Democracy, Social Space, and the Internet

Abstract

Democracy, Social Space, and the Internet Andrea Slane Executive Director, Centre for Innovation Law and Policy, University of Toronto. We are firmly convinced that we are collectively entering a new era of enormous potential, that of the Information Society and expanded human communication. In this emerging society, information and knowledge can be produced, exchanged, shared and communicated through all the networks of the world. All individuals can soon, if we take the necessary actions, together build a new Information Society based on shared knowledge and founded on global solidarity and a better mutual understanding between peoples and nations. We trust that these measures will open the way to the future development of a true knowledge society.1 I. Introduction The Internet inspires grand visions of a more democratic future, both for existing nations and for a more harmonious global community. These visions express the hope – or, more properly, the desire – that information technology will either join he historical march toward greater universal enlightenment or, in another version of the story, cure democracy's current ills. Grand narratives like these are of course mainly rhetorical, projecting an idealized image against or toward which the actual work of producing such a future can be measured. The delegates to the United Nations' World Summit on the Information Society (wsis) can be counted among the champions of the Internet's democratic potential, for whom computer networking provides solutions to many of the problems of space, population density, access, and participation that confront large societies – including, of course, global ones.2 Such statements imagine a function for the Internet in assisting and strengthening offline national and international democratic institutions. They rely on the general assumption that greater capacity to communicate improves democratic process and that greater capacity to disseminate information naturally leads to a democratically empowered populace. [End Page 81] Internet access policy has been an important platform within national policy in Canada and elsewhere as well. Federal programs such as Connecting Canadians and the Broadband for Rural and Northern Development Pilot Program are geared toward making Canada among the most Internet-connected countries in the world, and they are built upon the vision that high-speed Internet access will enable equal distribution of government services, health care, and educational opportunities and improve capacity for political participation.3 Internet access is thus cast as a means of strengthening national bonds as well as furthering democratic principles of equality and public participation, on both national and international levels. The union of democracy and the Internet has been a prominent object of discussion in legal scholarship, generally falling into six categories: the possibilities enabled by direct democratic self-governance of the Internet;4 the Internet's threat to national sovereignty;5 the Internet's capacity to augment, alter, or suppress current democratic political [End Page 82] practices;6 the capacity of particular Internet policies to enhance or suppress democratic values, such as freedom of expression and privacy;7 criticism of Internet policies implemented by non-democratic nations;8 and the dangers or promise of particular Internet technologies to democratic practices or values.9 A subset of these studies considers the spatial dimensions of the Internet: that is, whether cyberspace is a 'place' for jurisdictional purposes or, alternatively, whether it is a social space within which actors [End Page 83] engage in activities that are either novel or roughly parallel to offline life. The former approach mainly took root in early debates about the sovereignty of a cyberspace distinct from the offline world, and by the early 2000s had been roundly criticized and made moot by the proliferation of case law and legislation that firmly established that territorial governments could and would take jurisdiction over online phenomena.10 The latter approach, viewing cyberspace as a social space, appears less self-consciously and so has not been scrutinized with the same sharp critical eye that met arguments promoting cyberspace as a place unconnected to the offline world. Space, both physical and social, shapes online...