Institutional Power and Information Technology: American Foreign Policy and the Uneven and Combined Development of the Internet

拟议的研究课程将设法概述信息通信技术作为国际关系中的一种体制权力形式的理论。由于技术机构的设计和生产是在特定的社会和历史背景下进行的，因此它们带有社会和政治偏见。当这些机构在国际体系中扩散时，它们就会发挥制定议程权力的作用，迫使国际体系中的其他行动者接受技术的偏见，或试图以高昂的代价改变这种偏见。这是对社会权力的深刻理解，其中主导角色通过全球物质文化构建社会再生产的日常实践。当代最重要的例子就是互联网的发展。互联网表达了一种特殊的偏见，因为它是在特定的美国背景下创建的，这种偏见体现在互联网上信息的自由流动中，即对自由言论自由的偏见。当这种偏见在采用该技术的其他社会——如沙特阿拉伯、伊朗、中国和许多其他国家——实施时，就会产生政治问题，需要进行技术或社会变革。这在互联网过滤策略的发展中表现得最为明显。​有了这些概念，本研究将寻求进一步阐述这一技术发展和扩散过程是如何在社会学上产生的。考虑社会发展的不平衡和综合为本项目提供了理论基础。不平衡的国际社会的特点为技术的制度权力创造了空间，而结合的过程则是这种权力施加于其他行动者的方式。因此，国内环境下的技术发展总是包含“国际”因果关系的元素，其中多种政治社会的存在通过技术的制度特征积极地影响着国内社会的发展。从这个角度来看，技术不再被视为根据单一的线性原理发展，也不再被视为可以转向任何特定任务的中立工具。相反，技术发展的过程被正确地视为一个政治上有争议的过程，由社会发展的多重、碎片化和全球性过程构成。这项研究的主要产出将是一本书长的手稿，它发展了我对互联网制度力量的博士研究的初步见解。我还将撰写三篇论文草稿，发展上述一些论点，其中两篇将提交给社会科学的大型会议，以确保对本研究产生最大影响。最后，我将向学术期刊提交两篇论文，概述这些思想对国际关系和社会学领域正在进行的研究议程的重要性。

The proposed course of research will seek to outline a theory of information communications technology as a form of institutional power in international relations. Technological institutions carry a social and political bias due to their design and production within a particular social and historical context. When these institutions spread through the international system they function as a form of agenda setting power, forcing other actors in the international system to accept the bias of the technology, or to attempt to alter it at a significant cost. This is a deep understanding of social power, in which dominant actors structure the everyday practices of social reproduction through a global material culture. The key contemporary example is the development of the Internet. The Internet expresses a particular bias due to its creation in a specifically American context, a bias towards liberal freedom of speech present in the free flow of information on the Internet. When this bias is enacted in other societies that have adopted the technology - such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, and many others - it creates political problems that require the either technological or social change. This is seen most clearly in the development of Internet filtering strategies. Understanding the power of technology in this way is important in gauging the nature of power in international politics, a topic of significant controversy and importance touching upon a potential decline of American power, the possible rise of China to superpower status, and the purported diffusion of power represented by social media and Wikileaks.With these concepts in place, this research will seek to further elaborate how this process of technological development and diffusion is generated sociologically. Considering social development as uneven and combined provides the theoretical grounding for this project. The characteristics of an uneven international society create the space for technology's institutional power, while the process of combination is the manner in which this power is enacted upon other actors. The development of technology in domestic contexts thereby always contains an element of 'international' causality, in which the presence of multiple political societies actively informs domestic social development through technology's institutional character. Seen in this light, technologies are no longer viewed as developing according to a single linear rationale, nor are they viewed as neutral tools which can be turned to any particular task. Instead, the process of technological develop is correctly viewed as a politically contested process, constituted by the multiple, fragmented, and global process of social development. The primary output of this research will be one book length manuscript that develops the initial insights of my doctoral research on the institutional power of the Internet. I will also write three draft papers developing some of the above arguments, two of which I will present to large conferences in the social sciences in order to ensure maximum impact for this research. Finally, I will submit two papers to academic journals that will outline the importance of these ideas for ongoing research agendas within the field of International Relations and Sociology.