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Social Impacts of Community Wireless Networking: Articulating Technology and Politics
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Social Consequences of Community WiFi: Articulating Technology and Politics in the Community Wireless Movement
Alison PowellConcordia University
Paper given at the International Communications Association ConferenceMontreal, Quebec, May 25 2008
INTRODUCTION
How has Community Wireless Networking (CWN) contributed to a new kind of politicization of communication technology? How have individual community wireless networks mobilized ? Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, amateurs experimented with modifying commercially available WiFi equipment to create local networks and connect to the internet. As these experiments evolved into more robust networks, local governments became interested in WiFi connectivity as a means of extending internet access to citizens. By 2004, there were enough different projects in progress in the United States that Sascha Meinrath, a key organizer at the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CuWIN), organized a “National Community Wireless Summit” to “launch the Community Wireless Networking Movement” (2004). This Summit, and the others that followed in 2006 and 2007 attempted to mobilize individual developers of CWNs and define collective goals and identities. By 2007 the National Summit had become the International Summit, and the “movement” was described this way:
The Community Wireless Networking (CWN) movement has evolved since its beginnings in the 1990s. Although it has made impressive strides in the area of developing autonomous mesh networks, the larger success of the CWN movement has been the encouragement of citizens, small businesses, and local governments to get involved in local telecom infrastructure as important stakeholders. More than ever we are taking hands-on approaches to ensure that our communities have the telecommunications infrastructure necessary for an inclusive, dynamic and socially just future. (CuWIN Summit call for participants, 2007, http://www.cuwin.org/summit)
Is CWN a movement? Does it provide a unique way of politicizing WiFi networks? These central questions structure this paper, which proposes a framework for analyzing CWN that moves beyond considers the specific qualities of social movements that form around technology. It argues that these phenomena are simultaneously political and technical, and that they represent articulations of technology and politics through the discourses and practices of CWN actors.
Compared to conventional social movements, social movements that establish technology
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Social Consequences of Community WiFi: Articulating Technology and Politics in
the Community Wireless Movement
Alison Powell
Concordia University
Paper given at the
International Communications Association Conference
Montreal, Quebec, May 25 2008
INTRODUCTION
How has Community Wireless Networking (CWN) contributed to a new kind of
politicization of communication technology? How have individual community wireless
networks mobilized ? Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, amateurs experimented
with modifying commercially available WiFi equipment to create local networks and
connect to the internet. As these experiments evolved into more robust networks, local
governments became interested in WiFi connectivity as a means of extending internet
access to citizens. By 2004, there were enough different projects in progress in the
United States that Sascha Meinrath, a key organizer at the Champaign-Urbana
Community Wireless Network (CuWIN), organized a “National Community Wireless
Summit” to “launch the Community Wireless Networking Movement” (2004). This
Summit, and the others that followed in 2006 and 2007 attempted to mobilize individual
developers of CWNs and define collective goals and identities. By 2007 the National
Summit had become the International Summit, and the “movement” was described this
way:
The Community Wireless Networking (CWN) movement has evolved since its
beginnings in the 1990s. Although it has made impressive strides in the area of
developing autonomous mesh networks, the larger success of the CWN
movement has been the encouragement of citizens, small businesses, and local
governments to get involved in local telecom infrastructure as important
stakeholders. More than ever we are taking hands-on approaches to ensure that
our communities have the telecommunications infrastructure necessary for an
inclusive, dynamic and socially just future. (CuWIN Summit call for participants,
2007, http://www.cuwin.org/summit)
Is CWN a movement? Does it provide a unique way of politicizing WiFi networks?
These central questions structure this paper, which proposes a framework for analyzing
CWN that moves beyond considers the specific qualities of social movements that form
around technology. It argues that these phenomena are simultaneously political and
technical, and that they represent articulations of technology and politics through the
discourses and practices of CWN actors.
Compared to conventional social movements, social movements that establish technology
1
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