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of causes that harnesses the internet for purposes broadly oriented to social justice
and protection of the politically and economically marginalized, such as promoting
human rights; preventing war; attacking poverty; environmental protection;
women's, gay, handicapped peoples', animal, and minority rights; and opposition
to economic and political exploitation, including neoliberal globalization. By
allowing alliances to be forged and synergies to be fostered, the internet greatly
enhances the power of social movements, making them into relatively coherent
forces that accomplish far more together than they could by acting alone. In short,
Manning and Wikileaks fall squarely within the tradition of progressive hacktiv-
ism (Ludlow
2010
). Cyberspace is an ideal mechanism for groups to jump spatial
scales (Adams
1996
), allowing them to leverage public opinion at the global scale
in local struggles for justice. Wikileaks represents scale jumping at its finest: in
releasing vast quantities of state secrets, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange
revealed that the porosity of national borders can be utilized for emancipatory
purposes. As a result, even the most powerful and best financed institution in the
world—the U.S. military—was revealed as having weak points, moments and
spaces of vulnerability.
3.3 Discussion: A Habermasian Critique
Many groups in closed societies can view digital information in a manner
unavailable in censored print or broadcast media, undermining state monopolies
over the media, and enhancing, if slowly and contingently, moves toward demo-
cratic governance (Slane
2007
). Precisely because cyberspace facilitates relatively
easy, unfettered access to information, it has been viewed with alarm by numerous
governments. In and of itself, of course, the internet does not simply produce
positive or negative effects, for its information is always filtered through national
and local cultures, biases, and predispositions. However, as ever larger numbers of
people are brought into contact with one another on-line, cyberspace may expand
opportunities for engaging in political activity, some of which challenges or del-
egitimizes prevailing models of authority by undermining the monopoly of tra-
ditional elites over the means of communication. The internet is relatively low in
cost and easy to use, and thus reduces a major obstacle to the participation in
public debate by the poor. Because it allows access to multiple sources of infor-
mation, including films and images, the internet has facilitated a generalized
growth in awareness of foreign ideas, products, and political norms. Indeed, as
Yang (
2003
) suggests, given how widespread digital communications have
become, the internet and civil society have increasingly come to co-evolve,
energizing and shaping one another in time and space.
In this way, cyberspace deeply resembles Jürgen Habermas's (
1979
) famous
''ideal speech situation'' in which unfettered discourse is central to the ''public
sphere'' and in which discursive truth is constructed in the absence of barriers to
communication (Poster
1997
). One of the twentieth century's leading social
