Being Digital Citizens

From the rise of cyberbullying and hactivism to the issues surrounding digital privacy rights and freedom of speech, the Internet is changing the ways in which we govern and are governed as citizens. This open access book examines how citizens encounter and perform new sorts of rights, duties, opportunities and challenges through the Internet. By disrupting prevailing understandings of citizenship and cyberspace, the authors highlight the dynamic relationship between these two concepts. Rather than assuming that these are static or established “facts” of politics and society, the book shows how the challenges and opportunities presented by the Internet inevitably impact upon the action and understanding of political agency. In doing so, it investigates how we conduct ourselves in cyberspace through digital acts. This book provides a new theoretical understanding of what it means to be a citizen today for students and scholars across the social sciences. This new and updated edition includes two new chapters. A Preface consists of reflections on developments in digital politics since the book was published in 2015. It considers how recent major political struggles over digital technologies and data can be understood in relation to the conceptualization of digital citizens that the book offers. While the Preface positions dominant responses to these struggles such as government regulations as 'closings', a new final chapter, Digital citizens-yet-to-come offers examples of 'openings' – digital acts such as new forms of data activism that are less recognised but which point to the emergence of paradoxical digital acts that are producing new digital political subjectivities. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by European Research Council (ERC)

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Preface to the Second Edition 1. Doing Things with Words and Saying Words with Things 2. Citizens and Cyberspace 3. Speech Acts and Digital Acts 4. Participating, Connecting, Sharing 5. Filtering, Tracking, Normalizing 6. Witnessing, Hacking, Commoning 7. Making Digital Rights Claims 8. Digital Citizens Yet to Come Bibliography

About the Author :
Engin Isin is professor of international politics, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and University of London Institute in Paris (ULIP). Evelyn Ruppert is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK.

Review :
Being Digital Citizens is a singular volume. Bringing equal attention to both digital and citizenship studies, Isin and Ruppert offer a thoughtful and nuanced theorization of what it means to be digital citizens. In this highly anticipated second edition, they apply their lucid and convincing arguments to spelling out the continued tensions as well as interdependence between political activism and corporate and political power in cyberspace. This is a book for students and scholars who care about understanding the intricate ins and outs of the way data affect citizens’ everyday acts and how they produce political subjectivity. Being Digital Citizens provides a timely and much-needed framework for thinking through rights claims on the internet in relation to a collective political subject. The second edition of this seminal work broadens our understanding of political struggles over digital life further by engaging with new contemporary debates and research, delineating crucial pathways for understanding how people make claims for digital rights and data justice, and advancing the case of digital citizens as citizens yet to come. This is a critical and comprehensive contribution to the debate on political subjectivity, rights and justice in a digital age. No other book addresses the contest over digital citizenship as comprehensively as Being Digital Citizens. The authors set out the theoretical grounding we need right now to understand the digital citizen as political subject within the turbulent contemporary history of the internet.