Imagining the Internet: Communication, Innovation, and Governance Paperback – 8 Sep 2012

I wish this book could come out of the academic ghetto. It makes a thorough review of the dominant and alternative conceptualizations of the internet from a social perspective and raises important questions about who sets the norms for the internet and which norms count today and in the future. Alas the title "Imagining the Internet: Imagining the Internet: Communication, Innovation, and Governance" is too soft for a technical/corporate professionals and yet too esoteric for the general public. When Mansell applies the idea of the "Imaginary", a technical term from Canadian sociologist Charles Taylor, to the social experiences of the internet and alludes to poet Robert Brautigan's "machines of loving grace" and "cybernetic ecology", she self-selects her audience, namely students and academics. This select group has the leisure to contemplate these questions, but it is important that every internet user consider them.

Most books on internet policy are written to espouse one perspective over another. Mansell manages to criticize both the dominant and alternative perspectives. She describes the dominant or marked-led idea of the internet versus the alternative view of the equitable distribution of information resources. She challenges the excesses of governance from above (surveillance) as well as the naïve trust in the power of dispersed communities (wisdom of the crowds). Indeed she calls for improved accountability locally and globally and offers three policy suggestions.

1. Counter the monopolies of knowledge
Mansell is correct that users confuse hardware and software with knowledge, as if these constructs were the internet itself. Indeed as internet and its components grow more complex, typical users become not only less interested in how they works, but also, more trusting of they complexity. It is exactly this development that should be countered with information diversity and incentives to support the emergence of multiple knowledges. She points out the irony of world meetings for internet governance where certain groups, especially governments, present their knowledge as the end-all, be-all.

2. Facilitate online creativity
Mansell laments the current generation that disrespects digital property rights. In practical terms, however, she acknowledges that we need to pursue both informational commons as well as paid content. The idea that users want free information along with the reality that content creators need to be compensated is an essential internet paradox.

3. Automation and Accountability
Mansell is a critical of what happens behind the screen, both by companies and governments, namely increasing trends toward surveillance, privacy intrusion, and a lack of transparency. She is concerned of who will become the knowledge elite and whether lay people can understand how the internet influence their lives. She notes that it should not be a simply a choice between some self-organizing system in which the machine takes precedence over human or some information commons where a pre-ordained elite makes the decisions.

Manseel concludes that not only is there not a universal answer, but that it is difficult for stakeholders even to come together and discuss. Each side has a view of the internet as all or nothing, a zero sum game. Mansell points out that both conceptions are flawed. Indeed in many cases we have and should live with a paradox of opposing realities. It strikes me that the requirements she proposes are not unlike the work required to maintain systems in the offline world. Governance and democracy also require the interplay of various stakeholders, means of transparency, and general education so people can be informed enough to participate.

In any case, I hope the ideas of this book can get out of the ivory tower and into the everyday mainstream.