English Summary

Viviane Serfaty, The Internet, the Imaginary, Politics : A Comparative Perspective on Some Aspects of the Network in France, Great-Britain, the USA, Ph.D dissertation, Université Paris 7-Denis Diderot, 1999.

This research focuses on the representations of the Internet and on the social and political uses developed by network users in France, Great-Britain and in the USA.

The analysis of representations indicates that the underlying structures of the imaginary of the Internet are utopia and dystopia. Utopian representations turn the Internet into a space for individual and social rehabilitation. Dystopian representations focus on fears of proliferating spaces and bodies as well as on fears of their dematerialisation. These representations are linked to a body of ambivalent stereotypes which have been around since the advent of the first modern communication tools and whose function is crucial to the acculturation and the diffusion of innovations : they provide room for the social critique of technology and of communication.

The political debates in Usenet newsgroups are permeated with such representations. After describing the major features of the discourse which is developing into a fully-fledged genre in all newsgroups, we identify the social functions of forums through the production and the enforcement of rules by way of specific linguistic strategies.

Newsgroups maintain their cohesiveness through the ritualised expression of social conflict. The three countries we studied share these features. The thematic analysis of the debates reveals, however, a sharp differentiation ; in each country, only local politics elicits any kind of response. From 1996 to 1999, the observation of debates shows the increasing part played by the political agenda of each country. Official and political party communication in newsgroups is on the rise in the United States and in Great-Britain, but much less so in France ; some degree of feedback between debates in newsgroups and traditional political debate can be observed, indicating the growing part played by the Internet in public life.

Newsgroups elicit the continuing loyalty of members by providing them with space for a new kind of sociability and with an extension of traditional public space. As a symbolic construct, the Internet produces meaning and fosters innovative forms of sociability.