Reformatting Politics

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Book: Reformatting Politics: Information Technology and Global Civil Society. Editor: Jodi Dean, Jon W. Anderson, Geert Lovink. New York and London: Routledge, 2006


Review

Athina Karatzogianni:

" The book's argument, put forth both by the editors in their introduction and by Saskia Sassen in the volume's forward, is that ICTs enable networked communities, affiliations, and engagements that simply cannot be conceived with the democratic imaginary, as they cannot be housed in additional democratic notions of representation, accountability, and legitimacy. Subsidiarity, multistakeholderism, expertise and reputation management are discussed into a lesser or greater extent by a diverse list of authors as components of the postdemocratic governmentality emerging through civil society organizations and networked ICTs.

Carefully constructed, the volume tackles this necessity for postdemocratic politics by bringing together empirically and conceptually rich analyses on networks, sites of conflict and resistance in civil society, and formats relating to internet governance, ICANN, and the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS). As a result, Reformatting Politics is a very welcome contribution to the field of internet politics, civil society, network theory and ICTs, and the transformations we are experiencing in the governance and political economy of global communications." (http://rccs.usfca.edu/bookinfo.asp?ReviewID=543&BookID=391)