The Technosystem of Free Speech: Enriching Fundamental Rights in a Digital Society

In this book, Christoph Graber explains how the fundamental right of freedom of expression is gradually being enriched to cover its technological prerequisites. It challenges the predominant legal view that technology is merely an instrument, arguing that this overlooks the complex interplay between technological materiality and communicative sociality. It builds on a core argument of science and technology studies, that there is interpretative flexibility in both the design and social reception of a technology, which lays the groundwork for a critical stance towards smart technologies and the corporations that control them. This approach can then be transposed into the legal sphere via Luhmann’s systems theory. This book shows how normative expectations about digital technologies are formed and develop into legal norms and fundamental rights. It argues that, in order to achieve the implementation of fundamental rights, it is important to recognise their dimension as objective value judgments of a constitution, which the state has a duty to protect.