Democracy and Digital Technology

       

I’ve put together a short reading list that speaks to questions that arise from “democracy and digital technology” (democracy in theory and practice, and in participatory, deliberative, and representative modes, all of which are essential to ‘open democracy’ in Landemore’s sense). It is intended to be part of a forthcoming larger list that will include material on “artificial intelligence” (AI) while widening the scope to address issues that arise within a democratic society that in significant and often insidious ways is malformed by capitalist political economy (as evidenced in our earlier post on Zephyr Teachout’s NYRB article). It will also contain works more philosophically and ethically oriented (reflecting my critique—some of which is here—of the many extravagant claims often made on behalf of AI):

• Aaker, Jennifer and Andy Smith (with Carlye Adler) The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Drive Social Change (Jossey-Bass, 2010).
• Allan, Stuart. Online News: Journalism and the Internet (Open University Press, 2006).
• Baldwin-Philippi, Jessica. Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2015).
• Bennett, W. Lance and Alexandra Segerberg. The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
• Bernholz, Lucy, Hélène Landemore, and Rob Reich, eds. Digital Technology and Democratic Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2021).
• Bimber, Bruce. Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
• Boler, Megan, ed. Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times (MIT Press, 2008).
• Coleman, Stephen and Jay G. Blumler. The Internet and Democratic Citizenship: Theory, Practice, and Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
• Cowhey, Peter F. and Jonathan D. Aronson. Transforming Global Information and Communication Markets: The Political Economy of Innovation (MIT Press, 2009).
• Cram, Ian. Liberal Democracy, Law and the Citizen Speaker: Regulating Online Speech (Hart Publishing, 2022). 
• Deibert, Ronald, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain, eds. Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering (MIT Press, 2008).
• Deibert, Ronald, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain, eds. Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace (MIT Press, 2010).
• Ess, Charles. Digital Media Ethics (Polity Press, 2nd ed., 2014).
• Fenton, Natalie, ed. New Media, Old News: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age. (Sage Publications, 2010).
• Franda, Marcus. China and India Online: The Politics of Information Technology in the World’s Largest Nations (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
• Gerbaudo, Paolo. Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (Pluto Press, 2012).
• Henry, Neil. Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media (University of California Press, 2007).
• Hindman, Matthew. The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2009).
• Howard, Philip N. and Muzammil M. Hussain. Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Lessing, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (Penguin Press, 2004).
• Lynch, Michael Patrick. The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data (Liveright Publishing, 2016).
• Mandiberg, Michael, ed. The Social Media Reader (New York University Press, 2012).
• McCaughey, Martha and Michael D. Ayers, eds. Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2003).
• Murthy, Dhiraj. Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age (Polity Press, 2013).
• O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Broadway Books, 2016).
• O’Neil, Onora. A Philosopher Looks at Digital Communication (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
• Packard, Ashley. Digital Media Law (Blackwell, 2010).
• Papacharissi, Zizi A. A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age (Polity Press, 2010).
• Pasquale, Frank. The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press, 2015).
• Persily, Nathaniel and Joshua A. Tucker, eds. Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
• Pickard, Victor. Democracy without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society (Oxford University Press, 2020).
• Solove, Daniel J. The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age (New York University Press, 2004).
• Smith, Justin E. The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning (Princeton University Press, 2022).
• Teachout, Zephyr. “The Boss Will See You Know,” The New York Review of Books, August 18, 2022. [This is a review of four books about digital surveillance, tracking, and performance monitoring of millions of workers in an affluent capitalist but deeply inegalitarian society.]
• Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (MIT Press, 2005).
• Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2011).
• Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Books, 2016.
• van de Donk, Wim, Brian D. Loader, Paul G. Nixon, and Dieter Rucht, eds. Cyberprotest: New Media, Citizens and Social Movements (Routledge, 2004).
• Zittrain, Jonathan. The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (Yale University Press, 2009).
• Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (PublicAffairs, 2019).

Please note: relevant bibliographies are appended to our prior post.