Being Digital Citizens, Second Edition OPEN ACCESS PDF from Rowman & Littlefield Being Digital Citizens, Second Edition OPEN ACCESS PDF from Rowman & Littlefield Being Digital Citizens, Second Edition OPEN ACCESS PDF from Rowman & Littlefield Being Digital Citizens Being Digital Citizens, Second Edition OPEN ACCESS PDF from Rowman & Littlefield Being Digital Citizens, Second Edition OPEN ACCESS PDF from Rowman & Littlefield Being Digital Citizens Second Edition Engin Isin and Evelyn Ruppert London • New York Being Digital Citizens, Second Edition OPEN ACCESS PDF from Rowman & Littlefield Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and London (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2020 by Engin Isin and Evelyn Ruppert All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78661-447-6 ISBN: PB 978-1-78661-448-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Isin, Engin F. (Engin Fahri), 1959- | Ruppert, Evelyn Sharon, 1959- author. Title: Being digital citizens / Engin Isin and Evelyn Ruppert. Description: Second edition. | London ; New York : Rowman & Littlefield, [2020] | Includes biblio- graphical references and index. | Summary: "This book examines how citizens encounter and perform new sorts of rights, duties, opportunities and challenges through the Internet. By disrupt- ing prevailing understandings of citizenship and cyberspace, the authors highlight the dynamic relationship between these two concepts"-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019057075 (print) | LCCN 2019057076 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786614476 (cloth) | ISBN 9781786614483 (paperback) | ISBN 9781786614490 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Internet in public administration. | Internet--Political aspects. Classification: LCC JF1525.A8 I68 2020 (print) | LCC JF1525.A8 (ebook) | DDC 323.6/502854678-- dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057075 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057076 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Being Digital Citizens, Second Edition OPEN ACCESS PDF from Rowman & Littlefield Contents Acknowledgements vii Preface to the Second Edition ix 1 Doing Things with Words and Saying Words with Things 1 2 Citizens and Cyberspace 17 3 Speech Acts and Digital Acts 45 4 Callings: Participating, Connecting, Sharing 67 5 Closings: Filtering, Tracking, Normalizing 95 6 Openings: Witnessing, Hacking, Commoning 123 7 Making Digital Rights Claims 149 8 Digital Citizens Yet to Come 173 Bibliography 195 Index 217 About the Authors 229 v Being Digital Citizens, Second Edition OPEN ACCESS PDF from Rowman & Littlefield Being Digital Citizens, Second Edition OPEN ACCESS PDF from Rowman & Littlefield Acknowledgements We are thankful for the insightful comments of four anonymous review- ers. We are grateful for the assistance of Margaret Cheesman who re- searched the literature citing the first edition of this book. We thank Rowman & Littlefield International for the invitation and support to pub- lish this revised and expanded second edition. We gratefully acknowl- edge the assistance and guidance of our editor Dhara Snowden, who made preparing the second edition a pleasure. We also acknowledge that the research leading to this book was supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant 615588 (Ruppert) including funds for Open Access publishing. vii Being Digital Citizens, Second Edition OPEN ACCESS PDF from Rowman & Littlefield Being Digital Citizens, Second Edition OPEN ACCESS PDF from Rowman & Littlefield Preface to the Second Edition Two documentaries on political struggles over digital life aptly bookend the period between the two editions of this book. Laura Poitras’s 2014 documentary, Citizenfour, provided an account of Edward Snowden’s re- lease of classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) about how states and corporations are involved in mass surveillance and are spying on their own and other countries’ citizens. Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim’s 2019 documentary, The Great Hack, covered Christo- pher Wylie’s disclosure that the personal information of up to 87 million users was harvested without their permission by a Cambridge academic and used by Cambridge Analytica to allegedly interfere in the 2016 US election and 2016 UK referendum. Although the former brought attention to the surveillance and data accumulation practices of states and corpora- tions, the latter highlighted how such accumulation is pervasive and in- cludes not only platform owners but also academics and other third par- ties. That two whistle-blowers were key to both disclosures is significant for stressing a central concern of this book: If the Internet, and how we are acting through it, decisively traverses the borders constituted by some two hundred states, who then are the subjects of digital politics? Beyond the spectacular acts of activists, how do subjects perform every- day acts through the Internet to make claims about its workings that traverse the orders and borders of modern law and politics? How are we to understand ourselves as collective political subjects with rights to speech, access, and privacy, a political subjectivity that expresses being with others that involves and provokes the cultivation of openness against closings of the Internet, when our rights are grounded in and emanate from being citizens of states? We explicitly call for and signify collective political subjects as ‘digital citizens’ who make rights claims by acting through the Internet or, as stated in the closing chapter of the first edition, digital citizens yet to come. The significance of this reflects the absence of theorizing the politi- cal subject of the Internet at the time of the first edition. Research was only then developing on the acts of people demanding digital and data rights and resisting and subverting the dispossessions and appropria- tions of states and corporations. That research documented, for example, how people use the Internet in creative ways to organize movements, uprisings, protests, and demonstrations; disrupt hegemonic platforms and develop open alternatives; and challenge authoritative accounts and ix Being Digital Citizens, Second Edition OPEN ACCESS PDF from Rowman & Littlefield x Preface to the Second Edition knowledge across borders and orders. But how these transversal acts signified the emergence of a new political subjectivity remained undevel- oped and references to the political subject as a citizen were ambiguous. That has now changed significantly. Although the figure of the citizen remains an ambiguous and underspecified subject of rights, much re- search now suggests the outlines of its emergence. Several books and edited collections, along with articles in major journals, address the polit- ical subject of the Internet through research that now more fully spans the Global North and South. Most significant is a growing body of research on how people act through the Internet to make claims for data and digital rights and justice. We are convinced that the framing in the first edition has proven effective and relevant for interpreting the empirical studies that this research documents. But in addition to providing a way to conceive of political subjectivity, a second aspect of the framing that remains relevant is the specification of cyberspace as a transversal space that people bring into being by acting through the Internet. However, although many studies seek to understand the space of digital politics, cyberspace as a transversal space that makes possible citizenship as a different kind of political subjectivity remains underspecified. If men- tioned, references continue to be made to ‘online’ space and digital rights as separate, if not independent from, physical ‘offline’ space and non-digital rights. Thus, a central aim of this book remains to provide a theoretical framing of both the figure of the citizen and the figure of cyberspace to think across the growing research on digital politics for resignifying digital citizens as political subjects of cyberspace that is dif- ferent from, but related to, citizens as political subjects of the state. We now outline the major changes made to chapters 1 to 7 of the first edition and provide a longer summary of chapter 8, which is new. We identify in chapter 1 actors such as Cambridge Analytica and Mark Zuckerberg who, for many people, do not require introduction and reflect the ubiquity of connected digital lives. These are spectacular ex- amples of actors who engage in what we refer to as acts of closing the Internet. Yet, we also draw attention to ordinary acts that have provided openings, gained prominence, and have become emblematic of digital politics such as how citizen subjects have resignified hashtags to both name