Being Digital Citizens, by Engin Isin and Evelyn Ruppert

Being Digital Citizens takes a nuanced, theoretical look at how the definition of a political subject evolves as more and more of both day-to-day life and overt political action takes place through digital space. Isin and Ruppert draw from rich literatures in political science, sociology, and critical theory to refocus academic debate about digital political life around the figure of the ‘digital citizen’. They argue that the digital citizen is one aspect of the larger contemporary evolution of the figure of the citizen, an evolution that is moving away from the already rights-bearing citizen of a sovereign nation-state toward the citizen as constituted through the act of making rights claims: I, we, they have a right to. In a literature that tends towards extremes, declaring that the Internet changes either everything or nothing, Isin and Ruppert do an excellent job of explaining exactly how the digital context is and is not important for the politics of citizenship. They argue that doing life and politics through the Internet means political thought must revisit the influence that the anonymity, extensity, traceability, and velocity of our actions have. This care makes the theoretical apparatus developed here relevant to a wide variety of cultural economies scholarship, not only that concerning digital media.

The authors' main aim is to set forth a theory of the political subject, ‘a composite of multiple subjectivities that emerge from different situations and relations’ (p. 4), not to ground it in the empirical world of those situations and relations. Accordingly, the book's emphasis is on the theory, and its few empirical cases are not very well developed. This is frustrating since so much of the book's importance lies in how this theory could be applied to help change untenable situations like the fact that ‘while digital acts traverse borders, digital rights do not’ (p. 70). It also has the unfortunate effect of making cultural and socioeconomic factors into something of a ghost haunting the book. For instance, Isin and Ruppert begin by characterizing a general shift from optimistic to pessimistic in the tone of academic and popular fictional literature about the Internet over the past 20 years. While they position this as the shift from Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen (1995) to her Alone Together (2012), this tonal shift also marks an influx of work like Lisa Nakamura's Cybertypes (2002). These cultural studies-inflected works critiqued the assumption that the experiences of the largely white, male, moneyed, and Western denizens of the early Internet would mirror those of people with less privilege. Being Digital Citizens addresses this strand of critique obliquely at best, which is exacerbated by the small number and brief analysis of empirical examples. This is a shame. Isin and Ruppert's point that progress can only be made ‘if we shift our analysis from how we are being “controlled” [by the Internet] … to the complexities of “acting”’ (p. 4) mirrors the argumentative move of classic cultural and audience studies work, such as Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1991). Their conceptual framework of rights-claiming digital citizens can make an excellent contribution to understanding and analyzing online political action by those with non-normative identities, such as the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the USA, who have often not been able to claim citizenship rights as they were traditionally conceived.

Isin and Ruppert's overall argument is that people constitute cyberspace itself, as well as themselves as digital citizens, by saying and doing things. An action, particularly a rights claim, has impact through the constitutive power of performative, legal, and imaginary forces. These actions do not take place, of course, in a vacuum of perfectly free agentic choice. They are responses to ‘callings’ embedded in existing cultural, political, and technical structures, for example, a call to participate in an open digital culture or a call to share data about yourself. Citizen-subjects respond to these callings by obeying, submitting to, or subverting them through their actions. These actions lead to both the closing-down and the opening-up of possibilities for rights claims and ways of being. These actions, openings, and closings happen iteratively and continuously; they are separated simply for the sake of analysis. The book concludes by interrogating the lingering question of just who the subject of digital rights is and how they claim rights. Traditional citizenship studies focus on inscribing rights in documents like declarations, manifestos, bills, and resolutions. Isin and Ruppert argue that the digital citizen is a political subject yet to come and emphasize the importance of this subject as a citizen, not simply as a human. They conclude that attempts to inscribe rights

would have stronger imaginary force if they also derived their performative force from everyday acts through the Internet: how people … respond to callings to participate in cyberspace, how they create openings for constituting themselves differently, how they struggle for and against closings. (p. 178)

The first three chapters of Being Digital Citizens focus on constructing the conceptual apparatus: a cyberspace that is not ‘a separate or independent space … [but] a space of relations between and among bodies acting through the internet’ (p. 12); a digital citizen that is a subject of power, rather than simply a subject to power; and the ‘claim’ as a speech act with performative force. The first chapter offers a useful survey of the existing literature in digital studies and citizenship studies, noting a continuing, troubling lack of concern for the digital in citizenship studies. The second chapter explicates Isin and Ruppert's theory of a digital citizen-subject, which builds particularly on Foucault's theory of subjectivization. As opposed to subjects in authoritarian societies, who are mostly forced into obedience as subjects to power, in cyberspace digital citizens are subjects of power. They are, ideally, in control of the limits and terms of their submission and can thus also potentially be subversive. This puts digital citizens in cyberspace in a similar situation to citizens in disciplinary and control societies.

The third chapter continues this conceptual line and works through the authors' addendum of ‘rights claims’ to J.L. Austin's theory of speech acts and their argument that a ‘speech act’ can be both ‘doing by speaking’ and ‘speaking by doing’ (p. 59). Isin and Ruppert do an admirable job of raising and sustaining tensions, rather than falsely (or implicitly) resolving them. For example, they explain how making a rights claim is at once an act of submission and subversion: the claimant recognizes and submits to a convention as a legitimate authority (as that to which claims are directed) and, at the same time, subverts that authority by making a demand that the convention function in a particular way.

The book is at its strongest in these first three chapters, and its contribution largely rests on the conceptual apparatus developed therein. Chapters 4, 5, and 6, respectively, investigate the natures of callings, openings, and closings as briefly outlined above. By doing this, the arguments take a half step toward the empirical and more empirically minded work, where the analyses are not as strong. For example, Isin and Ruppert critique existing literature on digital media by writing that ‘being digital citizens is not simply the ability to participate’ (p. 77), without considering the elaboration that the concept of participation has received in that literature, such as Carpentier's (2011) hierarchy of participatory levels; Jenkins, Ford, and Green's (2013) definition of meaningful versus non-meaningful participation; and Couldry and Hay's (2011) caution about the way participation has taken hold as a conceptual frame in a neoliberal political age. Part of the reason for this, of course, is that participation is not really Isin and Ruppert's focus – it is simply an example of a calling. But the elegance and nuance of the conceptual apparatus mean that applying it to examples that are not as fully elaborated rings hollow. The lens for analysis that Being Digital Citizens provides has a great deal to potentially contribute to this and other literatures by, for example, mediating between the more optimistic (Jenkins 2008) and more pessimistic (Andrejevic 2008) analyses of the politics of fan participation in reality television. To achieve this, however, the call to participate that fans answered, how they answered it, and the openings and closings thereby configured would need to be specifically analyzed, and there simply is no room for that here. All this being said, following the authors as they work through ‘how callings summon subjects to act through the Internet, how these callings create openings and closings that configure cyberspace, and how these dynamics create citizen subjects in or by their making of rights claims’ (p. 59) in some empirical detail is helpful in bettering the reader's understanding of the theory.

The final chapter also suffers from the problem of being caught between theory and empirical work. Isin and Ruppert set themselves the likely impossible task of, in one chapter, gathering together ‘from disparate and dispersed digital acts the recognition of a dimly emerging figure as the subject of digital rights’ (p. 163). This feels like the task of another book, one that would apply the theoretical framework of digital citizens they have developed. Where the conclusion is convincing, however, is in its return to the ways in which the figure of the citizen is evolving and changing in the contemporary world. It highlights figures such as Assange, Snowden, and Swartz and groups such as Anonymous as those whose acts ‘enact citizenship as subjects of power with responsibility in ways that are instantly recognizable and yet cannot be bounded by their identity as military or security personnel’ (p. 164) or by their identities as citizens of particular nation states. There is also an opportunity missed here, however, to reach beyond mostly white, Western men acting politically through cyberspace. Still, the conclusion benefits from Isin and Ruppert's steadfast focus on complexity and refusal to lapse into either cynicism or naïveté. They argue that, if the rights inscribed in law are to avoid being ‘rights without political subjects’, they must reflect people's experiences of performing rights (even implicitly); those favoring performative enactment must also take care, however, because ‘without the force of law, this would amount to subjects without political rights’ (p. 179).

My critiques of the chapters where the stretch to empirical examples does not quite work is not at all a critique of Isin and Ruppert's theory; rather, it is an incitement for others to take up the theory and see if it does have explanatory power where there is also space to expand on a case study or empirical domain. Terms are explained with admirable theoretical precision, which makes the theory Isin and Ruppert develop relevant for all readers of this journal, not just those who concentrate on digital media, while still retaining enough specificity to comment directly on digital media and digital acts. Being Digital Citizens contributes a nuanced, flexible, and still elegantly workable conceptual framework to scholarship around contemporary political activity, particularly that unfolding through the internet.