Being Digital Citizens

by Engin Isin, Evelyn Ruppert

Overview

From the rise of cyberbullying and hactivism to the issues surrounding digital privacy rights and freedom of speech, the Internet is changing the ways in which we govern and are governed as citizens.

This book examines how citizens encounter and perform new sorts of rights, duties, opportunities and challenges through the Internet. By disrupting prevailing understandings of citizenship and cyberspace, the authors highlight the dynamic relationship between these two concepts. Rather than assuming that these are static or established “facts” of politics and society, the book shows how the challenges and opportunities presented by the Internet inevitably impact upon the action and understanding of political agency. In doing so, it investigates how we conduct ourselves in cyberspace through digital acts. This book provides a new theoretical understanding of what it means to be a citizen today for students and scholars across the social sciences.

This new and updated edition includes two new chapters. A Preface consists of reflections on developments in digital politics since the book was published in 2015. It considers how recent major political struggles over digital technologies and data can be understood in relation to the conceptualization of digital citizens that the book offers. While the Preface positions dominant responses to these struggles such as government regulations as ‘closings’, a new final chapter, Digital citizens-yet-to-come offers examples of ‘openings’ – digital acts such as new forms of data activism that are less recognised but which point to the emergence of paradoxical digital acts that are producing new digital political subjectivities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786614476
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	05/28/2020
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Engin Isin is professor of international politics, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and University of London Institute in Paris (ULIP).

Evelyn Ruppert is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface to the Second Edition

1. Doing Things with Words and Saying Words with Things

2. Citizens and Cyberspace

3. Speech Acts and Digital Acts

4. Participating, Connecting, Sharing

5. Filtering, Tracking, Normalizing

6. Witnessing, Hacking, Commoning

7. Making Digital Rights Claims

8. Digital Citizens Yet to Come

Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

Being Digital Citizens provides a timely and much-needed framework for thinking through rights claims on the internet in relation to a collective political subject. The second edition of this seminal work broadens our understanding of political struggles over digital life further by engaging with new contemporary debates and research, delineating crucial pathways for understanding how people make claims for digital rights and data justice, and advancing the case of digital citizens as citizens yet to come. This is a critical and comprehensive contribution to the debate on political subjectivity, rights and justice in a digital age.

Lina Dencik

Being Digital Citizens is a singular volume. Bringing equal attention to both digital and citizenship studies, Isin and Ruppert offer a thoughtful and nuanced theorization of what it means to be digital citizens. In this highly anticipated second edition, they apply their lucid and convincing arguments to spelling out the continued tensions as well as interdependence between political activism and corporate and political power in cyberspace. This is a book for students and scholars who care about understanding the intricate ins and outs of the way data affect citizens’ everyday acts and how they produce political subjectivity.

Bolette B. Blaagaard

No other book addresses the contest over digital citizenship as comprehensively as Being Digital Citizens. The authors set out the theoretical grounding we need right now to understand the digital citizen as political subject within the turbulent contemporary history of the internet.

Anthony McCosker

Conceiving of citizens as political subjects who interact with and through the Internet, Isin and Ruppert offer a sound theoretical discourse that draws on a wide range of relevant research and subsequently expands on the notion of citizen—a figure in cyberspace actively involved in making rights claims via the Internet. In contrast to citizenship studies in which the cyberspace figure's relationship to politics is practically lost, this digital study draws attention to the political role of subjectivity in cyberspace. Based on this broad conceptualization of digital citizens and drawing on Michel Foucault’s thoughts on the transformation of power, the discussion begins with a focus on relative space in terms of how digital citizens act through the Internet and realize cyberspace. The Internet allows 'doing things with words and saying words with things.' This fundamental understanding of citizenship relative to the Internet’s ability to facilitate digital interactions and transactions paves the way for conceptualizing digital acts as a kind of speech act and understanding the realization of digital rights claims. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate and research collections.

Choice Reviews

This book is a tour-de-force that — at last — explores systematically the emerging figure of the digital citizen. The rights-claims that distinguish this figure cannot be grasped through conventional analyses of either the digital or the citizen. This careful analysis shows not only how they may be rethought but how they will make a difference.

David Lyon

Being Digital Citizens takes a nuanced, theoretical look at how the definition of a political subject evolves as more and more of both day-to-day life and overt political action takes place through digital space. Isin and Ruppert draw from rich literatures in political science, sociology, and critical theory to refocus academic debate about digital political life around the figure of the ‘digital citizen’.. . .In a literature that tends towards extremes, declaring that the Internet changes either everything or nothing, Isin and Ruppert do an excellent job of explaining exactly how the digital context is and is not important for the politics of citizenship. They argue that doing life and politics through the Internet means political thought must revisit the influence that the anonymity, extensity, traceability, and velocity of our actions have.. . .Terms are explained with admirable theoretical precision, which makes the theory Isin and Ruppert develop relevant for all readers of this journal, not just those who concentrate on digital media, while still retaining enough specificity to comment directly on digital media and digital acts. Being Digital Citizens contributes a nuanced, flexible, and still elegantly workable conceptual framework to scholarship around contemporary political activity, particularly that unfolding through the internet.

Journal of Cultural Economy

Being Digital Citizens presents an incisive and galvanizing account of the political actions and experiences of digital citizens. Refreshing stale oppositional debates over rights, freedom and liberation through the internet, it offers a lucid and concrete account of transformations in what citizenship means.Hardly any other account of digital political life has managed to effectively sustain a dual focus on both the digital and political in the way this book does.

Adrian MacKenzie

Being Digital Citizens goes a long way toward untangling the language of digital citizenship and its highly normative force … [Ingin and Ruppert’s] insistence on conceiving the ‘digital citizen as yet to come’ opens up new trajectories for scrutiny and inquiry as well as intervention … this volume is a provocation, a point of reflection and a spark for further conceptual and empirical work.

Cultural Studies Review

What does it mean to be a digital citizen in a world where social traffic increasingly happens through online platforms? In this timely and intelligent book, Isin and Ruppert pose a number of fundamental questions about the rights and (speech) acts of citizens living in a new global online space. This book is a must-read for all students and scholars in digital media studies, especially those interested in human beings as the new ‘data subjects’.

José van Dijck

What does it mean to be a digital citizen in a world where social traffic increasingly happens through online platforms? In this timely and intelligent book, Isin and Ruppert pose a number of fundamental questions about the rights and (speech) acts of citizens living in a new global online space. This book is a must-read for all students and scholars in digital media studies, especially those interested in human beings as the new ‘data subjects’.

José van Dijck

Conceiving of citizens as political subjects who interact with and through the Internet, Isin and Ruppert offer a sound theoretical discourse that draws on a wide range of relevant research and subsequently expands on the notion of citizen—a figure in cyberspace actively involved in making rights claims via the Internet. In contrast to citizenship studies in which the cyberspace figure's relationship to politics is practically lost, this digital study draws attention to the political role of subjectivity in cyberspace. Based on this broad conceptualization of digital citizens and drawing on Michel Foucault’s thoughts on the transformation of power, the discussion begins with a focus on relative space in terms of how digital citizens act through the Internet and realize cyberspace. The Internet allows 'doing things with words and saying words with things.' This fundamental understanding of citizenship relative to the Internet’s ability to facilitate digital interactions and transactions paves the way for conceptualizing digital acts as a kind of speech act and understanding the realization of digital rights claims. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate and research collections.

CHOICE

Conceiving of citizens as political subjects who interact with and through the Internet, Isin and Ruppert offer a sound theoretical discourse that draws on a wide range of relevant research and subsequently expands on the notion of citizen—a figure in cyberspace actively involved in making rights claims via the Internet. In contrast to citizenship studies in which the cyberspace figure's relationship to politics is practically lost, this digital study draws attention to the political role of subjectivity in cyberspace. Based on this broad conceptualization of digital citizens and drawing on Michel Foucault’s thoughts on the transformation of power, the discussion begins with a focus on relative space in terms of how digital citizens act through the Internet and realize cyberspace. The Internet allows 'doing things with words and saying words with things.' This fundamental understanding of citizenship relative to the Internet’s ability to facilitate digital interactions and transactions paves the way for conceptualizing digital acts as a kind of speech act and understanding the realization of digital rights claims. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate and research collections.

Choice