The global web and its digital ecosystem can be seen as tools of emancipation, communication and spreading knowledge or as means of repression, fueled by capitalism, surveillance, and control.
The Digital Frontier, attempts an ambitious interrogation of how the most global technology in human history simultaneously heralds a novel form of power whose nature users can perceive but not fully name. The book's analysis reveals that power to operate through the conventions, protocols, standards, and algorithmic regulations that form the web's soft infrastructures. It shows this through analyzing four different sites where the universalizing imperatives of the web run up against local values, norms, and cultures. Kumar's critical analysis of these sites focuses respectively on how the idea of the "global common good" is used as a ruse by private corporations to expand their market-share, how seemingly collaborative spaces can simultaneously be exclusionary as they regulate what counts as legitimate knowledge, how selfhood is being redefined online along Eurocentric ideals, and how the web's challenge is felt differentially by nation states.
In analyzing the nature of power and control on the web, The Digital Frontier is a great read for readers, scholars, activists and students inspired by the utopian dream of a truly representative global digital network that its founders imagined the web to be.