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Infrastructuring The Digital Public Sphere, Julie E. Cohen
Infrastructuring The Digital Public Sphere, Julie E. Cohen
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The idea of a "public sphere"--a shared, ideologically neutral domain where ideas and arguments may be shared, encountered, and contested--serves as a powerful imaginary in legal and policy discourse, informing both assumptions about how public communication works and ideals to which inevitably imperfect realities are compared. In debates about feasible and legally permissible content governance mechanisms for digital platforms, the public sphere ideal has counseled attention to questions of ownership and control rather than to other, arguably more pressing questions about systemic configuration. This essay interrogates such debates through the lens of infrastructure, with particular reference to the ways that …
From Lex Informatica To The Control Revolution, Julie E. Cohen
From Lex Informatica To The Control Revolution, Julie E. Cohen
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Legal scholarship on the encounter between networked digital technologies and law has focused principally on how legal and policy processes should respond to new technological developments and has spent much less time considering what that encounter might signify for the shape of legal institutions themselves. This essay focuses on the latter question. Within fields like technology studies, labor history, and economic sociology, there is a well-developed tradition of studying the ways that new information technologies and the “control revolution” they enabled—in brief, a quantum leap in the capacity for highly granular oversight and management—have elicited long-term, enduring changes in the …