Classifying the Internet: Everyday Negotiations of Technology and Social Order

Abstract

Inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, this article explores the classificatory pairs used by 28 Internet users in four urban centres across Canada to describe their daily use of the Internet. The pairs—work/personal, reader/contributor, information/communication, and freedom/control—offer a snapshot of the everyday struggles over the subject positions and the social order that those wider discursive constructions of the Internet present to us. The struggles speak to respondents’ diffuse, yet ongoing, concerns with the increased commodification of Internet spaces. The article argues that there is a need to open up spaces for the critical consideration of our own roles, as Internet users, in the economy of the Internet.

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