Marres, Noortje

Issue-politics May Be ”Merely Cosmetic,” But What about Its Make-up? The Case of the Development Gateway and Its Shadows on the Web

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which the political tactics that

governmental insitutions and their critics engage in on the Worldwide Web,

may provide a basis for reconsidering a type of politics called

issue-politics. From the vantagepoint of a web-based ethnography of public

controversies, the debate on the merits and defects of issue-politics must

be re-opened again. Engaging with arguments that have been made in favor of

the re-invention of political institutions, on the one hand, and the new

politics of social movements, on the other, it will be argued that a

re-evaluation of the viability of issue-politics is more than timely.

Tracing public controversies on the Web unsettles these arguments, which

have advertently or inadvertently, contributed to the marginalization of

issue-politics, as an viable way of doing politics. In doing so, we may also

begin to articulate an alternative understanding of the significance of the

Internet for the re-invention of politics, by institutional as well as

extra-institutional actors. The controversy around the Development Gateway,

a portal set up by the Worldbank, serving as a case in point, it will be

shown how a piece of software called IssueCrawler, may help us to tease out

forms of politics as they are currently being articulated on the Web.