Chapter 2: Mediating Transparency: Governing with Visibility

This chapter explains how the concept of transparency deforms as it informs practices of governing. The discussion can be rather demanding at times as it breaks apart conceptions of transparency, media, and government into conflicting yet accurate appraisals of how to depict what transparency is and what it does when deployed – including in radical digital contexts. If you are reading this book with interest to learn more about cases of radical and digital configurations of transparency, chapters three through six are worth flipping ahead to. However, if you would like to dig deeper into how transparency is irreducibly connected to technologies of government; and how these in turn influence and are influenced by the design of socio-technological apparatuses we often call media; in ways that provide evidence towards considering post-foundational democratic theory and practice, this chapter is for you.