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This article looks at the United Nations‐brokered World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in light of nongovernmental organization participation as a full partner in consultations and decisions. Combining participation‐observation fieldwork, interviews, and eye‐witness accounts with a selective content analysis of key WSIS documentation, official and dissenting, the article presents the occupational hazards of this sort of encounter between civil society participants, government, and business sectors as global information and communication technologies (ICTs) and media agenda‐setting partners. It focuses on the hazards of key word strategies in what are now irrevocably computer‐embedded domains for action and access. Hyperlinked textual production and related key word search functionalities are now, I argue, integral to global agenda‐setting in the intertwined areas of ICT, media, and sociocultural policy. This formal encounter between multilateral institutions and social justice and ICT advocacy, online and on the ground, raises new questions for policy research in these domains, questions that require fresh approaches.

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The Internet and digital technologies have become indispensable in academia. A world without email, search engines, and online databases is practically unthinkable. Yet, in this time of digital dependence, the academy barely demonstrates an appetite to reflect upon the new challenges that digital technologies have brought to the scholarly profession. This forum's inspiration was a roundtable discussion at the 2017 International Studies Association Annual Convention, where many of the forum authors agreed on the need for critical debate about the effects of online surveillance and censorship techniques on scholarship. This forum contains five critiques regarding our digitized infrastructures, datafied institutions, mercenary corporations, exploitative academic platforms, and insecure online practices. Together, this unique collection of articles contributes to the research on academic freedom and helps to frame the analysis of the neoliberal higher education sector, the surveillance practices that students and staff encounter, and the growing necessity to improve our “digital hygiene.”