IJOC Review of Schudson, M. (2015) The Rise of the Right to Know, Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945-1975 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Beyond Transparency : Politics after Wkileaks
Digital platforms have been differently seen, throughout the last decade: 1) as a device of citizen participation in public affairs; 2) as a weapon for terrorist movements, which use sophisticated communication networks; 3) as a means to supply intelligence agencies with a capacity to control people such as we had never seen before; 4) as a means to discover and make known what governments secretly do. All these perspectives correspond to real changes internet brought to politics, and people are unconditionally supporting the ones mentioned in 1) and 4). Participation and transparency are indisputable values in democracy. However, in order to be efficient, political deliberation has always required secrecy, which places democracy at a crossroads: to be realistic it has to keep the so called state secret; to remain democratic it has to be transparent. Is this compromise feasible in the digital era? That is the challenge.
WikiLeaks: Vigilance to vigilantes and back again, or designing hues of transparency and democracy
This article offers an interpretive critique of the political affordances created through iterations of the WikiLeaks project. The research shows that delineated phases of the WikiLeaks transparency project often correlate with specific paradigms of digital democracy that were previously enunciated in this journal by Lincoln Dahlberg. The research builds upon and extends Dahlberg’s democratic paradigms by comparing new objects against the typology and offering a theoretical explanation towards how political affordances are formed in digital democracy. Specifically, the article relates theories of affordance to an informing/deforming design process to explain how political positions are created in new media apparatus. The article traces iterations of WikiLeaks from 2006 to 2011, as well as derivative projects of radical transparency that existed in 2012 and 2013.
Disclosure’s Effects: WikiLeaks and Transparency
Constitutional, criminal, and administrative laws regulating government transparency, and the theories that support them, rest on the assumption that the disclosure of information has transformative effects: disclosure can inform, enlighten, and energize the public, or it can create great harm and stymie government operations. To resolve disputes over difficult cases, transparency laws and theories typically balance disclosure's beneficial effects against its harmful ones—what I have described as transparency's balance. WikiLeaks and its vigilante approach to massive document leaks challenge the underlying assumption about disclosure's effects in two ways. First, WikiLeaks' ability to receive and distribute leaked information cheaply, quickly, and seemingly unstoppably enables it to bypass the legal framework that would otherwise allow courts and officials to consider and balance disclosure's effects. For this reason, WikiLeaks threatens to make transparency's balance irrelevant. Second, its recent massive disclosures of U.S. military and diplomatic documents allow us to reconsider and test the assumption that disclosure produces certain effects that can serve as the basis for judicial and administrative prediction, calculation, and balancing. For this reason, WikiLeaks threatens transparency's balance by disproving its assumption that disclosure necessarily has predictable, identifiable consequences that can be estimated ex ante or even ex post. This Article studies WikiLeaks in order to test prevailing laws and theories of transparency that build on the assumption that disclosure's effects are predictable, calculable, and capable of serving as the basis for adjudicating difficult cases. Tracing WikiLeaks' development, operations, theories, and effects, it demonstrates the incoherence and conceptual poverty of an effects model for evaluating and understanding transparency.
Between transparency and surveillance: Politics of the secret
Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2016
The recent wave of whistleblowers and cyber-dissidents, from Julian Assange to Edward Snowden, has declared war against surveillance. In this context, transparency is presented as an attainable political goal that can be delivered in flesh and bones by spectacular and quasi-messianic moments of disclosure. The thesis of this article is that, despite its progressive promise, the project of releasing classified documents is in line with the Orwellian cold war trope of Big Brother rather than with the complex geography of surveillance today. By indicting the US federal government as the principal agent of surveillance, the ‘logic of the leak’ obfuscates that today’s surveillance is conducted mostly by the private sector in the form of dataveillance. What should we think, then, of this new fetish of transparency? Is it a symptom of the castigation of a desire for surveillance, the wish to be constantly observed and closely inspected? I claim that the meaning of the ‘expository society’,...
Psychoanalysis against WikiLeaks: resisting the demand for transparency
Review of Communication, 2020
With the intensifying demand for transparency in government has come a dramatic increase in the number of spectacular public leaks that carry dramatic public consequences. This essay reviews how transparency has been considered an ideal of democratic theory and critical media scholarship and offers several psychoanalytic tenets for reading public demands for transparency. The essay then analyses discourse by and about WikiLeaks to illustrate how Julian Assange's discourse results in a program of transparency that engages in destructive rituals of disavowal and exposure. The other sections of the essay review WikiLeaks’s disclosures in the early 2000s through the Obama administration and the way that the motif of transparency is entangled with masculine fragility, disavowal, and the self-destructive drive. This is a pre-print of the article, and page numbers do not correspond with the final version.
Information wants to be free," rings the battle cry of transparency and open government advocates worldwide. The aphorism is attributed to Stewart Brand who deployed it in his 1987 book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, primarily to illustrate the downward economic pressure upon information in an age when information is cheap (Clarke, 2000, p. 202). Several pages later, Brand adds that "information wants to be (politically) free" (ibid., p. 211). This latter political meaning has animated the "freedom of information" movement in recent years, although the former economic meaning might describe the phenomenon that has helped enable it. Scholars interested in the historical, theoretical, and political dimensions of freedom of information legislation and open government initiatives would be well served by Transparency in Politics and the Media, published in association with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. This short volume, edited by