Titel: | ‘Free country, free internet’: the symbolic power of technology in the Hungarian internet tax protests; |
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Beteiligte: | |
In: | Media, Culture & Society, 41, 2019, 1, S. 70-85 |
veröffentlicht: |
SAGE Publications
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Medientyp: | Artikel, E-Artikel |
Umfang: | 70-85 |
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ISSN: |
0163-4437
1460-3675 |
DOI: | 10.1177/0163443718799394 |
veröffentlicht in: | Media, Culture & Society |
Sprache: | Englisch |
Schlagwörter: | |
Kollektion: | SAGE Publications (CrossRef) |
<jats:p>In 2014, the Hungarian government announced the introduction of a tax on internet usage. The proposal generated large protests, which led to its eventual withdrawal. In this article, I investigate the puzzling success of the ‘internet tax’ protests: how could a small tax on internet consumption generate so much contestation? I argue that the internet tax was able to give way to a broader mobilization against the government, because of the symbolic power of the idea of ‘the internet’, to which different political meanings can be attached. Through interviews with Hungarian activists, I reconstruct how the internet was associated with a mobilizing discourse that I term ‘mundane modernity’, which reproduces tropes of Western modernity about the equalizing properties of technology, progress, and rationality, while grounding them in the everyday practices of internet use. I then discuss the types of freedom embedded in mundane modernity and assess its political limitations.</jats:p> |