ABSTRACT
In April 2007, Estonia’s decision to move a Soviet World War II memorial from its place in central Tallinn resulted in what was described in the NewYorkTimes as “the first war in cyberspace.” Coordinated web traffic flooding, commonly known as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, brought down its government network, email servers, and the websites of banks, universities, and newspapers. Even with international aid, it was weeks before internet activity returned to normal. Though critical infrastructure such as electricity or water supply remained unharmed, the world took notice: NATO, various governments and private security companies promptly began analyzing the methods of the attack, to prepare for the next time. The internet has become so intertwined in our lives and societies that severe damage to it might create a communication catastrophe. In an increasingly interconnected world, no one can risk the internet breaking down. But the NewYorkTimes’s attempt to explain this event by invoking the image of war between
nation states may be misleading. Estonia blamed Russia for the attacks, but no proof was presented to counter Russia’s angry denial. Experts disagree on the Russian government involvement, but it is certain that much of the attack was the result of mass mobilization by ethnic Russian volunteers from all over the world – including within Estonia itself. This wellorchestrated collective action was coordinated through messages posted on Russian-language websites and mailing lists, rather than by political or military chain of command. This is only one demonstration of how inadequate our old categories are in explaining the complex dynamics of politics, culture, and social structure in the contemporary digital world. This story also demonstrates the crucial role that the internet is playing in these dynamics, as it allows collective identity and collective action to manifest itself across great geographical distances. From a humble beginning as a textual communication medium used by a small elite of
computer experts, the internet has become a universal medium, connecting people and distributing diverse content around the world. Based on standards and protocols which allow
information to flow through it without a central switchboard, it cancels out the traditional dichotomies of private vs.mass media and synchronous vs. asynchronous communication.New forms of expression such as emails, blogs, wikis, and social networks are now a part of everyday life for a large and growing part of world population.While its decentralized structure makes it particularly adaptive to cultural innovation, the internet still tends to foster a unique cultural logic. As Manuel Castells notes, “it is open source, free posting, decentralized broadcasting, serendipitous interaction, purpose oriented communication, and shared creation that find their expression on the internet” (2001: 200). Spreading rapidly during the last decade, internet infrastructure now extends to every conti-
nent, accessible in even the remotest of places. The deployment of this infrastructure is extremely uneven, with more than 55 percent of users coming from high-income countries (which hold less than 16 percent of global population). There is a strong and continuous trend towards shrinking this global digital divide: in 2005, low-and lower-middle-income countries accounted for 30 percent of internet users worldwide, rising from merely 5 percent in 1997. A significant gap still exists in access to broadband connections which enable users to access multimedia materials. Even more important, there is still a wide global disparity in the frequency and ways people around the world use the internet, as well as in the composition of user population,which tend to be more elite in less connected regions (Chen et al., 2002; ITU, 2007). As its web is continuously spreading around the world, the internet is playing a major role in the growth of worldwide interconnectedness. In the twenty-odd years since the internet began to emerge into public awareness, the
concept of globalization came to the forefront of academic research and became a household term. The internet itself is at least partially responsible for this development, as the ability to instantly reach people and content around the world captured the imagination and encouraged the perception of the world as one global village.While both the extent and the novelty of globalization are still highly contested, there is a general consensus that social, political, cultural, and economic processes are increasingly acquiring global dimensions. For the purpose of this chapter, we will describe globalization as a process by which networks of interaction spread around the world – especially across national borders – connecting diverse people, institutions, ideas, and representations in increasingly complex patterns of interdependence. This does not mean, however, that locality loses its importance, or that the nation state is disappearing. As the Estonian example shows, the global and the local are always tightly intertwined, and nation states play a crucial part in mediating their relations. The next three sections of this chapter discuss the extension of social, cultural, and political
global networks into the internet, while the following section is devoted to the attempts made by nation states to influence, control, and regulate it. In the first section, we explore the globalization of social structures via information and communication technologies, concentrating on the writings of Manuel Castells and Karin Knorr-Cetina. In the second section,we describe the internet’s effects on the relations between local and global culture, illustrating them through the examples of global popular culture and transnational diasporas. In the third section, we show how the internet is used as an assembling space for transnational advocacy networks. In the fourth section, we explain how efforts of nation states to govern the internet – both by individual states and through international regimes – foster the creation of multifarious global networks.We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these phenomena, and point out some theoretical implications.
