Digital formations of the powerful and the powerless (keynote)

Abstract

This talk compares two kinds of socio-technical formations: electronic financial networks and local social activist movements that are globally networked. Both cut across the duality global/national and each has altered the economic and political landscapes for respectively financial elites and social activists. Using these two cases helps illuminate the very diverse ways in which the growth of electronic networks partially transforms existing politico-economic orderings. They are extreme cases, one marked by hypermobility and the other by physical immobility. But they show us that each is only partly so: financial electronic networks are subject to particular types of embeddedness and local activist organizations can benefit from novel electronic potentials for global operation. I show how financial electronic networks and electronic activism reveal two parallel developments associated with particular technical properties of the new ICTs, but also reveal a third, radically divergent outcome, one I interpret as signaling the weight of the specific social logics of users in each case.