Information Politics on the Web

Once upon a time information lived in one corner and politics lived in another. This is no longer so: information has been politicised (and probably always was), while insights into the sociology and informatics of politics have grown with recent (and long overdue) research. In addition, it has all gone online – to the internet and the worldwide web. These trends interest both information professionals and political commentators equally, because information politics is an area of convergence. Developments in e‐democracy and e‐government and e‐voting, too, have both driven these factors forward and been shaped by them. General interest, too, in weblogs, particularly political ones, in the sociology of information (the behaviour of information content and hypertext links), and content analysis, has shifted research in the direction of “webometrics” (the internet counterpart of bibliometrics).

This in turn has shaped what is regarded as true there, what is called web epistemology, and how, on the internet and the worldwide web, official and unofficial voices converge, mainstream and underground interpretations collide. Conventional media like the press have band‐wagonned their way into the show with the growth of electronic newspapers and other forms of content aggregation. So all this takes things in two identifiable and tangible directions: first, information‐related, how information networks are formed, how they behave and cluster, and what ontologies and epistemologies they imply; and second, politics‐related, what issues appear where, how opinion clusters around issues, how political parties cluster around issues and vice‐versa, what links what to what (and why), how official versions compete with alternative versions, and how all this takes place in everyday politics as well as on special occasions like elections.

Over‐arching everything, is the design and operation of the internet and the worldwide web, and above all search engines like Google and services like Amazon. The rise and rise of these is chronicled perceptively by Bruce Abramson (2005) in Digital Phoenix, and their commercial character is analysed well in Library Trends (Fabos, 2005) where implications for libraries and democracy are explored (in the context of open archive). Weber (2004) has suggested new business and legal models as the result of open source (in The Success of Open Source), and Willinsky (2006) examined the implications for scholarship in The Access Principle. If anything, works like these demonstrate how a distinctive “information” perspective, in the widest sense, is offering important insights into how and why things are changing, and what causes and implications really are.

The MIT Press has contributed substantially to this debate, taking up one strand in particular – that of the sociology of information on the internet and the worldwide web. Several of these works are published by them. Others include the tantalizing The Laws of the Web by Huberman (2001), dealing with “the ecology of information” there, and Fensel and Hendler (2003) Spinning the Semantic Web, on meaning and relationship in the structured networks of the worldwide web. The work under review here, Rogers's (2000) Information Politics on the Web, comes from the same stable, along with others like Manovich's (2001) The Language of New Media and Elmer's (2004) Profiling Machines. These are not the only kids on the block, as a sideways glance at Hines's (2005) Virtual Methods (Berg) confirms, with, among other essays, a thought‐provoking contribution by Martin Dodge on mapping in virtual research (Dodge and Kitchin, 2001).

So Rogers's new book exists in a well‐recognized framework, and contributes its fair share to it. To get a clear idea of what it offers, readers will almost certainly want to visit Rogers's website at Govcom.org, an Amsterdam‐based foundation specializing in creating and hosting political tools on the worldwide web, where Rogers is director. He is also Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. The book is called information politics for several reasons:

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  the internet and the worldwide web are where official and unofficial views of politics come together;

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  official websites vet the truth;

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  search engines rank entries according to paid inclusion and promotional content;

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  voluntaristic inclusion creates its own bias;

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  links and metatags simply reinforce these biases;

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  commerce and populism set dominant agendas; and

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  notions of the truth (web epistemology) cannot be understood without knowing these things.

If internet and worldwide web content, then, is edited and filtered, created and displayed in this protean ways, some viewpoints being tacitly ignored, others dominating unnaturally, links and rank orders in retrieval merely reflecting (and perpetuating) knowledge hegemonies based on power and commerce (shades of Foucault?), then how do analyses of such networks and co‐occurrences shed authentic light on information politics and political information? Rogers discusses official and unofficial content about the drug Viagra (for example, what Pfizer says about it, the risks cited by alternative voices). Mapping politically‐charged issues, like HIV/AIDs and genetically‐modified food, reveals how, within the semblance of pluralism, certain viewpoints prevail, underpinned by an ontology of semantics and by links that reflect self‐promotion rather than objectivity.

Chapter four deals with coverage of the G8 Summit held in 2001 at Genoa in Italy, picking out key issues for the summiteers (like making globalisation work, the global health fund, compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, and dealing with protest) and key issues for protesters (like debt cancellation for poor countries, national emission control policies, native population and forest rights, and tax on international flows of capital). Differences are stark, and are corroborated by further analyses of relevant press coverage in major broadsheet newspapers.

In such ways, factoids masquerading as facts and infoids pretending to be information, take on the appearance of truth, and this is exaggerated further by the neat fit between the issues raised and a populist Zeitgeist‐effect on top queries in the search engines. In the Dutch election, election issues were tracked and a network of co‐occurrences constructed by which it became clear how the Dutch political parties clustered around particular issues. Year‐on‐year comparisons were possible, and web issue index of and for the civil society could be compiled. Political party‐related and non‐governmental organization (NGO)‐related issues could be separated out. In this case, the Dutch government itself, through the Infodrome project, provided help.

Yet government portals, like UK online Citizen's Portal (now DirectGov) attract general criticism from Rogers for being heavily edited. Only through systematically examining worldwide web information trans‐discursively can researchers move beyond these vetted sources and partial truths. Rogers's conclusions about information politics are challenging and topical, and his methodology an example of approaches taken more and more by both researchers and practitioners. So a book offering a lot for the right reader and deserving a place, along with others like it, in any thoughtful and topical academic and specialist collection.