Information Politics on the Web

This book seeks to identify the cultures, techniques, and devices that rank and recommend information on the web. It also analyses the political content of web sites as well as the politics built into the web's infrastructure.

The book describes two methods for politics on the web. The first is referred to as "back-end," and is described as the politics of search engine technology. Second, the "front-end" is defined as "diversity, inclusivity, and relative prominence of sites publicly accessible on the Web." To examine these approaches, Rogers developed software tools that take into account and draw from the competition between the "official, the non-governmental, and the underground."

On the basis of his findings about how information politics works, Rogers suggests that the web should be, and can be, a "collision space" for official and unofficial accounts of reality.

The book is broken into these chapters:

1. Introduction: Behind the Practice of Information Politics
2. The Viagra Files: The Web as Collision Space between Official and Unofficial Accounts of Reality
3. Mapping De-territorialization: Classic Politics in Tatters
4. After Genoa: Remedying Informational Politics and Augmenting Reality with the web
5. Election Issue Tracker: Monitoring the Politics of Attention
6. The Practice of Information Politics on the Web

Richard Rogers is Director of govcom.org, an Amsterdam-based foundation that seeks to create and host political tools on the Web.

Click here for Chapter 1 in PDF format: Introduction: Behind the Practice of Information Politics