Instead of focusing on regulators, journalists or other key figures in society and how they frame the Dark Web, Gehl chose to examine the users from within three networks-Freenet, Tor and I2P. In doing so they miss important aspects about the fringes of technology and why they have become fringe to the Clear Web. This is an important work not only for people who work in the tech industry and cyber security, or regulation but also internet researchers who often do not examine such technologies. Mixing media theory with software studies, sociology, and science and technology studies, Gehl peels off layers of common understandings about the Dark Web while focusing on three types of legitimacy-violence, propriety and authenticity. And this is the core focus of the book, it is about constructing, negotiating and redrawing boundaries around the legitimacy of power, architecture and use of technology. But this technical feature has far reaching influences on the way people experience these technologies, and importantly, about how legitimacy is redrawn.
This is contrary to the World Wide Web that most people use, which Gehl terms the Clear Web, that identifies people through IP Addresses, cookies, digital fingerprinting and other technologies. These special routing systems turn both the people and the sites into anonymous publishers. So first, what is the dark web? According to Gehl it is “websites built with standard web technologies (HTML, CSS, server-side scripting languages, hosting software) that can be viewed with a standard web browser, such as Firefox or Chrome, which is routed through special routing software packages” (Gehl, 2018: 5). By doing so, Gehl follows a tradition of scholars such as Gabriella Coleman (hackers), Whitney Phillips (trolling), Jussi Parikka (computer viruses), and Aram Sinnreich (piracy), who examine and challenge our common understandings of deviant media and practices, and reveal the power relations that they represent.
But is the dark web really that evil? Is it just the opposite of the web that we use everyday? Shedding light on the monster under the bed, Robert Gehl shows that there are 50 shades of gray to describe the dark web and that in fact, there is nothing dark about it at all.
If you search the term ‘dark web’ you will find the cliché imagery of guys with dark hoodies practicing in what seems like the black magic of computing.
By Robert Gehl, the Information Society Series, MIT Press, 2018, 288 p.
0 kommentar(er)
