The Multiplicity of Cybersecurities. On Divergent Understandings of a Contested Term

Digital systems are ubiquitous and play a pivotal role in our daily lives. However, the digital hyper-infrastructure is not without its flaws, and could be considered defective. Society-wide questions of IT security and its regulation define the field of cybersecurity. However, the term itself, as well as many of the underlying principles it encompasses, are the subject of contestation and are marked by both explicit and implicit contradictions. To illustrate this, I conduct an extensive literature review in which I analyze the scopes, actors, priorities, threats and approaches being negotiated in the cybersecurity discourse. The subsequent analysis involves the categorization of the findings into four distinct categories of cybersecurity understandings: individual IT security, civic infrastructure IT security, national IT security and holistic IT security. I then delineate the relevant differentiating dimensions, explicate the hidden tensions and discuss the potential of data protection theory to inform a more systematic cybersecurity discourse. I argue that it is imperative that not only scholars explicitly accept the multiplicity of cybersecurities if they are to facilitate fruitful discourse and provide actionable insights for politics, regulation and practice towards securing the digital hyper-infrastructure.