Tracing the trajectories of issues, and their democratic deficits, on the Web: The case of the Development Gateway and its doubles

This article explores the ways in which the political tactics that governmental insitutions and their critics can be seen to engage in on the Worldwide Web, may provide a basis for reconsidering a type of politics called issue-politics. From the vantage point of an ethnography of public controversies on the Web, informed by actor-network theory, 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 reinvigoration of the global public sphere, 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 form of politics. In doing so, we may begin to articulate an alternative understanding of the significance of information and communication technology (ICT) for institutional as well as extra-institutional forms of democracy. The controversy around the Development Gateway, a portal for development information set up by the World Bank, serves as a case in point. It will be shown how a piece of software called IssueCrawler, may help us to tease out a number of requirements on effective democratic action, as they come into view on the Worldwide Web. Introduction In the spring of 2002, my colleague rather unexpectedly received an email from the World Bank (see figure 1). The message had been forwarded to him by Oneworld, the organisation that hosts the Web crawling software we use in our research. The week before, I had been collecting data on the Web, using this software, about the controversy surrounding the Development Gateway, a portal for development information originally set up by the World Bank. Now the World Bank had sent us a message that our crawling software clogs the Development Gateway Web site. According to the Bank, our software ignored the robot files of the Gateway, lines of code with « do’s and don’ts » that visiting crawlers encounter on the Gateway site. If we did not stop the crawler from visiting the site, they wrote, they would block it. Now, the « cease and desist » email we thus received from the Bank, could lead us to