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Terminal magazine looks at digital social innovations

A field of research is emerging around "digital social innovations". The magazine Terminal devotes a dossier to them in its 122nd issue.Valérie Peugeot, Jean-Samuel Beuscart, Anne-Sylvie Pharabod and Jean-Marc Josset propose a dive into "Transition techs" by analyzing the intentions and projections of digital environmental innovators through an analysis of nine digital initiatives.Sabrina Boulesnane studies the role of "CivicTech" in fostering citizen e-participation: in particular, she sheds light on social cohesion practices that allow "interrelated" actors to contribute to strengthening our connected democracies.Jean-Alexandre Pouleur, Noémie Lago, Chantal Scoubeau and Pascal Simoens explore the dynamics of digital participation in urban planning through an in-depth analysis of the "Demain, Mons" platform.Victoria Laurent, Romain Badouard, Clément Mabi, Cécile Méadel and Guillaume Sire examine the contribution of governmental digital tools to the development of the law by analyzing the design of the "Digital Republic" platform.Maud Pélissier, for her part, focuses on understanding what happens in fablabs, particularly in terms of the contributions made by digital entrepreneurs to the "knowledge commons.Contents Cédric Gossart, Nicolas Jullien, David Massé and Müge Özman: Overview of Digital Social Innovations [Full text] Valérie Peugeot, Jean-Samuel Beuscart, Anne-Sylvie Pharabod and Jean-Marc Josset: Digital technology for sustainable behavior? First steps of "Transition Techs" companies Sabrina Boulesnane and Laïd Bouzidi: Digital Social Innovations dedicated to citizen e-participation: what place for CivicTech? Jean-Alexandre Pouleur, Noémie Lago, Chantal Scoubeau and Pascal Simoens: Digital participation in urban planning, a simple amplification of existing processes? The case of the citizen platform "Demain, Mons Victoria Laurent, Romain Badouard, Clément Mabi, Cécile Méadel and Guillaume Sire: Government digital tools at the service of the law: The design of the Digital Republic platform Laurence Dierickx: From technical object to social object in the context of automated production of journalistic information Maud Pélissier: The deployment of digital social innovations in fablabs Interview with Nicole Alix, President of La Coop des Communs: Solidarity and Digital Commons Jacques Vétois: RGPD and personal data law: new constraints, new advances? Margot Beauchamps What are the social, economic, cultural and political benefits of Internet use? Presentation of the Capacity survey Mathilde Muracciole and David Massé: Digital social inclusion: the case of three digital devices improving access to rights Edgar Charles Mbanza: Domestic recompositions in the connected African margins

• Innovation

Published on 29/08/18



The magazine Terminal scrutinizes the digital mobilizations of minority and/or marginalized groups

This number of the journal Terminal, coordinated by Vincent Raynauld, Emmanuelle Richez and Stéphanie Wojcik, gathers a selection of articles dedicated to "minority and/or marginalized groups in the digital age".Several online protest movements led by minority and/or marginalized groups have emerged in recent years: #Occupy, #BringBackOurGirls, #BlackLivesMatter, the "sunflower" movement in Taiwan, the multiple protests of the Arab Spring movements, and most recently #MeToo."The last decade," explain Vincent Raynauld, Emmanuelle Richez and Stéphanie Wojcik in the introductory text, "has been marked by a growing number of minority and/or marginalized groups or communities that are using social digital media to highlight issues of concern to them, to establish a dialogue with political elites and other members of civil society, and to gain public recognition and favor. "Minority and/or marginalized groups," the three authors state, "typically include individuals who come from situations of social, ethnic, religious, cultural, linguistic, economic, or political inequality, because of their voluntary or involuntary membership in communities or networks, and who are perceived as subordinate or, in some cases, negatively by dominant groups. g. In this way, many minority and/or marginalized groups that were virtually invisible in the arenas influenced by conventional political and media elites (e.g., political parties, journalistic organizations, politicians) are now being given a platform through the use of socionic media." "Thus, socionic media allow minority and/or marginalized groups greater flexibility and control over the structure, content, tone, and dissemination of their message (...) In some cases, they reduce the threat of repression by political actors (...) They can act as a lever and exert influence over the political process.In sum, they contribute to the enlargement, diversification and, for some, the enrichment of the repertoires of collective action, which can be defined as the set of "means of action that the mobilized groups have at their disposal, at a given moment, to implement" political and civic actions often aimed at contesting the dominant political and social forces.The texts presented in this dossier are structured around three issues: The internal effects of online political and civic protest The impact of online protest movements on social and political elites The limitations and problems associated with the online challenge. "Some of these aspects have received a lot of attention from the scientific community internationally, without always being based on empirical observations, while others, notably because of methodological difficulties, have been little studied until now.Contents of the issue Vincent Raynauld, Emmanuelle Richez and Stéphanie Wojcik: Introduction: Mobilization practices, socio-political changes and identity transformations Natacha Souillard, Brigitte Sebbah, Lucie Loubère, Laurent Thiong-Kay and Nikos Smyrnaios The Yellow Vests, study of a social movement through the prism of its media arenas Lena A. Hübner and Anne-Marie Pilote: Feminist mobilizations on Facebook and Twitter. The case of the #StopCultureDuViol movement in Quebec Afaf Taibi, Anna Lezon Rivière and Madjid Ihadjadene: The info-communication practices of the Rifian diaspora on the digital networks in a socio-political crisis situation Normand Landry, Anne-Marie Gagné, Sylvain Rocheleau, Christiane Caneva, Pascale Caidor and Mathieu Bégin: Activism, Social Justice and Digital Inequality: A Study of Anti-Poverty Groups in Quebec Vincent Carlino: Online video and radical political contestation. Between integration to militant practices and criticism of platforms Pascal Lupien: Socio-digital media and the participation of Canadian francophone minorities in political life Mireille Lalancette, Stéphanie Yates and Carol-Ann Rouillard: Participation of minority counterpublics and socionumeric media. Twitter debates in the context of the adoption of the law on medical aid in dying in Canada Arjun Tremblay and Yasmin Jiwani: Hispanic and Latino minority and digital social networks in the United States in the era of Donald Trump: a research note.

• Inclusion

Published on 21/09/20



When Internet Governance is Controversial: An Overview of French-Speaking Research

In spite of many preconceived ideas, "the Internet is governed " remind Julien Rossi, Francesca Musiani and Lucien Castex, coordinators of this file published by the magazine Terminal. " The coexistence of technical standardization sources and traditional legislative and legal sources gives rise to a multi-actor and multi-level Internet governance, characterized by the presence of several regulatory centers of different nature as well as by the juxtaposition of several normative "layers".This governance is exercised through a variety of instruments: legal texts adopted by local, national, supranational or international political institutions, contracts between private actors such as Internet access providers or domain name registries, soft law instruments such as charters and technical standards. "All these instruments, even those that are purely technical, such as standards or infrastructure, produce political effects.The control of these technical infrastructures, which are often "critical" because they are scarce resources of the Internet, remains a central power issue in Internet governance. Discussions focus on topics such as interoperability, openness and network neutrality, privacy protection, surveillance techniques and their regulation, content filtering techniques, security and encryption of communication protocols, artificial intelligence and algorithmic discrimination, and copyright and access to knowledge and culture on the Web."In these controversies, political questions are often implicitly placed behind discourses that deal with seemingly purely technical objects. A detailed understanding of the technical dimension of the debates is therefore often an indispensable prerequisite for accessing their meaning on the political level. A specific field of research, at the intersection of international relations, "Science and Technology Studies", law and computer science, has thus emerged.The ambition of this issue of the journal Terminal is to " present the state of the art of French-speaking research on the subject, while revealing the diversity of theoretical and methodological tools used to study the great diversity of socio-technical controversies and arenas of Internet governance.The interest of this issue lies, indeed, in the ability to study Internet governance without separating the technical from the political.Stéphane Bortzmeyer discusses the process of developing the Internet's technical standards: "the study of technical standardization and its political consequences is distinguished by the fact that technical and political issues are intertwined, to the point that it is difficult to separate them during debates.Camille Paloque-Bergès, for her part, presents a research program on Unicode, a character encoding format that describes content.Julie Marques discusses projects of ethical charters applicable to Artificial Intelligence, elaborated by companies and associations, through a documentary and textometric approach.Clément Perarnaud presents a qualitative study of the institutional processes of negotiation of export control policies exercised by the European Union on surveillance technologies.Camila Pérez Lagos and Laura Calabrese analyze how the controversy over the Cambridge Analytica scandal unfolded on Twitter, "broadening the focus to the general public by moving beyond the very arenas in which the instruments (laws, charters, standards, protocols, code, physical infrastructure...) through which power is exercised on the Internet are produced."These articles are complemented by four interviews with researchers that complete the thematic overview of current research on Internet governance.Farzaneh Badii discusses her two current objects of investigation: the effect of US sanctions applied to content delivery networks on connectivity in sanctioned countries, and the writing of a socio-history of Internet protocols. She defends the point of view according to which, contrary to what other researchers and certain actors in the field propose, technical standards are not the adequate instruments for the defense of fundamental rights.Romain Badouard evokes his work on the regulation of content on social networks, and its effects on moderation practices, "through a perspective inspired by Science and Technology Studies but also by document analysis as practiced by historians".Corinne Cath discusses the interest of the ethnographic approach for the study of controversies within the Internet Engineering Task Force, in particular to uncover the political values underlying the technical decisions that are adopted. Finally,Guillaume Sire presents his research on the World Wide Web Consortium, which defines Web standards, and in particular the HTML and ePub formats, on which he has conducted fieldwork "with an approach that borrows from the theory of composites of Joëlle Le Marec and Igor Babou, from the sociology of innovation of Patrice Flichy, but also from the current of Critical Code Studies.Two Internet governance actors, Constance Bommelaer de Leusse and Anriette Esterhuysen, complete the overview by sharing a personal testimony and point of view rooted in the Internet governance institutions in which they operate.In an encyclopedia entry intended for an English-language volume, Francesca Musiani outlines the debates that have so far marked these attempts at definition, placing them in a historical periodization. Contents Julien Rossi, Francesca Musiani and Lucien Castex: Internet governance, between infrastructures and socio-political spaces: research contributions Stéphane Bortzmeyer: Decision-making in Internet technical standardization: the example of DoH Laura Calabrese and Camila Pérez Lagos: The Cambridge Analytica case on Twitter: resignation or resistance to digital surveillance? Julie Marques: The principle of justice in the governance of artificial intelligence through the lens of gender, class and race Camille Paloque-Bergès: Encoding multilingual writing in digital Clément Perarnaud: Export controls as instruments of power in Internet governance Francesca Musiani: Internet governance, a brief history of a controversial space Farzaneh Badiei: Looking for Godot, finding Internet governance Romain Badouard: Internet governance, from pipes to content Corinne Cath-Speth: The Internet we don't see until it works: an anthropological research on the infrastructure of the Internet Guillaume Sire: Web standards: the ins and outs of operating rules Interview with Constance Bommelaer de Leusse Interview with Anriette Esterhuysen

• Inclusion

Published on 27/06/22