Teaching Comparative

Politics of technology - Technology of Politics

Operating systems and politics? How about operating systems and political philosophy? Bill Thompson, a BBC columnist, raises some questions with political implications.

He also helps point out that the idea of "the state" is more than just political institutions. That's often an idea we have to make several times with students, and this article might help, especially with tech-savvy students. You could also use this article to provoke some discussion about what Thompson means by "liberal values."

You might ask an interested student or two to describe the differences between the political implications of operating systems like Vista (discussed in the article excerpted below) and the implications of open source systems like Linux.

I'd have to write myself a big note to make sure that at the end a discussion about computer operating systems, I didn't forget to make the point that the pedagogical purpose of the discussion was to emphasize that the government is not the only powerful element of the state.

How the net turns code into politics

"The internet that we know today is changing, turning from an open, enabling and profoundly public space into a communications system which can be regulated, controlled, monitored and - where necessary - curtailed...

"Today's internet has a technical architecture which expresses certain liberal values, largely concerned with fair access to the net's resources, lack of centralised control, support for freedom of speech, openness to innovation, and resistance to monopoly - either cultural, economic or technological.

"These values are implicit in the way that it links computers and networks together and moves data around, because they are a consequence of the way that every computer on the net communicates with other computers.

"They are embedded in the network's protocols, the standards which determine how connections are made and how data is moved.

"Yet now governments and corporations around the world are making a concerted effort to dismantle the open internet and replace it with a regulated and regulable one that will allow them to impose an "architecture of control".

"The freedom of expression that was once available to users of the Internet Protocol is being stripped away. Our freedom to play, experiment, share and seek inspiration from the creative works of others is increasingly restricted so that large companies can lock our culture down for their own profit...

"Thanks to the internet we are seeing an unprecedented shift of power from the centre to the people, a shift that we observe in the media, in politics and in the way large companies respond to their customers.
We need to ensure that the freedoms we currently enjoy online are preserved as the network evolves, or this shift could easily end up as minor historical footnote."

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"state: the assembly of all those people and groups within a nation-state that have power to effect change at some level of society through direct action or political participation" -The AP Comparative Government and Politics Examination: What You Need to Know, p. 42

Labels: concepts, state

posted by Ken Wedding @ 10:42 AM