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Book Review: The Internet and Society

He argues that we are now entering the third – empirical – phase of theorising about virtual communities. Agnostic about the virtues of virtuality, he supports Redden’s asssertion that geographical location is significant in the deployment and culture of the internet. Although he endorses Castells’s thesis in The rise of the network society that IT has generated a new economy and new cultural patterns, he regards Castells’s claim that the geography of globalization is founded upon MNCs exploiting the New International Division of Labour as too structuralist. This approach, Flew says, reifies the Net, and also has the traditional structuralist weakness of structure-agency. Pleasingly, the book reveals an abundance of new, sharp thinkers (to say ‘antipodean’ seems inappropriate here now) whose work relegates the better-known McKenzie Wark’s two papers. His aphorisms (e.g., ‘History is the production of abstraction and the abstraction of production’, p. 5) are, I believe, ultimately problematic. His extracts from the hacker’s manifesto – for example, ‘It is in the interests of hackers to be free to hack for hacking’s sake’ (p. 100; a second paper) – draws on liberal individualist discourse, which seems very much at odds with the dominant themes. In all, this book provides a useful guide to the major issues and positions in digital culture and politics. Its rejection of the technophilic and neo-liberal discursive strains in much contemporary debate, especially in government policy documents, is an encouraging sign of mature thinking. It should indicate that the on-going Fibreculture discussion will not be just the ‘social noise’ (p. vii) that the editors wish to avoid, but will contribute to global and local theory and practice.