Digital Politics

From the Wikileaks scandal to the NSA spying scandal and the ‘Facebook’ revolutions of the Arab Spring, the ‘information age’ appears to be changing how we think about politics and challenging long establishes notions of power, privacy and participation. But what sort of change is it? Who benefits and who loses? Above all, where does power lie in the digital age?

This module proposes to examine the nature and conduct of politics in the information age in which societies are increasingly organised according to informational principles and characterised by the ubiquitous diffusion of technologies of computation and telecommunication. How are new do the digital societies emerging in the early twenty-first century differ from their predecessors? How is governance and conflict being transformed by the new social morphology of information networks? Do they make government more transparent or more invasive? Is new technology a tool of liberation or a weapon of oppression?

The first part of the module will examine the broad political, economic, and cultural features of information societies with a wide historical overview of their emergence. The second part of the module will then offer a tighter focus on particularly salient issues and debates animating the politics of information societies.

• Demonstrate knowledge of the competing theories of information society and the emerging social and political issues related to the growth of information and telecommunication technologies.
• Demonstrate knowledge of the context in which technological change takes place and the ways in which technology and society shape each other.
• Demonstrate an understanding of how various disciplinary approaches drawn from the social sciences and humanities contribute towards the understanding of information societies.
• Make use of online research skills and demonstrate familiarity with the strengths and weaknesses of online sources.
• Apply the methods and techniques they have learned to assess competing theories and empirical evidence as to the nature and scale of the social and political changes induced by information and telecommunication technologies.