Power, Visibility, Wikipedia

According to a popular current in cultural criticism, which focuses on the danger of new technologies, new media have the potential to enhance surveillance. This article is also concerned with a type of visibility, but not one that is reducible to surveillance. Rather, the article investigates the potential for new technologies to open up, or make visible, political processes that have in the past best been described by the metaphor of the black box. In particular, I focus on Wikipedia and the production of knowledge. The article finishes by linking this new potential to a new power relation, fittingly termed 'visibility'.