Chapter 10: Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A Critical/Reconstructive Approach

It has been just over a decade since the blossoming of hypertext and the emergence of the utopian rhetoric of cyberdemocracy and personal liberation, which accompanied the growth of the new online communities that formed the nascent World Wide Web. While the initial cyberoptimism of many ideologues and theorists of the “virtual community” now seems partisan and dated, debates continue to rage over the nature, effects, and possibilities of the Internet and technopolitics (Armitage, 1999; Barlow, 1996; Best & Kellner, 2001; Gates, 1996; Kellner, 1997; Kelly, 1998; Rheingold, 1993; Walch, 1999).¹ Some claim that the Internet is producing a cyberbalkanization of “daily me” news feeds and fragmented communities (Sunstein, 2002; Van Alstyne & Brynjolfsson, 1996), while in an accompanying article in this journal Jodi Dean argues that Internet content is often reduced to the circulation of noise and effectless content in a new stage of “communicative capitalism.”²