Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

eng
c i t i z e n s h i p a n d d i g i t a l n e t w o r k s
second half of the 18th century, a technology appeared, which performed on the
population, the ‘living beings’, and not simply on the individual’s body, but on the
species. Foucault named this technology biopolitics (285-315). Surveillance, typical
of the disciplinary societies, follows the coaching mechanisms of the bodies, the
individual examinations and the repetitive exercises. On its turn, biopolitics dealt
“with the population as a political problem, as a problem simultaneously scientific
and political, as a biological problem and as a power problem” (293). The relationship
between the Deleuzean proposal of control society and the Foucaultian idea of
biopolitics can be explored for the analysis if the digital networks in a globalized and
cognitive capitalism scenario. How?
A big part of our sociability is being carried out from informational networks.
The most relevant communication of our society is now intermediated by information
processing machines. Because of that, codes, software and technological protocols
penetrate our social and cultural daily life. The Internet, essential under the
most diverse social aspects, is a communicational arrangement based on technological
products. As pointed out by Galloway, the management style of the distributed
networks is of protocol, and clearly expresses the control society. In order to carry
out the digital communication, it is necessary to accept its protocols. In order to
freely communicate in the digital networks, one needs to accept its rules, its procedures
and its communicational architecture. Thus, it is possible to clearly observe
that the same network ensuring our communicative freedom is the one that controls
us. One cannot ensure the free flow of digital information without accepting the
network protocols. There lies the control.
The control itself is neither good nor bad, but simply the technical mode of
ensuring distributed and interactive communication. It is the TCP/IP protocols
and their verticalized system of domains organization, the DNS (Domain Name
System) that defines a series of limits and possibilities in network communication.
Built by collectives of technicians, hackers, engineers, academics and representatives
of corporations, these and other hundreds of protocols constitute and make
network communication feasible. They are the most typical elements of control
society, which main power technologies are also distributed, but clearly coexist with
domination forms based on the territorial power technologies — mainly the sovereign
States — and with disciplinary institutions and their archaic surveillance
techniques.
An analysis of the scenarios currently comprised allows the elaboration of a
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