Vox Internet - Programme de recherche soutenu par l'ANR

Imaginaire(s) des Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication

2008-05-13T12:42:40Z

Le programme Vox Internet II organisait, le 31 mars dernier à l'Ecole des Mines de Paris, une journée d'étude consacrée aux « Imaginaire(s) des Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication ». Le but de cette journée était de faire un bilan critique de l'usage de la notion d'imaginaires dans la recherche sur les TIC et de proposer de nouveaux outils pour la compléter ou la remplacer (P. Robert).
Les représentations sociales des TIC peuvent être considérées comme un arrière-fond de la question de la gouvernance de l'internet, puisqu'elles constituent le terreau des conditions d'acceptabilité des ses différentes formes.
Si l'on constate pour l'internet à la fois des ruptures et des continuités avec les précédents moyens de communication, aux niveaux technologique, juridique, politique, économique ou socio-culturel, il s'ensuit que l'appréhension commune de son fonctionnement témoigne de contradictions exacerbées dans les représentations. Concernant son substrat matériel : invention radicale ou évolution continue. Concernant les pratiques : fluidité infinie des échanges ou capture des traces informatiques. Concernant les contenus : support de nouvelles solidarités ou de nouvelles criminalités. Concernant, enfin, les apprentissages : maîtrise de la technique ou confusion entre l'expression et son véhicule.
Toute procédure de gouvernance visant l'élaboration d'un accord entre acteurs d'origines et d'intérêts différents, l'ambivalence de ces représentations sociales rend la tâche ardue. Peut-être faut-il alors, lorsque l'on étudie les discours sur l'internet, les rapporter plus finement aux pratiques réelles et changer de cadre d'analyse pour envisager de manière plus productive les relations entre technique, politique et société ?

Discuter la pertinence de la notion d'imaginaires appliquée aux TIC

La « stabilité » de la notion d'imaginaires constitue la condition nécessaire à son utilisation comme outil pertinent pour l'analyse des TIC (P. Robert). Or cette notion, appliquée aux TIC, semble poser problème du fait de sa confusion avec d'autres notions relativement proches.

Les imaginaires, une notion floue
P. Mathias, reprenant l'analyse de P. Flichy, note lors de son intervention que, du fait de la multiplicité des objets et des expériences disponibles sur l'internet, les "imaginaires" rassemblent sous un même vocable des pratiques extrêmement diverses. Si la notion n'est pas illégitime, elle revêt donc des contours « flous ».
Pour D. Pucheu, ce « flou » provient du fait que la notion renvoie à autre chose qu'à son objet. Il n'est toujours question que d'un imaginaire d'un élément de l'internet, comme par exemple les mondes virtuels, et pas d'un imaginaire de l'internet dans son ensemble.
Ces imaginaires peuvent également être compris comme des modes de transmission de systèmes de valeurs. D. Forest, en prenant l'exemple du logiciel libre, montre qu'« adhérer » à une représentation du libre, c'est adopter son système de valeurs, en l'occurrence la philosophie du don.

Les notions liées à celle d'imaginaires
La notion d'imaginaires est liée à différents concepts relativement proches. Cette proximité laisse courir un risque de confusion, notamment entre celles d'imagination, d'utopie, d'idéologie ou de mythe. Les différents intervenants se sont donc livrés à des tentatives de définition. P. Mathias constate ainsi une distinction entre imaginaires et imagination en notant que l'imaginaire relève de « l'imagination productrice », et donc fabrique du sens plus que des images. Sur la question de l'utopie et de l'idéologie A. Lakel se réfère aux écrits de P. Ricoeur dotant l'utopie d'une fonction d'exploration-alternative, alors que l'idéologie est conçue comme un acte matériel d'intégration-légitimation. Cette approche laisse cependant dans l'ombre la relation entre des acteurs insérés dans des rapports sociaux de pouvoir.
Pour D. Forest, la notion d'utopie est difficilement applicable à l'internet : nous sommes en contact avec des reflets d'utopie et non des systèmes utopiques (a priori « fermés »). En reprenant pour exemple le logiciel libre, il estime que le discours utopique permet de représenter la négativité de la norme, alors que les communautés du libre sont en quête d'une « bonne » loi, c'est-à-dire d'une norme ouverte.
Concernant la notion de mythe, les Grecs la considéraient comme une clé d'interprétation du monde réel, permettant de démêler le vrai du faux. L'emploi de ce terme pour évoquer l'internet constituerait donc un abus de langage. Il permet néanmoins de réintroduire la notion du collectif. D. Pucheu, rapprochant l'évangélisme religieux du XIXème siècle outre-Atlantique et l'évangélisme des techniques, y observe le leit motiv d'un « présent mythique » qui sert d'instrument politique de mobilisation.

Face aux multiples sens que revêt la notion d'imaginaires et à la fragilité des frontières entre cette notion et celles qui lui sont souvent associées, deux conclusions s'imposent : il est nécessaire d'aborder l'imaginaire des technologies au pluriel et non au singulier ; les "imaginaires" et les notions qui en sont proches ont leur utilité comme outil d'analyse des TIC puisque représentations et pratiques sont liées. D. Pucheu évoque ici Durkheim, pour qui une société se bâtit en fonction de la façon dont elle se représente : société imaginée et société réelle interagissent.

Méthodes d'analyse des imaginaires

De la même façon que la notion d'imaginaires revêt une multitude de significations, à leur analyse correspondent plusieurs méthodes, différentes mais complémentaires.

La diversité des approches
Lors de son intervention, A. Lakel reprend l'approche de P. Flichy, pour qui il existe deux tendances principales dans la recherche en sciences de l'information et de la communication : la méthode microsociologique et la méthode macrosociologique. Flichy utilise la métaphore du « collège invisible » : il étudie des ouvrages dominants et populaires, qui deviennent des sources pour déceler des items récurrents, et ainsi mettre en évidence l'existence d'un système permanent qui "bégaie" à travers l'histoire. Selon A. Lakel, la limite de cette méthode serait sa dimension d'« approche sociologique idéale », où les acteurs produisent des idées qui ont un effet d'entraînement, qui participe à l'adhésion d'autres acteurs.
P. Robert, suite à une étude réalisée sur les représentations du bug de l'an 2000 dans la presse, distingue d'autres outils, selon lui mieux adaptés à l'analyse des imaginaires des TIC :

La notion de macro-techno discours.
Inventée par Dominique Janicaud, elle désigne des relais informationnels perfectionnant la technicisation planétaire, sans pour autant être des discours parasitaires. Le macro-techno discours pénètre en profondeur dans les médias, mais aussi dans la société. Il permet de retirer l'informatique et les TIC des épreuves de justification politiques et éthiques, et ainsi de ne renvoyer la technique qu'à elle-même.

La notion d'impensé.
Dans une situation de vulnérabilité, la technique est considérée comme la solution au problème … de la technique ! L'homme n'est vu de manière positive qu'à travers la figure de l'expert (l'homme-technique). La neutralité de la technique, la confiance dans la performance technique forment l'impensé d'un discours à la fois culpabilisateur et salvateur, mais aussi « confiscateur » de responsabilité.

Pour L. Monnoyer-Smith, cette grille d'analyse comporte une lacune : en réduisant la technique à l'informatique et en mobilisant la notion de macro-techno discours, on laisse de l'espace à l'impensé, mais si l'on analyse en même temps la production du discours sur la technique et les pratiques techniques observables, on n'arrive pas aux mêmes résultats.
L'utilisation du concept d'impensé est, selon P. Mathias, légitime face à l'impossibilité de justifier les valeurs, alors que pour L. Monnoyer-Smith, l'analyse des pratiques offre un espace pour penser les valeurs. F. Massit-Folléa ajoute que les valeurs ne devraient être saisies que dans une dynamique, et non comme des catégories formelles intangibles. A fortiori pour un système socio-technique qui encore à ce jour est modelé par une vision unilatérale, occidentale, de l'universel. Les pratiques évoquées sont peut-être plus proches « culturellement » les unes des autres que les principes et les discours qui les sous-tendent.

La complémentarité des méthodes
A. Laborde, qui a travaillé sur les imaginaires des techniques à travers l'exemple du télégraphe optique, insiste sur la nécessaire complémentarité des analyses qualitatives et quantitatives. Son travail sur les articles de presse a permis de montrer la redondance des discours produits sur la technique. La limite de cette méthode est, selon elle, la possible reconstruction a posteriori d'un imaginaire passé, et la confusion entre l'imaginaire du passé et le passé de l'imaginaire. Cette première approche a donc été couplée à une analyse statistique de discours recourant au logiciel ALCESTE. Les analyses lexicales sur de très grands corpus permettent de définir des « mondes lexicaux » et de mettre en évidence des thèmes récurrents sur de longues périodes, mais renouvelés selon les époques.
P. Musso complète cette intervention en soulignant que le discours des acteurs des politiques publiques est important en soi à étudier, en complément de son reflet dans la presse.

Les imaginaires des TIC : quelques particularités

Les discussions et interventions de cette journée ont permis de déceler un certain continuum des représentations des techniques dans le temps, avec des thèmes récurrents, mais chaque fois modelés par le contexte de l'époque. Elles ont également permis de cerner quelques particularités des imaginaires des TIC, parmi lesquelles la signification de la critique des TIC et le déni d'interrogation des usagers vis-à-vis des technologies qu'ils utilisent.

L'impossible critique
S. Labelle, qui a étudié les discours publics sur la société de l'information, a constaté qu'ils véhiculaient explicitement les pré-supposés du renouveau de la citoyenneté, du progrès social, de la transparence, tout en les définissant comme les objectifs à atteindre. On cherche à traiter le déficit démocratique par l'innovation technologique, en minimisant le rôle des acteurs, les médiations et les conflits. Ces discours mobilisent les mêmes symboles : risque de déclin et besoin de rattrapage technologique, cadre de la concurrence internationale et nécessité d'adaptation. Toute critique est alors interprétée comme une résistance au progrès.
D. Forest rappelle que Ph. Breton interprète cette absence de débat comme un reflet de ce qu'il nomme « l'idéologie de la communication », assortie d' « incompétence démocratique ».
La démarche critique aurait ainsi atteint, selon P. Robert, ses limites : il faut lui adjoindre une proposition conceptuelle, de modélisation et de catégorisation, dans la recherche en sciences sociales. Un chantier tout juste ouvert …

Le déni d'interrogation
Lors de son intervention, C. Faure a pointé une forte tendance des discours politiques à nier l'ambiguïté des implications sociales des TIC. Mais cette négation peut-être interprétée, selon L. Monnoyer-Smith, comme la conséquence de la vision libérale, voire l'expression d'un impensé, plutôt que comme une réelle volonté politique d'évitement. A. Laborde souligne que si le XIXème siècle a créé un cadre de débat public sur la technique et les expériences techniques, aujourd'hui les « usagers » des techniques ne sont ni enclins ni conviés à ouvrir la « boite noire ».
F. Muguet constate à son tour que ce déni débouche sur un « univers magique », qui entraîne une scission dans la population entre une minorité de technologues et une majorité d'usagers qui naturalisent les instruments proposés, au prix de l'ignorance de leurs propres pratiques, avec toutes les conséquences négatives qui peuvent en découler.

Si un effort d'éducation est nécessaire pour se soustraire à l'emprise des « imaginaires » imposés, il ne peut cependant se limiter à des apprentissages mécaniques car l'internet peut aussi être lieu et source d'imaginaires créatifs, d'un « entrelacs de discursivités » (P. Mathias) que nous produisons même sans en connaître les mécanismes de production.
La recherche en sciences de l'information et de la communication est ainsi fondée à s'intéresser à la matérialité des expériences individuelles et collectives de l'internet autant qu'à la production des discours mobilisateurs ou mystificateurs sur les imaginaires des TIC.

Une bibliographie ainsi qu'un résumé des interventions sont disponibles dans la partie "Documents" située à droite de l'écran. Si vous souhaitez compléter la bibliographie, merci d'adresser les références complémentaires à l'adresse contact@voxinternet.org.

A democratic Internet ?

Andrew Feenberg — 2008-03-04T13:20:00Z

Andrew Feenberg, philosophe de la technologie, titulaire d'une chaire de recherche à la Simon Fraser University (Vancouver), était l'invité d'un séminaire Vox Internet, organisé en collaboration avec les programmes thématiques de recherche sur les TIC de la FMSH, à la Maison Suger (Paris), le vendredi 25 janvier 2008. Son intervention, dont le titre était "A democratic internet ?" s'inscrit dans le droit fil de sa "trilogie" dont seul le dernier volume a été traduit en français : "(Re)penser la technique", La Découverte, 2004.

My title ends in a question mark for the very good reason that the Internet is still in question. It is not a fully developed technology like the refrigerator or the electric razor. We do not yet know what its final form will be. That has not prevented a huge outpouring of literature hyping the Internet as the solution to all our problems or criticizing it as a looming catastrophe. In fact this controversy is the best evidence that the Internet is not a finished work. The case cannot be closed while the debate continues with such fierce intensity.

In the early days, the Internet was called ARPANET, after the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the defense department that specialized in “blue sky” projects, projects so wild and speculative no normal government agency dared fund them. The engineers associated with its early development were enthusiasts who believed their work would have enormous beneficial impacts. They prophesied a global community organized by computer networks. One of these early enthusiasts, Vinton Cerf, waxed poetic in his “Requiem for the APRANET. He wrote :

Like distant islands sundered by the sea,
we had no sense of one community.
We lived and worked apart and rarely knew
that others searched with us for knowledge, too...

But, could these new resources not be shared ?
Let links be built ; machines and men be paired !
Let distance be no barrier ! They set
that goal : design and build the ARPANET !

Fortunately, Cerf is a better engineer than poet !
The Internet gradually went public in the 1980s, but even before that social commentators were prophesying great things from computer mediated communication. In 1978 Murray Turoff and Roxanne Hiltz published a serious work of analysis and prediction entitled The Network Nation. They foresaw widespread adoption of computer networking for telework and education. They believed networking would promote gender equality and speculated that electronic discussion and voting would revivify the public sphere in democratic societies.

They may have over-estimated the transformative power of their favorite technology, but their projections were modest compared to many that came afterwards. According to a whole new genre of Internet hype, networking was a change comparable in significance to the Industrial Revolution and would soon transform every aspect of our daily lives. Cities would be depopulated as people retreated to electronic cottages in the woods. Government as we know it would be replaced by continuous electronic plebiscites. Artificial intelligences would learn our preferences and control the mechanical world around us without our having to lift a finger. Even sex would be transformed through remote access to virtual partners.

Naturally, the hype called forth its demystification. The technology critic David Noble wrote "visions of democratization and popular empowerment via the net are dangerous delusions ; whatever the gains, they are overwhelmingly overshadowed and more than nullified by the losses. As the computer screens brighten with promise for the few, the light at the end of the tunnel grows dimmer for the many".

Noble expressed the widespread skepticism about the Internet that appeared in the 1990s as it became a theme of popular discussion. Social critics point to a number of phenomena that seem to them inimical to democracy. Some argue that the digital divide excludes the poor from participation while enhancing the powers of the well-to-do. Others complain that people segregate themselves on the Internet from those with whom they disagree so that discussion there merely reinforces preexisting prejudices. Still others argue that the Internet is so thoroughly colonized by business that it is little more than an electronic mall.

But, of all these critiques, the most serious challenges the ability of the Internet to support real human communication and therefore human community. Without face-to-face contact, it is said, people cannot take each other seriously enough to form a community. How can moral roles bind us and real consequences flow from interactions that are no more durable than a flicker on the screen ?
In this talk I respond to these criticisms and argue that the Internet does have value for democratic deliberation. I do not want to exaggerate the significance of the Internet. It will not replace our customary democratic institutions with a universal electronic town hall meeting. On the other hand, the contrary exaggeration seems to me to reflect a lack of perspective. It threatens to blind us to real possibilities that should be seized rather than dismissed. These possibilities have to do with online community, supported by the Internet, and given over, as the critics note, to endless talk. But discussion lies at the heart of a democratic polity. Any new scene on which it unfolds enhances the public sphere.

Complaints about the Internet are similar to complaints about television broadcasting and in fact it seems that bad experience with the latter has shaped negative expectations about the former. Recall that television promised a “global village” in which new solidarities would arise from easy access to information about other peoples and their problems. It is true that global information circulates on the evening news but broadcasting is also used for propaganda and to influence lifestyle choices. Aldous Huxley published Brave New World in the early 1930s, only a few years after the first commercial radio broadcasts, but already his dystopian vision of a totally manipulated public captured the very real threat. Many social critics seem to have concluded that technical mediation as such leads to mass alienation. Can the Internet be squeezed into this same pattern ? I do not believe so.

The difference between television and the Internet is a consequence of their different technical structures. In broadcasting a single source sends out messages to a mass audience. The Internet enables reciprocal communication among small groups. The members of these groups both receive and emit information. There is a return here to the normal pattern of human communication in which listening and speaking roles alternate rather than being distributed exclusively to one or another interlocutor.

The original military design of the Internet comes to the aid of ordinary users by rendering it difficult to transform it into a broadcast technology. Military planners were more interested in survivability than control. The telephone network is too vulnerable because it depends on a central computer to connect up correspondents. A single bomb could take out the whole system by hitting this center, but packet switching makes it possible to route messages on the Internet through many different computers and so the system does not depend on the survival of any one of its nodes. This design is non-hierarchical and redundant, qualities that turned out to privilege the free flow of information and innovation. The persistence of these features poses significant problems for business and repressive governments while also enabling both public spirited and socially stigmatized activities to go on unhindered.
The possibility of normal reciprocal communication on the Internet should interest us more than it does. This is in fact the first technical mediation of small group activity. The huge range of human activities that go on in small groups was not technically mediated previously and therefore could only be carried out in face-to-face settings. That limitation is now overcome and this is an important advance that we tend to overlook since it seems so obvious after 20 years of widespread online communication.

What is missing in the critics' accounts is any sense of the great victory represented by ordinary human communication on the Internet. There is a long history of communication technologies introduced for broadcasting or purely official usages that ended up as instruments of informal human interaction. The telephone, for example, was originally intended for serious business conversation. When women appropriated it to organize the social life of their families, engineers complained bitterly about the waste of their beautiful instrument. Even more surprising, the telephone was at first imagined as a broadcasting technology. In the early days, several companies distributed live musical performance to subscribers. In France the Théâtrophone company thrived until 1920 broadcasting operas.
The Internet story is similar as we will see, but in fact there is an earlier precedent in the history of computer networking. The first successful domestic network was not the Internet but the French Minitel. Concerned about the slowness of computerization in France, the government established a network based on technology similar to that of the Internet. Six million free Minitel terminals were distributed to telephone subscribers in the early 1980s. These terminals were designed to consult a national electronic phone directory, to display news and classified ads, to view train schedules, examination results, and other official documents. But soon after the system was deployed hackers introduced instant messaging. It did not take long for this unexpected application to become the Minitel's single most important usage. Ironically most of the messaging consisted in the search for dates and sex. The cool new information medium was transformed into a hot electronic singles bar.

Like the Minitel network, the Internet was not originally designed to support human communication. The earliest version of the Internet was intended to test a new communication technology, and not to enhance human communication. After World War II, military planners were convinced that American power depended on scientific research, and they believed the scientists who told them that research depended on communication and collaboration. The Pentagon hoped that university scientists would share computing resources and data over a new kind of packet switching network.

Soon after the introduction of the new system, at a time when it connected only a few universities, a graduate student introduced an e-mail program. Back at the Pentagon the leaders of the project met to decide if human communication was a legitimate usage. Like the early telephone company engineers, they were disturbed by wasteful socializing. Fortunately, they agreed to allow the experiment in e-mail to continue. We inherit the consequence of that decision.

To get an idea of its significance consider this example. Suppose that you were forbidden to engage in any but official communication in your workplace. In other words language could only be used for sanctioned purposes. We would surely find such severe censorship totalitarian. The Internet could have been configured technically in just this way. The result would have been the enhancement of official communication in business and government institutions with no corresponding enhancement of the informal communication in which daily life goes on, including the daily conversations of political significance that form the basis of the democratic public sphere.
This example indicates the need for a different approach to understanding the Internet from that taken by its severest critics. They overlook the human significance of the technology. They focus on the triviality of most of the communications but they fail to realize that without a channel for trivial speech, there is no place for serious speech. We have no record of the conversations in those 18th and 19th century pubs and coffee houses idealized (perhaps rightly) as the birthplaces of the public sphere, but no doubt in their precincts too much time was wasted. Rather than comparing the Internet unfavorably with edited cultural products like newspapers, it would make more sense to compare it with the social interactions that take place on the street. The coexistence there of the good, the bad and the trivial is normal, not an offense to good taste or intellectual standards because we have no expectation of uniform quality. In what follows I will outline an approach that allows for the dross and also the gold in the flood of words on the Internet.

I intend to do this through an account of the public role of online community on the Internet. I will not discuss the myriad examples of democratic politics in the usual sense of the term. By now these are familiar : the use of the Internet by the Zapatista movement in Mexico, protests against the WTO and the IMF, opposition to the War in Iraq, political campaigns, and many other similar interventions. Particularly significant is the development of a sustained effort to report the news independent of the major news outlets. The Internet has broken the near monopoly of the business and government dominated official press and television networks by enabling activists to speak directly to millions of Internet users.

These examples seem to me to provide strong evidence for my position, but they need to be grounded in more fundamental considerations on the nature of the technology and its potentials. A theoretical framework must give them substance. After all, they might be odd exceptions without larger significance and the Internet defined by its role in the distribution of information, goods and pornography. My main concern in what follows is to develop a coherent alternative to this critical assessment. To anticipate my conclusion, I will argue that political usages of the Internet are instances of a much broader phenomenon, the emergence of new forms of agency in online communities of all sorts.

I want to begin by introducing some essential methodological considerations. As I noted at the beginning of this talk, it is a commonplace error to consider the Internet finished and complete before it has actually achieved its final shape. Critics repeatedly generalize from rapidly changing characteristics to timeless conclusions that are soon outdated by further changes. But how can we evaluate a technology that is still in process, that is radically incomplete ? This problem has been addressed by the constructivist approaches to technology studies.

The chief idea shared by these approaches is negative : the success of a technology is not fully explained by its technical achievements. There are always alternative paths of development at the outset and social forces determine which are pursued and which fall by the wayside. Behind each of the technical devices that surround us there lies a halo of alternatives that were eliminated at some stage and which we have forgotten or notice only in the quaint illustrations of old books. What is called the principle of “underdetermination” teaches us that technical considerations alone cannot explain why we are living with this particular survivor of the process of elimination rather than that one, why for example we drive gas powered rather than electric cars.

To make matters still more complicated, the struggle between alternatives is not a straightforward competition to achieve the same goal. Subtle differences in goals are often at stake in the contest between means. Approximately the same technology, with a slightly different design, can serve the interests and needs of very different social groups.

This constructivist approach represents technologies not as things but as processes in more or less rapid movement. The process pulls at first in several different directions but is finally stabilized in a single more or less durable form. Because our lives move quickly with respect to these stabilized forms, it appears that they are finished and fixed rather than temporary arrangements that may enter into flux again at a future date. We assume the functions they serve are the obvious ones similar technologies ought to serve rather than noticing the contingency of their purpose on a particular configuration of social forces that interpreted the problems in a certain way at the outset. Constructivism aims to overcome this illusion in order to restore a more accurate picture of the process of development.

To apply the constructivist approach to the Internet, we need to identify the various versions of it that currently coexist and from among which a selection will finally be made. Note that the closure of the Internet around one or another of these possible configurations does not preclude the survival of the others in subordinate roles. Although operas are no longer heard on the telephone, radio and television broadcasting accommodate many usages. At its inception radio broadcasting was dominated by education and public programming and television was originally conceived for surveillance and education. Both quickly fell under the domination of business oriented networks and are defined today as entertainment media. Other usages were not excluded but the technical and legal dimensions of these alternatives are largely determined by the requirements of entertainment.

Critics of the Internet believe something similar has already happened to it, but they exaggerate the extent of business control so far achieved as I am sure most business people would agree. A truly business oriented network like the Minitel offers possibilities unthinkable on the Internet. The French system was designed to calculate the time each user spent on each service so as to collect revenue through the telephone bill, which could then be shared between the telephone company and the service provider. The X.25 network protocol employed by the French made this possible while also complicating the internationalization of the system. The Internet's IP protocol is unable to provide such a high degree of precision in tracking users, but it has features which have enabled it to spread over the entire globe. Business is a latecomer to the Internet and it is still struggling to gain better control of the system.
I identify three possible futures for the Internet which I call “models” since they aspire to define the dominant features of the technology. Each of these models represents a possible configuration that might have prevailed in the past or that may prevail in the future. I will call them the information model, the consumption model, and the community model. As we will see only the community model bears the democratic potential of the Internet.

The Information Model
This model presided over the early Internet and similar systems such as the Minitel network in France. It aims at improving the distribution of information, a function that the Internet fulfils and will undoubtedly continue to fulfil so long as it exists. The information model is not just an implementation of a technical function. It depends on a larger vision in which the widest possible access to information contributes to a higher level of rationalization of society as a whole. This vision reflects sociological theories of the information age according to which knowledge is replacing industrial production as the most important activity in advanced societies. This idea inspired attempts to spread the information model from professional to domestic settings in the 1980s in France and a decade later on the Internet. In fact it quickly became apparent that personal communication was far more attractive to users of these systems than any economically significant exchange of information. Thus the information model has little chance to prevail as an overall interpretation of the meaning of the Internet.

The consumption model
It is a curious and little known fact that the early Internet was virulently hostile to business. Attempts to sell goods and services on the system were severely repressed. An individual who scandalized the community by engaging in commercial activity would be attacked by hundreds, even thousands, of hostile emails and hackers would go after him. But once the decision was made in the early 1990s to allow commercial activity on the Internet, a tidal wave of corporate initiatives swept over the rather sedate virtual space occupied by individual users and universities. The Internet was the technology behind the famous dotcom boom and even the later bust did not diminish the pace of business activity in cyberspace for long. Today Internet based markets are a factor in the prosperity of nations.
This new type of market inexpensively links up people and goods over a global territory. The most profitable Internet businesses resemble E-Bay in stocking little or no inventory, but in delivering a smooth connection between supply and demand. Although email remains the most used function of the Internet, e-business does not lag far behind.

The consumption model has enormous potential for growth because film and television have not yet been fully adapted for delivery over the Internet. We can expect a huge boost in consumption usages when recorded entertainment is readily available. Already this prospect is pressing on the legislative agenda of the United States government. Entertainment companies and Internet service providers are anxious to obtain the legal right to convert the Internet into an enhanced version of television by privileging high speed delivery of entertainment over other functions served by the system.

This would be the end of “network neutrality,” the current rule under which all types of communication are treated equally. If the companies prevail, the Internet may soon become impractical for communication and public usages as bandwidth is monopolized by profit making enterprise. While so far this is primarily an American debate, its effects will be felt worldwide, as is the case with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Further development of the technology would undoubtedly follow along lines determined in the US. The triumph of the consumption model would thus transform both the dominant interpretation of the system and its technology.

The community model
This is the model that most resembles the Internet as we know it today in which free communication prevails in cyberspace. The two main types of personal communication are individual email and various forms of group communication such as listservs, forums, blogs, and social sites. These have most recently been joined by new sites and services, including Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, Blogs, Wikis, and RSS content syndication, often referred to collectively as Web 2.0. Communities form around these spaces of virtual social interaction. This is significant because community is the primary scene of human communication and personal development. It is in this context that people judge the world around them and discuss their judgments with others. Any technology that offers new possibilities for the formation of community is thus democratically significant.

The conditions of community are both social and technical. The essence of the community model is reciprocity. Each participant is both reader or viewer and publisher. To maintain this structure, the community model requires the continued neutrality of the network so that unprofitable or politically controversial communication will not be marginalized. It must be possible to introduce innovative designs for new forms of association without passing through bureaucratic or commercial gate keepers. The involvement of open source developers and other unpaid volunteers is essential and cannot be expected to survive a commercial take-over of cyberspace. Embedding a strict regime of intellectual property in the technology of the system would surely be incompatible with free communicative interaction. Should community prevail, commercial, entertainment and informational applications would find their place, but they could not dominate the evolution of the system with their special technical requirements. Indeed, we can expect business to adapt to the requirements of community. The process has already begun with the commercial takeover of certain community sites as platforms for advertising.

Commentators noted early that online communities form around a shared interest or concern. In this they differ from geographically based communities in which a far more mixed population is related by place. Is this good or bad ? Disadvantaged publics can pool their forces online and increase their impact. This has made it possible for ordinary Americans to raise huge sums of money for political candidates who might have been swamped at the polls by adversaries with the support of a few wealthy businessmen or party organizations. On the other hand, public debate involves disagreement and it is said that debate is sidetracked by the homogeneity of Internet groups. Whether this is really true is unclear but even if it is, practically no one associates only with like-minded interlocutors on the Internet. Everyone has many other contacts in which the opportunity for disagreement arises.

These familiar debates overlook a more important issue. The most innovative democratic implications of the Internet are only beginning to emerge, and they have less to do with traditional politics than with new forms of agency that will redefine and enlarge the sphere of politics. What we commonly identify as politics on the Internet is merely an instance of this broader phenomenon. A new kind of social activism is emerging in the myriad online communities that populate cyberspace. To understand this new form of public life we will need to reconsider how we think about technology once more.

Technology resembles a code of laws that together determines the framework of our lives and decides important political questions in the shape it gives our social relations as we use it. And like legislation, technology represents the interests and concerns of some better than others. Just as it is possible to trace out the links between laws and those they represent, so technologies can be said to represent their users. This is a reason to prefer a democratic technological regime which, like political democracy, enables the broadest possible representation.
But there are also important differences between politics and technology. The idea of representation is traditionally tied to geographical locality on the presumption that those who live close together share common interests and are able to meet to discuss them. Of course there are likely to be disagreements but so long as communication is possible, conflicts can be resolved by legitimate means such as voting. The resultant consensus makes it possible for the community to feel itself fairly represented.

But in modern societies, geographical proximity is no longer the only or principal tie people share. As we move into a more advanced phase of technological development, the rather narrow definition of politics inherited from the preindustrial past is less and less plausible. More and more aspects of social life are conditioned by commonalities among people who share a similar relation to the vast technical systems that shape most social life. Technologically advanced societies enrol their members in a wide variety of technical networks that define careers, education, leisure, medical care, communication, and life environments. These networks overlay the geographical communities and compete with them in significance in the lives of citizens. Shared concerns, which I call “participant interests,” arise in this context.

The representation of technically mediated communities is complicated by the role of experts in the creation and operation of technical networks. Experts represent the community constituted by a technical network in the sense that they implement some fraction of the participant interests of its members. But expertise is based on technical knowledge which, unlike the wisdom sought in political representatives, is cumulative and must be acquired through extensive training. Like technologies, technical disciplines are underdetermined and realize specific social interests in technically rational forms. These bodies of technical knowledge transmitted to successive generations of experts contain the outcome of past struggles over design. Current designs are responsive to this technical inheritance and to the agency of current participants bringing pressure to bear on those in control of technology.
Obtaining adequate representation was well beyond the means of almost all technically mediated populations in the days before the Internet. Only groups organized around politics in the traditional sense were also able to function effectively as technical pressure groups. The labor movement, for example, was able to impress governments with the importance of health and safety rules for industry. The movement for Gay rights was able to influence the health system with demands for access to experimental AIDS drugs. But most participants in technical networks went unmobilized and it appeared that some sort of technocratic order would be the outcome of further technological advance.

Already in the 1920s John Dewey foresaw the problems that would result. He worried that traditional local community was losing its integrity in a mobile modern society. New forms of technically mediated community were needed to replace or supplement localism, but these were not easy to create. The new links being forged by the advancing technical system were still inarticulate. Dewey described the dilemma as follows :

Indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of conjoint and interacting behavior call a public into existence having a common interest in controlling these consequences. But the machine age has so enormously expanded, multiplied, intensified and complicated the scope of the indirect consequences, have formed such immense and consolidated unions in action, on an impersonal rather than a community basis, that the resultant public cannot identify and distinguish itself.

Dewey hoped that the new possibilities of communication supported by modern technology would help to solve this problem. But he remained caught in the dilemma he so presciently identified—large scale technical networks as the form of our social future, and local community as the only possible site of true democratic deliberation.
This has begun to change. Technical communities have begun to use the Internet to coordinate their demands for a fuller representation of their interests. Despite discouraging developments in other domains, agency in the technical sphere is on the rise. The ease of communication on the Internet has made it possible for these new communities to organize. These new forms of online politics cannot replace traditional geographically based representation, but their existence has extended the public sphere to embrace technical issues formerly considered neutral and given over to experts to decide without consultation. This has had the effect of creating a social and technical environment in which agency in the traditional domain of politics has begun to recover from the passivity induced by a steady diet of broadcasting.

In conclusion, I will mention a few examples.

Medicine
Patients meet and support each other on the Internet to an unprecedented extent. In 1995 I studied an early example, a discussion forum for patients with the rare neurologic disease ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease). The patients exchanged social support, lore about living with the disease, and information about medical experimentation. This new type of patient organization defied standard assumptions about the sick role. Instead of waiting in isolation for individual help from the medical profession, the patients worked together to further their interests. They eventually brought pressure to bear on the ALS Society of America to demand larger budgets and changed policies from the National Institutes of Health. Prior to the creation of the ALS forum, the ALS Society represented their interests to the medical community without any clear mandate. Today similar patient forums proliferate on the Internet and create a very different social environment for medicine (Feenberg, et al., 1996).

Music sharing
Everyone is familiar with the emergence of networks for the sharing of MP3s. This is a response to the conservatism of the established record companies. Between an $18 album with one good song and a free or 99 cent download of that same song, there is no competition. The huge overhead of top heavy music companies forms an obstacle to adaptation. But the issue here is not merely economic. Music has always been an important social activity, mobilizing and gathering the community for pleasure. The invention of individual listening is recent and the packaging of music as a commodity even more recent. The celebrity cult that goes along with these innovations has an unhealthy aspect. A very different musical world with far more space for more musicians and their performances appears likely to emerge in the new situation created by the Internet. Online music sharing appears to contribute to a restoration of music as a social activity, a return to its historic role in social life.

Software
Software users form an invisible community that has until recently been helpless before gigantic firms such as Microsoft which are notoriously indifferent to users' demands. But the software business is young. In the early days of the IBM mainframe, users rather than commercial suppliers developed software. Habits of free exchange acquired then gradually merged with an ideological movement for free and open source software initiated by Richard Stallman in 1985. The rapid development of the field thereafter has had a huge impact on the Internet. Each open source project gathers an online community that tests the programs and suggests or actually codes improvements. Software users and producers are no longer separated by the barrier of commercial enterprise but like readers and writers in other types of online forums, can exchange places and engage reciprocally with each other.

Video games
The video game industry is now larger than Hollywood and engages millions of subscribers in online multiplayer games. The players' gaming activities are of course structured by the game itself, but online communities organize them in informal relationships that the industry does not control. These online forums are venues for various unexpected appropriations of the game environment. For example, players auction items acquired in games for real money. Hackers have modified games and the modified versions have occasionally become popular. Legal issues arise in such cases since players usually agree to extremely restrictive policies when they subscribe. So far companies have generally responded to violations by protesting at first, but in most cases they soon ignore the violators or modify their policies to accommodate them. The online game world thus supports a certain degree of interaction between customers and suppliers, different from what we have come to expect from television and film.

Online education
The invention of online education goes back to the early 1980s. Only online discussion was possible then and so a pedagogy developed based on dialogue and collaboration. In the late 1990s, university administrations were attracted by the still unfulfilled promise of automated learning on the Internet. The collapse of that project has left a confusing situation in which online education means very different things to different people. Millions of students use online sites and forums today. Many of them are adult learners who would not be able to study in a traditional university setting. The reciprocal communicative potential of online education represents a great improvement over the one way model of traditional distance learning. For other students, online education offers opportunities for discussion as a supplement to lectures held in a conventional classroom setting. This too seems an improvement over the traditional lecture course. Nevertheless, there is a risk that because it is a new and poorly understood technology, online education will provide a cover for the reduction of education to the mechanical delivery of materials. The struggle over the future of the Internet is paralleled by this controversy over how best to employ it in education.

I will conclude with these examples. They suggest a significant change in the way we live. The return of agency in these various domains may appear non-political but what is democracy if not the activity of individuals in determining their own collective life ? And to the extent that so much of life is now mediated by technology, more and more of it becomes available for these new forms of community control. Let's be clear : This is not a revolution and its effects are still small enough to be ignored. But give it ten more years and we will see if I am right to argue that the Internet has made a difference.

That is, if the community model is able to sustain itself. This is the ultimate challenge : to preserve the conditions of community on the Internet. A democratic Internet ? That depends on the capacity of ordinary users to defend its democratic potential in the coming years.

A democratic Internet ?

2008-01-29T14:25:12Z

Andrew Feenberg, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University (Vancouver), was invited by the Vox Internet II project at the "Maison Suger" (Paris) on January 25th.

Like distant islands sundered by the sea,
we had no sense of one community.
We lived and worked apart and rarely knew
that others searched with us for knowledge, too...

But, could these new resources not be shared?
Let links be built; machines and men be paired!
Let distance be no barrier! They set
that goal: design and build the ARPANET!

Fortunately, Cerf is a better engineer than poet!
The Internet gradually went public in the 1980s, but even before that social commentators were prophesying great things from computer mediated communication. In 1978 Murray Turoff and Roxanne Hiltz published a serious work of analysis and prediction entitled The Network Nation. They foresaw widespread adoption of computer networking for telework and education. They believed networking would promote gender equality and speculated that electronic discussion and voting would revivify the public sphere in democratic societies.

Naturally, the hype called forth its demystification. The technology critic David Noble wrote "visions of democratization and popular empowerment via the net are dangerous delusions; whatever the gains, they are overwhelmingly overshadowed and more than nullified by the losses. As the computer screens brighten with promise for the few, the light at the end of the tunnel grows dimmer for the many".

But, of all these critiques, the most serious challenges the ability of the Internet to support real human communication and therefore human community. Without face-to-face contact, it is said, people cannot take each other seriously enough to form a community. How can moral roles bind us and real consequences flow from interactions that are no more durable than a flicker on the screen?
In this talk I respond to these criticisms and argue that the Internet does have value for democratic deliberation. I do not want to exaggerate the significance of the Internet. It will not replace our customary democratic institutions with a universal electronic town hall meeting. On the other hand, the contrary exaggeration seems to me to reflect a lack of perspective. It threatens to blind us to real possibilities that should be seized rather than dismissed. These possibilities have to do with online community, supported by the Internet, and given over, as the critics note, to endless talk. But discussion lies at the heart of a democratic polity. Any new scene on which it unfolds enhances the public sphere.

I intend to do this through an account of the public role of online community on the Internet. I will not discuss the myriad examples of democratic politics in the usual sense of the term. By now these are familiar: the use of the Internet by the Zapatista movement in Mexico, protests against the WTO and the IMF, opposition to the War in Iraq, political campaigns, and many other similar interventions. Particularly significant is the development of a sustained effort to report the news independent of the major news outlets. The Internet has broken the near monopoly of the business and government dominated official press and television networks by enabling activists to speak directly to millions of Internet users.

I want to begin by introducing some essential methodological considerations. As I noted at the beginning of this talk, it is a commonplace error to consider the Internet finished and complete before it has actually achieved its final shape. Critics repeatedly generalize from rapidly changing characteristics to timeless conclusions that are soon outdated by further changes. But how can we evaluate a technology that is still in process, that is radically incomplete? This problem has been addressed by the constructivist approaches to technology studies.

The chief idea shared by these approaches is negative: the success of a technology is not fully explained by its technical achievements. There are always alternative paths of development at the outset and social forces determine which are pursued and which fall by the wayside. Behind each of the technical devices that surround us there lies a halo of alternatives that were eliminated at some stage and which we have forgotten or notice only in the quaint illustrations of old books. What is called the principle of “underdetermination” teaches us that technical considerations alone cannot explain why we are living with this particular survivor of the process of elimination rather than that one, why for example we drive gas powered rather than electric cars.

Commentators noted early that online communities form around a shared interest or concern. In this they differ from geographically based communities in which a far more mixed population is related by place. Is this good or bad? Disadvantaged publics can pool their forces online and increase their impact. This has made it possible for ordinary Americans to raise huge sums of money for political candidates who might have been swamped at the polls by adversaries with the support of a few wealthy businessmen or party organizations. On the other hand, public debate involves disagreement and it is said that debate is sidetracked by the homogeneity of Internet groups. Whether this is really true is unclear but even if it is, practically no one associates only with like-minded interlocutors on the Internet. Everyone has many other contacts in which the opportunity for disagreement arises.

In conclusion, I will mention a few examples.

I will conclude with these examples. They suggest a significant change in the way we live. The return of agency in these various domains may appear non-political but what is democracy if not the activity of individuals in determining their own collective life? And to the extent that so much of life is now mediated by technology, more and more of it becomes available for these new forms of community control. Let's be clear: This is not a revolution and its effects are still small enough to be ignored. But give it ten more years and we will see if I am right to argue that the Internet has made a difference.

That is, if the community model is able to sustain itself. This is the ultimate challenge: to preserve the conditions of community on the Internet. A democratic Internet? That depends on the capacity of ordinary users to defend its democratic potential in the coming years.

The history and conceptions of communication techniques

Vox Internet — 2006-03-12T23:00:00Z

Researchers, historians, sociologists, anthropologists and philosophers of technology have long demonstrated the role played by the utopian discourse and a posterioriconstructions that go along with technological innovation. Beyond ideological criticism, they have gradually brought up to date the full complexity of a discoursive regime with effects on reality. As ideological discourse, the "information society" proposes a reconstruction of social relations, suspending certain constraints, emphasizing others, in order to anticipate the banalization of a new technology. As a frontier object, the notion enters the social struggle and appears to be the mirror of the compromises or tensions between the various interest groups involved in an innovation's socio-technical construction. In the sense of conventionalists, it can even appear to be a form of institutionalization of a compromise putting an end to strategic negotiations - thus becoming a discoursive framework and, a priori, soon to be a cognitive one.

The Internet as a radical socio-technical innovation represents a very rich subject for this approach. Its material history has experienced and continues to experience numerous unexpected changes that make it an extremely dynamic and open field of study. The reach of the Internet's founding utopias is well known. But the Internet has become banalized, commercialized, institutionalized and politicized. All social forces have become involved therein, bringing to bear a large portion of their resources. E-commerce, governmental and international institutions, and the most diverse social and political groups and individuals have expressed multiple points of view corresponding to their strategic investment. Is it not now time to resume the socio-historical approach to computer science and ICT in order to demonstrate that the "information society" is a discourse and not a concept? In view of this, three main axes of study must be opened:

The first axis could be epistemological and heuristic. What do the sociology of innovation and the history of technology offer to an analysis of the public discourse on the Internet?

The second axis should be grounded not in the imagination but in the imaginary conceptions of the Internet. Indeed, while the discourse is inscribed sociologically and historically, its cognitive frameworks are numerous and shifting, and practices interact via struggles, alliances and negotiations. How does a technical infrastructure become a symbolic object? What does this mutation teach us about our societies?

The third axis would aim to rethink the social dimension and democratic status of technology. Is not the debate on technology's neutrality and pure instrumentality renewed by the phenomena of Internet multiple appropriations, which are inseparable from its technological development? Where, why and how are built the various norms that govern the workings of the network of network's macro-system?

Histoire et imaginaires des techniques d'information et de communication

Vox Internet — 2006-03-07T23:00:00Z

Depuis longtemps, les chercheurs, historiens, sociologues, anthropologues, philosophes des techniques ont démontré le rôle des discours utopiques et des constructions a posteriori qui accompagnent l'innovation technique. Au delà de la critique idéologique, ils ont progressivement mis à jour toute la complexité d'un régime discursif qui a des effets sur le réel. Comme discours idéologique, la « société de l'information » propose une reconstruction des rapports sociaux, mettant en suspens certaines contraintes, en valorisant d'autres, afin d'anticiper sur la diffusion d'une nouvelle technologie. Comme objet-frontière, la notion entre dans la bataille sociale et apparaît comme le miroir des compromis ou des tensions entre les différents groupes d'intérêts engagés dans la construction sociotechnique d'une innovation. Au sens des conventionnalistes, elle peut même apparaître comme une forme d'institutionnalisation d'un compromis assurant la fin des négociations stratégiques - devenant alors un cadre discursif et bientôt cognitif a priori.

L'Internet comme innovation sociotechnique radicale représente un objet très riche pour cette approche. Son histoire matérielle a connu et connaît encore de multiples rebondissements qui en font un champ d'étude extrêmement dynamique et ouvert. La portée des utopies fondatrices de l'Internet est désormais connue. Mais l'Internet s'est banalisé, marchandisé, institutionnalisé, politisé. Toutes les forces sociales s'y sont impliquées en engageant une grande partie de leurs ressources. L'e-commerce, les institutions gouvernementales et internationales, les groupes sociaux et politiques comme les individus les plus divers ont exprimé une multiplicité de points de vue conformes à leur investissement stratégique. N'est-il pas temps aujourd'hui de relancer l'approche socio-historique de l'informatique et des TIC pour démontrer que la « société de l'information » est un discours et non un concept ? Pour cela, il faudrait ouvrir trois axes d'études principaux.

Le premier axe pourrait être d'ordre épistémologique et heuristique. Quel apport la sociologie de l'innovation et l'histoire des techniques nous offrent-elles pour analyser le discours public sur l'Internet ?

Le deuxième axe devrait s'attacher non plus à l'imaginaire mais aux imaginaires de l'internet. En effet, si le discours est sociologiquement et historiquement inscrit, ses cadres cognitifs sont multiples, mouvants et les pratiques entrent en interactions à travers des luttes, alliances et négociations. Comment une infrastructure technique devient-elle un objet symbolique ? Qu'est-ce que cette mutation nous apprend sur nos sociétés ?

Le troisième axe viserait à réinterroger la dimension sociale de la technique et son statut démocratique. Le débat sur sa neutralité et sa pure instrumentalité n'est-il pas renouvelé par les phénomènes d'appropriation multiples de l'internet, consubstantiels à son développement technologique ? Où, à quelles fins et comment se construisent les normes de fonctionnement du macro-système du réseau de réseaux ?