ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a framework to think systematically about power in relation to the internet. It draws from existing research and offers three broad frameworks – ideal types, as sociologists would describe them – that distil some key features of power's operation. These three frameworks relate to: the constitution of subjectivities and knowledges; the regulation of social interactions; and the perpetuation of inequality. The chapter suggests several ways in which power operates, considering how the 'newness' of online life has been shaped by existing modes of power, and how cyberworlds also reproduce their own modes. Young people's search for sexual information offers an example of the ways power frameworks overlap. Young information seekers must navigate the various kinds of regulatory power in order to obtain the information they are seeking, and negotiate the discourses they find in order to constitute themselves as sexually knowledgeable subjects.
