Down on the Mapping Road. Progresses and Challenges of Mapping Internet Governance within the Global Media and Communication Governance Landscape.

Abstract

Over the last years, the interest on information and communication global issues and, more recently, for Internet governance (IG) as one of the main topics amongst them, has grown considerably. Certainly, this increased interest derives from the acknowledgement that information, communication, and the Internet governance in particular, have become highly strategic domains for global politics (see Braman 2006, Mueller et al. 2004, Padovani & Pavan 2008, Singh 2002). Despite current knowledge available on these topics has reached significant levels, a comprehensive understanding that “clarifies, combines and balance governing arrangements that take place in a globalized context on different yet related areas of information, culture and knowledge production, diffusion, reproduction etc.” (Raboy & Padovani forthcoming) has not been proposed yet. Indeed, in first place existing works have adopted exclusive attention foci -global media policy (Raboy 2002), information policies (Braman 2006), the government of electronic networks (Drake & Wilson III 2008), the management of Internet critical resources (Mueller 2002)- thus ending up providing only partial accounts of complex contexts (both in terms of the vast range of issues included and of the variety of actors taking part into political processes) they were examining. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, they have preferred to inquiry official, institutionally based processes while the role played by cognitive elements -such as frames applied to global issues, cognitive categories and ideas- in the development of governance processes has so far received less attention.