Paper short abstract:

This paper intends to show how issues of digital policy arise from the dilemmas faced by participants in social movements in their use of digital social media. Thus, a new public sphere and agenda that goes beyond the concern for the instrumental value of these media emerge from these practices.

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic research I am conducting on free software communities and on hacktivist groups involved in the creation and maintenance of the technological infrastructure used by the 15-M movement in Spain, this paper intends to show how participants in social movements and organizations face a number of problems as they connect, communicate and organize themselves through new digital media. These problems naturally produce the need to take into account issues of digital policy, including net neutrality, privacy, openness, trust, security, transparency, and problems regarding intellectual property and the construction of a digital commons. These issues have consequences for the organization and governance of the movements, but also for the emergence of a broader field of action related to new forms of politics in digital environments. Since this is a regime of power as much as a regime of knowledge, a series of dilemmas with a political dimension inevitably arises.

Thus, a field of uncertainty opens up that displaces the concern about these digital policy issues into a back-and-forth path between groups organized around this agenda and a broader public composed by social activists and movements, NGOs, and other actors engaged in processes of social change.

In sum, this paper intends to show that, in addition to the impact of new digital media on social organizations, movements, and social change, issues involving a digital public sphere that, according to the anthropologist Chris Kelty, could be called a "recursive public" arise from the implementation and use of these same media.