Embedding Politics into Technologies: Towards a Design-Oriented Approach to Online Participation

Online Political Participation: Business as Usual?
By Romain Badouard
English

This paper addresses a specific approach to online political participation that focuses on the design of digital technologies. Connecting communication studies and science and technology studies, it analyzes how political values become embedded into participatory tools. In this paper, three points are tackled: how these technologies configure our actions on the Internet, applying formats to them, and thus “make us act;” how they frame our online relations, assigning roles and allocating resources, and thus “make us interact;” how they promote principles through these framings, and “make happen” specific modes of organization. In this regard, a design-oriented approach to online political participation raises question about the new forms of technological governmentality that these technologies perform.

Keywords

  • participation
  • Internet
  • design
  • uses
  • governmentality
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