The Digital Frontier

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The internet is often seen as either a great emancipator, spreading knowledge and encouraging free discourse, or a repressive machine fueled by capitalism and surveillance. In The Digital Frontier, Sangeet Kumar interrogates the World Wide Web in the age of globalization. Particularly, he considers the question of internet governance and the impact of Google, Facebook, and Twitter on a global scale. In doing so, he identifies four theories that bring to light the problems of a culturally and politically democratic global digital network. He analyzes how a global common good is used as a ruse by private corporations, how seemingly collaborative spaces are actually exclusionary due to strict policing of what is considered to be legitimate knowledge, how selfhood is being redefined online by Eurocentric ideals, and how the web has challenged nation states that try to limit access to certain information, like Wikileaks and Google Earth. The Digital Frontier suggests innovative and nuanced ways of understanding the internet as a powerful tool that is quickly shaping what it means to be global.