The Digital Nexus Cultural Dialectics Series editor: Raphael Foshay The difference between subject and object slices through subject as well as through object. —Theodor W. Adorno Cultural Dialectics provides an open arena in which to debate questions of culture and dialectic—their practices, their theoretical forms, and their relations to one another and to other spheres and modes of inquiry. Approaches that draw on any of the following are especially encouraged: continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt and Birmingham schools of cultural theory, deconstruction, gender theory, postcoloniality, and interdisciplinarity. Series Titles Northern Love: An Exploration of Canadian Masculinity Paul Nonnekes Making Game: An Essay on Hunting, Familiar Things, and the Strangeness of Being Who One Is Peter L. Atkinson Valences of Interdisciplinarity: Theory, Practice, Pedagogy Edited by Raphael Foshay Imperfection Patrick Grant The Undiscovered Country: Essays in Canadian Intellectual Culture Ian Angus The Letters of Vincent van Gogh: A Critical Study Patrick Grant “My Own Portrait in Writing”: Self-Fashioning in the Letters of Vincent van Gogh Patrick Grant Speaking Power to Truth: Digital Discourse and the Public Intellectual Edited by Michael Keren and Richard Hawkins The Digital Nexus: Identity, Agency, and Political Engagement Edited by Raphael Foshay TheThe DigitalDigital NexusNexus Identity, Agency, and Political Engagement edited by RAFAEL FOSHAY Copyright © 2016 Raphael Foshay Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1200, 10011 – 109 Street, Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8 ISBN 978-1-77199-129-2 (print) 978-1-77199-130-8 (pdf) 978-1-77199-131-5 (epub) doi: 10.15215/aupress/9781771991292.01 A volume in Cultural Dialectics series: ISSN 1915-836X (print) 1915-8378 (digital) Cover design by Marvin Harder Interior design by Sergiy Kozakov Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens The appendix, “Do Machines Have Rights? Ethics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” is a reprint of Paul Kellogg’s interview of David J. Gunkel, which was first published in Aurora, issue 2014. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication The digital nexus: identity, agency, and political engagement / edited by Raphael Foshay. (Cultural dialectics) Includes bibliographical references. Issued in print and electronic formats. 1. Digital media—Social aspects. 2. Digital media—Political aspects. 3. World Wide Web—Social aspects. 4. World Wide Web—Political aspects. I. Foshay, Raphael, 1950-, editor II. Series: Cultural dialectics HM851.d58 2016 302.23'4 C2015-908545-4 C2015-908546-2 We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBf) for our publishing activities. Assistance provided by the Government of Alberta, Alberta Media Fund. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons licence, Attribution–Non- commercial–No Derivative Works 4.0 International: see www.creativecommons. org. The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. To obtain permission for uses beyond those outlined in the Creative Commons license, please contact AU Press, Athabasca University, at [email protected]. Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction: The Computational Turn and the Digital Network 1 Raphael Foshay PART I DIGITAL THEORY • 1 The Internet in Question 25 Andrew Feenberg 2 Emergent Meaning in the Information Age 49 Ian Angus 3 Responsible Machines: The Opportunities and Challenges of Artificial Autonomous Agents 71 David J. Gunkel 4 Open Source Transparency: The Making of an Altered Identity 89 Daryl Campbell PART II DIGITAL CULTURE • 5 Hacktivist (Pre)Occupations: Self-Surveillance, Participation, and Public Space 109 Carolyn Guertin 6 Institutions and Interpellations of the Dubject, the Doubled and Spaced Self 127 Mark A. McCutcheon 7 The Network University in Transition 151 Bob Hanke 8 Spinning the Web: Critical Discourse Analysis and Its Online Space 183 Leslie Lindballe v 9 Paramortals, or Dancing with the Interactive Digital Dead 197 Roman Onufrijchuk PART III • DIGITAL POLITICS 10 The Rise of the National Surveillance State in Comparative Perspective 207 Peter J. Smith 11 Democracy and Identity in the Digital Age 231 Lorna Stefanick and Karen Wall 12 The Digital Democratic Deficit: Analysis of Digital Voting in a Canadian Party Leadership Race 249 Josipa G. Petrunić 13 Navigating the Mediapolis: Digital Media and Emerging Practices of Democratic Participation 281 Maria Bakardjieva 14 The Construction of Collective Action Frames in Facebook Groups 303 Sharone Daniel Afterword 321 Raphael Foshay Appendix: Do Machines Have Rights? Ethics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence 325 David J. Gunkel, Interviewed by Paul Kellogg List of Contributors 341 Acknowledgements This book began as an international symposium of invited speakers, with the present volume of thematically related essays as its goal. The symposium met under the title “Identity, Agency, and the Digital Nexus” on April 5–7, 2013, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The symposium was generously funded by a Connection grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), and by timely financial and administrative support by the Research Office of Athabasca University. I would like to thank Acting Associate Dean of Research Dr. Donna Romyn, the research office manager, Rebecca Heartt, and the financial administrator, Crystal Brown, for their help through- out the planning of the symposium and the editing of the volume. I would also like to thank Athabasca University’s M.A. Program in Integrated Studies for administrative help and for the donation in kind of my time and energy as program director to the organization of the symposium and the edit- ing of the present volume. I thank Corinna Lewis, administrative officer in the MA-IS Office, for her help with many tasks. An equally warm thank you goes to the Organizing Committee, made up of faculty members of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at AU: Derek Briton, Jay Smith, Evelyn Ellerman, Paul Kellogg, and Wendell Kisner, and, from Computing Services, Daryl Campbell (Jay, Paul, and Daryl are contributors to the present volume). I would also like to extend especially warm thanks to organizing committee member and MA-IS Program colleague Dr. Paul Kellogg, who gave generously of his time at both the planning and the symposium-organizing stages. The Digital Nexus: Identity, Agency, and Political Engagement is the second symposium/book project mounted under the auspices of Athabasca University’s M.A. Program in Integrated Studies. The first took place in 2008, resulting in Valences of Interdisciplinarity: Theory, Practice, Pedagogy, published by Athabasca vii University Press in 2011. I would like to acknowledge AU Press for its support of this project from the symposium, through the peer review and editorial stages, to publication in its open access format. AU Press is the first university press in North America to be founded as an open access press. Its enlightened embrace of digital dissemination of the fruits of research clearly attests the importance of digital technology to the future of scholarship and of the centrality of digital computerization and the Internet to the Academy. Special thanks to Kathy Killoh and Pamela Holway at Athabasca University Press, and to the internal and external peer reviewers of the volume for their support, guidance, and many constructive recommendations. viii Acknowledgements 10.15215/aupress/9781771991292.01 Introduction The Computational Turn and the Digital Network Raphael Foshay The realm of the “digital” is a variegated, rapidly unfolding, and experientially encompassing phenomenon, directly and indirectly reshaping many aspects of our global, national, and individual lifeworlds. The media of communication that are informed by digital code are multifarious, extending well beyond the reach and limitations of traditional analog reproduction: digital code enables new kinds and levels of communication across media platforms, from television to computers and mobile devices, combining text and audiovisual content with the interactivity made possible by the fusion of computerization with the Internet, the World Wide Web. While being enabled and engendered by the electronic platform of the computer, computerization itself synergizes with the Internet to create a totalizing virtual environment of connectivity—a domain that at an early stage of its emergence was termed cyberspace—within which we all now con- duct daily life, whether as nations or corporations, institutions or interest groups, communities or private citizens. So habituated have we now become to this sphere of interactive connectivity that the term “cyberspace” itself has become quaint and disused. In its current iteration as Web 2.0 it surpasses an earlier, content-delivery model of the web now seen as transitional between television and the Internet’s highly interactive and multimedia environment: what “cyber- space” denoted has so thoroughly become the air we breathe that it would now be impossible, not only on a practical level, to return to an existence deprived of 1 the web and cellular networks, it would be unimaginable on almost any grounds that one could consider: social, political, economic, scientific, educational, com- municational, military . the list goes on. Further, the communicational domains of the digital network are not only public but also private, increasingly woven into both our