The Internet, Power and Society: Rethinking the Power of the Internet to Change Lives

Citation

Kaden, B. (2010), "The Internet, Power and Society: Rethinking the Power of the Internet to Change Lives", Online Information Review, Vol. 34 No. 6, pp. 985-986. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521011099478

Reading books like those of the internet expert Clay Shirky, whose arguments credit an all‐out potential for enlightenment, collective action and democratisation to internet technology, one may wonder whether there is a general and global way of how the internet affects the lives of its users. Does technology really have the power to finally fulfill the idea of equality of expression on a worldwide scale? And does everybody in the internet like to enqueue with this vision? Some have doubts, as I do.

Even though there is some kind of global usage pattern, the evolving communication space called thee internet seems to breed a diversity of communication styles and techniques no less sophisticated than its real world matches. Of course it remains debatable how the dependency on certain platforms like Google or Facebook may level differences, but from a perspective that imagines those platforms being gates to a potentially infinite space of communication, those structures of entrance might be bottlenecks to a malleable universe of information, networking and sharing. This is especially so when one's professional work requires some insight on how and where internet usage patterns intersect and where they differ regarding different cultures, milieus and maybe even different individuals. Some information professionals may like to go further and see a need to assess possible effects of digital communication tools on society in general. For both cases, Leaning's book is a good choice. This is not because he contradicts the Shirkyian analysis (he does not), but rather because he examines his subject in a much calmer and more modest way.

Leaning's book provides a profound approach to ground the idea of an interdependence of internet and social circumstances in media sociology. Taking us on a trip through his universe of theory, he circumnavigates the alluring calls of post‐modern theorists and sticks to the somewhat more sober, but no less elaborated, thoughts of Anthony Giddens, Jürgen Habermas and Ulrich Beck. The argumentation backdrop is late modernity, the viewpoint is the internet as a (possible) public sphere, and the aim is to develop thoughtful explanations which could provide a basis for further analysis.

Whereas the forerunners of internet theory like Shirky transport their messages mainly through “gunboat” anecdotes to make the biggest impact possible, and deep hearted skeptics like Nicholas Carr row the waters of cultural pessimism, Leaning writes in a refreshingly dry way and deploys a broad range of theories to explain quite conclusively how society and technology interweave. In his book one should not expect to find much on symptoms like “flash‐mobs” and “wisdom of the crowds” but more on the driving forces underneath like the qualities of reflexive societies and the role of media structures for the public sphere.

The book provides extensive references on these topics, and it is good to see Leaning in the end being less a man with a mission to announce than a scholar with a discourse to argue through. He is not celebrating a post‐modern, post‐historian feast of neo‐enlightenment but explores the origins and properties of modernity in relation to mass media and how this has led to where we are now. It is the individual who uses the web, and that ways of usage are as manifold as there are individuals. The internet is “small media” and does not necessarily have to go for the big shot against the traditional media. Most of all it is a tool whose usage depends on the interests, skills and social imprints of the particular user/user group. The internet has the potential to influence society; but society comes first, and to trigger this potential for change it needs an offline social environment willing to pull. If we want to understand “the power of the internet to change lives”, we first ought to focus on the particularities of the lives and the respective social (and political) environments to which they are tied. Having a scholarly lens like this, it may be easier to understand how and why, and to what degree, specific digital means of communication operate as a central motif of Western societies at the present time.