The lasting lessons of 'Imagining the Internet' - LSE

On Monday 5 December 2022, LSE’s Department of Media and Communications volition clasp a public event to observe the bequest of Professor Emerita Robin Mansell. We person invited immoderate of Robin’s contiguous and erstwhile colleagues and students to lend their thoughts connected the interaction she has had some connected them personally, and connected the tract of accusation and connection technologies mentation and practice. João C. Magalhães, Assistant Professor successful Media, Politics, and Democracy astatine the University of Groningen, successful the Netherlands, completed his PhD astatine the LSE nether Robin’s supervision.

A non-trivial question erstwhile reflecting connected the bequest of Robin Mansell is – wherever should 1 start? For her vocation has been not lone remarkably prolific but besides multifarious. There’s Robin the theorist, who unearthed unsuspected links betwixt precise antithetic disciplines to marque captious consciousness of our perplexing communications systems. There’s Robin the world leader, who headed the IAMCR, edited landmark publications, and played a large relation successful the internationalization of our tract and successful the constitution of the LSE’s Media and Communications Department. She has been besides a paragon of the “impactful” academic, a bona fide student who for decades worked with argumentation makers and tech developers. And determination is of people her relation arsenic pedagogue and mentor. Robin helped signifier a procreation of researchers, supervising implicit 40 PhD students. That’s a staggering fig successful immoderate subject but peculiarly awesome successful media and communications, wherever doctoral candidates often constitute book-long theses based connected extended fieldwork.

So, so – wherever should a reflection connected her bequest start? It would beryllium foolish for maine to effort and remark connected each these aspects. But arsenic idiosyncratic who has been profoundly influenced by Robin’s ideas – archetypal arsenic a scholar of her enactment and past arsenic her MSc and PhD supervisee – I’d similar to suggest that her 2012 monograph, “Imagining the Internet”, offers an inspiring introduction point.

I archetypal encountered this publication arsenic a postgraduate pupil and I was instantly puzzled by the title. Why would anyone constitute astir however the Internet is imagined, I retrieve thinking? And however was specified “imagining” connected with “communication, innovation, and governance”, the book’s subtitle? The opposition betwixt the subjective acquisition of imaginativeness and the impersonal systematicity of powerfulness and economics sounded to maine novel, subversive – and alluring. I borrowed the publication from the LSE room not knowing that it would signifier overmuch of my ain reasoning successful the coming months and years.

“Imagining the Internet” remains, successful my view, the champion instauration to Robin’s intelligence project. Not that the publication is written successful an “introductory” style. This is simply a dense, astatine times demanding text. What I mean is that the publication seems to dialog with galore of the topics and theories she had engaged with earlier without, however, overly focussing connected immoderate circumstantial country – regulation, governmental economy, improvement etc. The extremity is precisely to connection a panoramic presumption of the taken-for-granted ideas (the imaginaries) that signifier however connection systems are designed, governed, and used.

In truthful doing, “Imagining the Internet” remains, 10 years on, 1 of the astir originative critiques of the archetypal decades of the Internet, exemplary successful its rigour and ambition.

Drawing connected Charles Taylor’s societal doctrine (but besides connected captious systems theory, economics, and cybernetics, to sanction but a fewer of her typically eclectic inspirations), Robin’s relationship persuasively demonstrates that determination were 2 wide imaginaries shaping the sociotechnical accumulation of the Internet, peculiarly successful the West. On the 1 hand, determination was the “dominant societal imaginary”. This assumed that the “good” accusation nine would look from lightly-regulated markets, whose due functioning successful crook depended connected controlling the integer flows of accusation done the enforcement of intelligence rights. On the different hand, determination was the “alternative societal imaginary”. According to this view, the Internet would beryllium beneficial arsenic agelong arsenic it was collectively controlled by decentralized networks of backstage actors. Those who adopted this imaginativeness assumed that self-organized communities led by an elite of bundle developers should govern the Internet from below, producing and circulating accusation arsenic freely and openly arsenic possible. Intellectual rights, if enforced, could impair the flourishing of this integer “commons”.

These visions were locked successful a stalemate created by 2 paradoxes, Robin pointed out. The paradox of accusation scarcity meant that accusation was simultaneously imagined arsenic “costly to produce”, frankincense needing to beryllium made artificially scarce to incentivise “creativity, diverseness and growth” (dominant imaginary) and also “costless to reproduce”, successful which lawsuit creativity, diverseness and maturation could lone look erstwhile accusation was “freely distributed” (alternative imaginary). The paradox of complexity acrophobic however to relationship for the emergent intricacies of our integer communication. From the ascendant perspective, specified complexity was starring to a nonaccomplishment of control; from the alternate view, it was engendering new, decentralized forms of government.

Robin describes these views clinically and critically. Despite their differences, she says, some camps converged successful their superficial presumption of technological advancement arsenic inherently bully and “beyond quality control”, successful their often self-interested scepticism towards governments and states, and successful their naïve (or intentionally ignorant) knowing of the entanglements betwixt powerfulness and justice. In a way, those “dominant” and “alternative” views were the offspring of a wider neoliberal imaginary, rooted successful morally impoverished dreams of achieving state done a “natural” technocracy – oregon astatine slightest that’s however I work them.

To immoderate extent, the issues “Imagining the Internet” examines and theorises astir person changed drastically successful the past decade. The copyright wars that dominated regulatory debates successful the precocious 1990s and 2000s person cooled disconnected pursuing the improvement of monolithic automated filters (think of YouTube’s Content ID) and caller concern models, specified arsenic those of paid streaming platforms. Complexity has lone accrued but its power has been refashioned arsenic a work offered not by decentralized networks but by the mammoth firm brainchildren of those networks – Big Tech conglomerates. We request not recognize however information are produced and instrumentality learning systems run to bask the seamless acquisition of scrolling done our quality feeds.

It is not the case, however, that disputes implicit accusation and complexity power disappeared. Left unattended, those paradoxes person successful information festered and multiplied, creating caller and contradictory sets of intractable problems: unaccountable code control, wide misinformation, and exploitative connection systems that we fundamentally distrust – but don’t cognize however to abandon. It would instrumentality much than a blog station to untangle these transmutations. However, fto maine conscionable enactment that it is not absurd to deliberation that our Big Tech-centred Internet is present underpinned by a societal imaginary that looks similar a merge betwixt the imaginaries Robin truthful precisely depicted a decennary ago. Information state and decentralization look present to beryllium taken arsenic necessary for the plan of centralized systems of monetizable accusation control. It is arsenic if that “alternative” presumption had captured the “dominant” position, adopting immoderate of its assumptions and becoming a hybrid that we are inactive trying to understand.

And arsenic we make captious vocabularies to construe these reasonably caller systems, it is worthy mentioning an thought contiguous successful that publication and successful Robin’s full assemblage of work: nevertheless analyzable and concentrated, connection technologies stay someway malleable and ambiguous. Pervading “Imagining the Internet” is the skyline of anticipation and reform: an impulse to defy the unusual charm of simplification and fatalism, to cull immoderate signifier of determinism – beryllium it utopian oregon dystopian. Of each lessons Robin taught me, this is 1 I support learning.

This nonfiction represents the views of the writer and not the presumption of the Media@LSE blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.