A Bounded Web : Platforms and the Crisis of Social Life

This book examines the digital degradation of our social life, critiques current approaches to technology regulation, and provides concrete proposals for reform. It criticizes the status quo for its technocratic approach to regulation and proposes an alternative that emphasizes the renewal of associational life online and offline.

The internet once promised to strengthen our associational life. Instead, A Bounded Web shows that digital technology has replaced bounded institutions, where members gather to make decisions together, with porous social networks that platforms administer behind the scenes. In response, scholars and policymakers tend to reduce the pathologies of digital life to technical challenges that demand technocratic solutions. Against this trend, this book offers a new approach to technology policy that emphasizes the need to rebuild diverse and robust associations both online and offline. It defends efforts to build technological boundaries – like smartphone bans in schools – that empower cultural, educational, political, and social organizations to set their own terms for how we gather and communicate. It also calls for legal reform to enable the creation of 'middleware' and even entertains the pursuit of local 'digital Sabbath' policies to reshape our collective management of technology. Rigorously argued, A Bounded Web asks us to recognize what we've lost and imagine what we might build in its place.