent European public consultation round showed once more. It is insufficient to attribute this mistrust to an archetypal irrational fear for new technologies, it also has to do with the lack of publicity given to crucial issues about the embedment of technologies in society. To paraphrase political scientist Philippe Schmitter, discussions about accountability should not be single-mindedly concerned with limiting the power of state authorities, but also with mobilizing the power of citizens to overcome the entrenched positions of oligarchies such as the patent cartel at the European level. Necessary grand visions, alternative models and practices need to be amplified in media and society. The Infopolitics series is but one small contribution to bring together different stakeholders and to push dialogue beyond the deadlock, to raise the stakes of public involvement in a culture which is increasingly narrowcast — where there is no more public, only audience, as cultural studies researcher Rob van Kranenburg has it: "Putting technological issues on an agenda for a 'general' audience requires either a thousand interfaces (for a thousand different audiences) or a scandal"... [More coming soon.] Check out the Infopolitics dossier at De Balie website.
The program title infopolitics refers to informational politics, Manuel Castells' term for the transformation of democratic processes in society where electronic media become the privileged space of politics. A very plain example is the replacement of ballot boxes by voting machines in many countries, by which governments outsource the democratic election process and its verification to the business world. Yet another example is the way in which information on the internet is ranked or recommended by search engines, as web epistemologist Richard Rogers shows in his study Information Politics on the Web. So far I organized a few collaborative public debates, including one on the wiretapping of investigative journalists by the Dutch secret service AIVD; one on the cumulative effects of privacy-invading government measures against organized crime and terrorism; on the slippery slope of political interferences with internet filtering in The Netherlands...
Yet critical debate on who's in charge, who's included or excluded, essential questions about management and control, access and freedom of choice, is mostly limited to the well-informed circles of experts and professionals, seldomly reaching the playground of mass media. Social and political counterweight in The Netherlands is rather low-profile, with the notable exception of the efforts made by digital rights organization Bits of Freedom, initiator of the Dutch Big Brother Awards. Bits of Freedom discontinued activities in 2006, but the urgence for public awareness has not waned. A lack of privacy concerns characterizes the introduction of electronic patient records, the public transport chip card (OV-chipkaart), the Citizen Service Number (burgerservicenummer), and data retention regulations (bewaarplicht). The Netherlands is classified as a country that fails systematically to uphold safeguards when it comes to privacy protection, according to the annual 
In the present scenario, agency is mostly concentrated in the corporate world — hence the considerable mistrust and hostility among citizens towards corporate use of RFID technology, as a recent European public consultation round showed once more. It is insufficient to attribute this mistrust to an archetypal irrational fear for new technologies, it also has to do with the lack of publicity given to crucial issues about the embedment of technologies in society. To paraphrase political scientist Philippe Schmitter, discussions about accountability should not be single-mindedly concerned with limiting the power of state authorities, but also with mobilizing the power of citizens to overcome the entrenched positions of oligarchies such as the patent cartel at the European level. Necessary grand visions, alternative models and practices need to be amplified in media and society. The Infopolitics series is but one small contribution to bring together different stakeholders and to push dialogue beyond the deadlock, to raise the stakes of public involvement in a culture which is increasingly narrowcast — where there is no more public, only audience, as cultural studies researcher Rob van Kranenburg has it: "Putting technological issues on an agenda for a 'general' audience requires either a thousand interfaces (for a thousand different audiences) or a scandal"... [More coming soon.]
Check out the 