Abstract
The Internet has been touted as a potential platform for a “global” civil society to assert itself and challenge the dominant forms of power, including the globalized market, multilateral institutions, and nation-states. This argument coincides with Nancy Fraser’s 2005 piece in the New Left Review, “Refraining Justice in a Globalizing World,” that called for a global platform beyond states as a public sphere for critical discourse. For the Internet to serve as such a platform, it is often constructed in this discourse as a space beyond borders or boundaries, somehow unlimited by the forces that constitute the current power constructs of the afore-mentioned dominations. While borders and boundaries can create hierarchies, their loss may also produce negative effects, such as an absence of space for critical reflection necessary to any public sphere. Moreover, the idea that the Internet can overcome boundaries denies that the Internet exists in actual, physical space and is materially constructed. This paper will argue that the Internet more often acts as an extension of authoritarian technics and that its possibility as a site for more democratic technics depends upon a more critical engagement of how democratic participation or “global” civil society materializes in digital space.
