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Comprehending the issues at stake in the networked world
Managing the Infosphere
Governance, Technology, and Cultural Practice in Motion
Stephen D. McDowell, Philip E. Steinberg and Tami K. Tomasello
"Managing the Infosphere is accessible and welcoming. The theoretical underpinnings are clearly explicated, and strong."
—Sandra Braman, Professor, Department of Communication, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and author of Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power
Managing the Infosphere examines the global world of communications as a mobile space that overlaps uneasily with the world of sovereign, territorial nation-states. Drawing on their expertise in geography, political science, international relations, and communication studies, the authors investigate specific policy problems encountered when international organizations, corporations, and individual users try to "manage" a space that simultaneously contradicts and supports existing institutions and systems of governance, identity, and technology.
The authors argue that the roles of these systems in cyberspace cannot be fully understood unless they are seen as mutually constituting each other in specific historical structures, institutions, and practices. With vision and insight, the authors look beyond the Internet to examine the entire networked world, from cell phones and satellites to global tourism and business travel.
Excerpt
Reviews
"McDowell, Steinberg and Tomasello present an engaging and theoretically dynamic perspective on the construction of the virtual and territorial spaces wherein technology, political-economic institutions, and cultural practices are simultaneously regulated, contested, and transformed. This is an original and path-breaking work, which offers nuanced conceptualization and engrossing case studies."
—J. P. Singh, Communication, Culture and Technology Program, Georgetown University
"The authors have written a compelling book, one that succeeds in synthesizing the dynamics of information technology, globalization, and Internet governance. They cogently demonstrate that only through such a synthesis can these dynamics be fully grasped and adequately probed."
—James N. Rosenau, University Professor of International Affairs, The George Washington University
"Managing the Infosphere exposes and explains how electronic communication and networking always consists of spaces of movement—diverse mobilities of information, capital, trade, territoriality, regimes of governance. In so doing, it forwards a constructivist perspective on space that challenges liberal notions of spatial fixity and flow by placing mobility at the heart of its analysis. Managing the Infosphere will be of critical interest to those concerned with how new electronic mobilities reterritorialize the world and open up new political questions concerning culture, governance and states."
—Rob Kitchin, Director of National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Contents
Acknowledgements
1. Managing the Infosphere
2. Managing Technological Change
3. Scales of Governance, Governance of Scales
4. Communication Technology, Mobility, and Cultural Consumption
5. Internet Names, Semiotics, and Alternative Spaces of Governance
6. Fixity, Mobility, and the Governance of Internet Names
7. The Infosphere: A World of Places, an Ocean of Information, or a Special Administrative Region?
Notes
References
Index
About the Author(s)
Stephen D. McDowell is John H. Phipps Professor of Communication and Chair of the Department of Communication at Florida State University. He is the author of Globalization, Liberalization, and Policy Change: A Political Economy of India's Communications Sector.
Philip E. Steinberg is an Associate Professor of Geography at Florida State University. He is the author of The Social Construction of the Ocean and co-editor (with Rob Shields) of What is a City? Rethinking the Urban After Hurricane Katrina.
Tami K. Tomasello is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication, East Carolina University.
Subject Categories
Mass Media and Communications
Political Science and Public Policy