Content area
Full Text
Michael Y. Dartnell, Insurgency Online: Web Activism and Global Conflict (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2006)
WHAT IS MEANT by the claim that politics increasingly speaks with an "Internet accent"? The title of Dartnell's book provides a good indication of the answer. According to Dartnell we are entering an era in which the Internet is becoming the media of choice, if not necessity, for marginalized non-state actors challenging the historical grip that states have had on the media and publicity. The results are potentially immense. States, claims Dartnell, are increasingly losing their control over their borders, territories, and identities.
Theoretically speaking the implications are also significant. This is particularly true of international relations realist theory which argues that "states and the principle of sovereignty shape the international system and provide a structure to contain the chaos of human diversity." (13) Today, Dartnell contends we are entering a post-realist era in which nonstate actors are, by means of the World Wide Web (www), able to produce and distribute information, thus providing a means of independently shaping public perceptions of events on a global basis. These changes are of such significance that Dartnell claims that "web media are part of a shift in politics that could be as far-reaching, profound, and unpredictable as the rise of print technology, mass literacy, and nationalism in the late eighteenth century." (15)
These are strong words indeed. However, in itself this is not a novel argument. Writings on the Internet and digital technologies tend to lean to either of two poles, the first a cyberpessimism in which the state and corporations "normalize" information technologies, the second a cyberoptimism in which its take on emancipatory qualities. While Dartnell leans towards the latter he makes more modest claims on the ability...