Abstract
What does the political look like in the digital realm of the lobby organisation? This thesis is based on a stint of fieldwork within the Communications department of a Brussels lobby organisation that promotes wind power by means of both more traditional press work and via digital media. Questions that are explored are: How do digital documents flow, and how can we conceptualise their matter? What sort of distinctions do the subjects make between the analogue components of their political world and the digital ones? What do they know about their public, and how do they use this knowledge? Findings indicate that the subjects’ enactments in the analogue often are referred to as lobbyism, while when they are enacting politics in the digital, it is viewed as «neutral information» or «expertise». The digital-analogue divide as practiced by the subjects in our study therefore serves to reconceptualise the boundary between politics and expertise. The thesis also raises questions about limits of authority in the digital, as well as about the lobby organisation’s actual comprehension of its audiences. I argue that the politics in the digital perhaps can be usefully analysed in terms of its negatives. Digital politics is often a mess in John Law’s sense – and as much as being about order and power, it is about non-authority, non-audiences, and it is not always as «public» as theory or practitioners suppose.