Net Neutrality| Closing the Technocratic Divide? Activist Intermediaries, Digital Form Letters, and Public Involvement in FCC Policy Making
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Building upon research suggesting activists enhance public involvement in technocratic policy-making processes through forms of digital intermediation, this study investigates the extent to which digital form letters address the structural and rhetorical subordination contributing to the technocratic divide. The ability of the general public to overcome this efficacy divide is assessed in the context of the FCC’s 2014 network neutrality deliberations. Results suggest that even though activists helped individuals overcome impediments to public involvement, including geographic distance from policymakers, deliberations during the workweek, and access to public comment systems, the finding that many comments were submitted via form letter suggests the public’s voice was largely absent. This raises questions about the ability of “slacktivist” tactics to advance public mobilization efforts and the difficult task faced by intermediaries attempting to bridge technocratic divides while avoiding principal–agent problems.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".