Digital Dilemmas

Digital Dilemmas addresses an important current field of media studies. Its principal strength and originality lies in its ability to bridge social, technological and cultural approaches to the internet and to new media generally, in a space in which major studies are typically one-dimensional. Franklin's strong and broad-ranging grounding in social theory is evident in her clear explication of the paradox dilemma of a globally distributed technology which is, at the same time, controlled by a small number of hardware and software interests. --Arjun Appadurai, New York University Who 'owns' the internet? Are 'we' getting the internet 'we' deserve? M.I. Franklin's new work critically analyzes how the internet developed over the past decades through the concepts of nation-state, publics/public spheres and governmentality. A thought-provoking book, Digital Dilemmas tackles a number of poignant questions arising from tensions between the internet's co-habitants. --Jose van Dijck, University of Amsterdam Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork, scholarship and activism, and spanning an impressive range of sites (from courtroom to homeless refuge and UN policy forum), M.I. Franklin's exciting new book offers a red thread towards a sharper understanding of the entangled challenges and normative choices of the internet age. Franklin, through her careful unpicking of the complexities, gets us to a place where we start to grasp 'another way' of thinking about the internet, and we are all in her debt. --Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science Carefully and methodically, Digital Dilemmas unravels the mythologies of the internet to provide a persuasive sense of the power struggles, dominations, and resistances that inform the internet's many meanings for people's lives from the homeless on the streets to the gilded halls of the United Nations. --J.P. Singh, George Mason University