The Image is Openness, The Practice is Data

The paper argues for the importance of seeing just how we conceptualise digital phenomena in relation to how the regulatory discourses. The Internet used to be an “information superhighway”, a “cyberspace”, or a “world wide web” often described as an empowering structure, that now has transformed to be understood in terms of “layers”, a generator of big data for a number of “platform” ventures and preferably consisting of “open” attributes. It is this discourse of openness that is the key concept to analyse in this paper, not the least due to its central place as describing a number of activities in a positively value-laden manner – the open innovation, the open source and the open data.