Reimagining How to Govern the Internet

Are we facing the danger of the Internet running out of all human control or, rather, are we facing the threat of an Internet panopticon? In Imagining the Internet, Robin Mansell argues that what we actually face is a “complexity paradox” (p. 3) where both dangers may be true. We are trapped, she argues, by an imaginative failure that is undermining our ability to mitigate either risk. Mansell’s priority is to address a political policy question: What can and what should we do to manage the Internet to enable its development in ways which will foster a “good society”? (Who exactly the “we” is or should be and where we should act is something to which I will return.) Imagining the Internet is a book about communications policy, although it expends little effort on examining actual policies. One could call it an investigation of metapolicy: a discussion about how we think and talk about directing and governing the Internet. Her approach begins by investigating how those who have shaped the Internet (as well as those who study it) imagine it to be. She continues by developing a critique of those imaginaries and proposing an alternative that could guide the Internet’s future direction. She believes this is a matter of some urgency: “There is a risk that the communication system is running out of control” (p. 27). Mansell posits that the dominant ways in which we imagine the Internet and the information society act as barriers to setting both the scope and the content of communication policies that could serve the public interest. The “imagining” of the title is not a psychological state. She adopts the speciac meaning of the term social imaginaries from the Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor, referring not to a set of ideas but to the sensemaking process of understanding—the ways of seeing—the social processes around us. The imaginaries she explores describe “the taken-for-granted notions, images and visions” (p. 6) of those engaged with the information society. As her book demonstrates, discussions of and debates about the Internet and the information society comprise a rich ground on which to apply the concept of the social imaginary. It is difacult to think of any major innovation in communications over the last half-century that has not been accompanied by vociferous and contested sense-making, often highly utopian or dystopian. Mansell’s investigation starts by searching for social imaginaries in an eclectic range of sources, from poetry and science action to UN reports, although she soon focuses on the social sciences. She identiaes the network of mathematicians, engineers, and economists who developed the aelds of cybernetics and information processing, starting in the 1940s, as the originators of what she argues is the dominant prevailing imaginary of the information society. She then identiaes sources of critical thought—primarily in political economy studies that have focused on power relationships in the communication system and in sociological accounts of online practices. She goes on to explore the development and roles of imaginaries among software system developers, governments, and civil society organizations and how these imaginaries play out in international policies and governance forums.

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