Summary
Introduction (pdf)
Chapter One,
"First Contact"
Chapter Three, "High-Tech
Orientalism"
Chapter Four,
"Stroking Keys"
Work Cited (pdf)
Appendices (pdf)
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Chapter Two,
“Pornocracy,”lays
out the consequences of and assumptions behind the narrative of the Internet
as public sphere. Through a reading of MCI’s corporate policy paper
and “Only Minds” commercial, and the Supreme and District Court’s decisions
declaring unconstitutional the Communications Decency Act, I argue that
portrayals of the Internet as race-, gender-, class- and age-free naively
correlate reading and writing with reasoning on the one hand, and agency
with mouse-clicking on the other. These portrayals of the Internet
as liberal public sphere also make invisible institutional and societal
responsibility for discrimination by depicting online communication as civil
interactions between autonomous, unmarked individuals. The Internet,
then, can only be called the most democratic medium to date, in the terms
of the Supreme Court decision, when everything that threatens the autonomy
and agency of an individual—namely pornography and physical and social differences—are
construed as accidental to this medium. However, rather than dismissing
the democratic possibilities of the Internet, I argue that the Internet
may open up the possibility for a new democratic public sphere. A
public sphere without stable identities or abstract formality, but rather
one that disrupts and that through invasion of private space enables a rigorous,
perhaps hostile, perhaps civil but never safe, encounter with others.
Summary |