| Technologies have political qualities. This assertion is no longer as controversial as it once was. How we can gain more understanding of these characteristics however is more contentious. This project is an effort to unveil the political qualities of technologies by investigating the language that surrounds their design. It advances a rhetoric-based framework to study the development of a public space online in Canada. Through rhetorical analysis of the language employed by the designers of an artifact, the project demonstrates that technologies are political in at least two ways. First, they are embedded with assumptions about the public good and contain possibilities for ordering public order. Second, technical design is a site for political discourse and activity in the public sphere. Technologies are hence both political objects and objects of political compromise around which citizens congregate to form and negotiate distinct views of the world.; Finally, the project outlines process features through which a technology is rhetorically constructed as designers build it “with nuts and bolts.” In particular, it investigates the rhetorical appeal of public space online as a means of explaining how technologies are related to the civic conversation unfolding around them. It also identifies two definitions of public space online put forth by the designers in the course of building their artifact and explains in which ways the language they used to create these visions of democracy allowed them to work together despite their differing assumptions about the public good. |
