The purpose of my session was to provide a frame to explain while Law is nowadays having more trouble than usual in trying to solve many of today’s problems. In other words, the goal was not to enter in specific issues that Law can difficultly fix, but to reflect on how the foundations of our industrial society are being challenged by digitization and Information and Communication Technologies and, thus, how the Law that was built upon those foundations is shaking from head to toes.

The (long!) session was split in three parts

1. The Network Society, or how industrial institutions’ feet became of clay, which explains how the end of scarcity and transaction costs in the areas of knowledge is questioning most of our institutions — Law amongst them.
2. The Web 2.0, or how individuals became mass media, which explains how the addition of the social layer to the World Wide Web has transformed communication, culture and creation as we knew it.
3. The Internet, or how Law became (even) more complicated, where some specific practices and malpractices are identified on a typical task done through the Internet — and challenging the concepts of who or what is the sender, the receiver, the message, the channel or the code.

Here follow the materials that I used in the session and a short collection of bibliographic references.

The Network Society, or how industrial institutions’ feet became of clay

Downloads:

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2012). The Network Society, or how industrial institutions’ feet became of clay. Seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property, University of Alicante, 14 May 2012.

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2012). The Network Society, or how industrial institutions’ feet became of clay. Seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property, University of Alicante, 14 May 2012.

The Web 2.0, or how individuals became mass media

Downloads:

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2012). The Web 2.0, or how individuals became mass media. Seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property, University of Alicante, 14 May 2012.

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2012). The Web 2.0, or how individuals became mass media. Seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property, University of Alicante, 14 May 2012.

The Internet, or how Law became (even) more complicated

Downloads:

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2012). The Internet, or how Law became (even) more complicated. Seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property, University of Alicante, 14 May 2012.

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2012). The Internet, or how Law became (even) more complicated. Seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property, University of Alicante, 14 May 2012.

Further reading

Nous Horitzons — the review of the Fundació Nous Horitzons — has released issue #204 with the quite explicit title of Democratizing communication, communicating democracy (original title: Democratitzar la comunicació, comunicar la democràcia).

I was asked to write a piece where to reflect about what can be done and what cannot be done on the Internet, in the sense of what is allowed, what is not, where are the boundaries of our civic rights, where do different rights collide (e.g. freedom of expression vs. intellectual property rights), etc.

My article, The conquest of Internet: new maps for new territories, is originally written in Catalan (La conquesta d’Internet: nous mapes per als nous territoris — Spanish translation also available) and takes its title from William Gibson’s documentary No Maps for These Territories!.

I ended writing what it looks like a slightly different thing: that there is not an actual collision of rights, but the dawn of a totally new model of society. And what looks like a collision of rights is, indeed, the fight to set up new institutions, appoint new leaders and shape up this new model according to each one’s own views. Thus, the apparent collision of rights is but the symptom of a higher level matter: what is the “global order” going to look like in the next decades after the actual order, based on the industrial paradigm, has become obsolete by Information and Communication Technologies.

I want to heartily thank Marc Rius for the invitation to write this piece, for his patience on my repeated delays and, most especially, for not changing a single comma on what I acknowledge is a dense text that goes way beyond the simple answer to what can and cannot be done on the Internet.

Downloads

Peña-López, I. (2012)
La conquesta d’Internet: nous mapes per als nous territoris

Peña-López, I. (2012)
La conquista de Internet: nuevos mapas para los nuevos territorios

Nous Horitzons (nº204)
Democratitzar la comunicació, comunicar la democràcia

• Online Entertainment and its implications in fields such as, among others, the legal framework of audiovisual communications, the liability of intermediaries, legal aspects of videogames and online gambling, social networking sites, behavioural advertising, privacy, data protection, defamation, protection of minors, intellectual property, new models of content distribution, user generated contents, illicit and harmful contents, net neutrality, new generation networks, antitrust.

Papers may also focus on:

• Legal issues relevant to the current status and future perspectives of the Internet, such as, among others, online privacy, data protection, intellectual property, ISP liability, freedom of expression, cybercrime, e-commerce.
• Issues regarding electronic government, such as, among others, open data, reuse of public sector information, political participation online, e-procurement, Internet governance.

Interested participants should first submit an abstract (a 300-word outline) of their paper by 20 December, 2011, indicating clearly its subject and scope, and including a provisional title. There is no need to use a template for submitting the abstract. The abstracts received will be peer-reviewed and authors will be notified of the outcome by 10 January, 2012.

Authors of accepted abstracts will be required to send the full paper by 26 March, 2012. Full papers should not exceed 8,000 words in length, including notes and references. For the full paper authors should use the conference template that will be available to download from the web. The full papers will be peer-reviewed as well. The outcome will be notified by 16 April, 2012. Final version of the paper (camera ready) should be sent by 30 April, 2012. All papers accepted will be included in the electronic proceedings of the Conference, which will hold an ISBN number. Accepted papers may also be selected for oral presentation at the Conference.

Important dates

• Abstract submission: please submit a 300-word outline by 20 December, 2011.
• Notification of acceptance of abstracts: 10 January, 2012.
• Full paper submission: please submit the full paper by 26 March, 2012.
• Notification of full paper’s acceptance: 16 April, 2012.
• Final version (camera ready): 30 April, 2012.

Please send all submissions by electronic mail in a .DOC or .ODT document to: uoc.idp2012@gmail.com

The limits of the mass media and the emergence of mass self-communication in the digital age
Lluís Bassets (El País Associate Director), Manuel Campo Vidal (Journalist), Mayte Pascual (TVE Journalist), Ricardo Galli (Meneame.net), Klaudia Alvarez (Communication group DRYbcn), Vicent Partal (Vilaweb, chairs)

Ricardo Galli

(this speech is partly based on Ricardo Galli’s article Pienso, luego estorbo — I think, therefore I’m in the way)

Some of the reactions against the 15M movement were expected — as the ones from the extreme right wing — but some others were unexpected, and nevertheless were as foreign, strange, surprising for the activists of the social movements.

Several initiatives like #nolesvotes or Democracia Real Ya’s protests for May 15th (15M) became extremely popular in online platforms, with massive acceptance and viral communication and, notwithstanding, they would not appear on the papers. Why?

• Lack of belief that things would come to something real. That is, lack of belief that there would not be a transposition from online spaces to offline spaces.
• Lack of a press conference. Indeed, there were some, but were unattended by journalists.
• Avoid a call effect: if it appears on the papers, there is more likelihood of success. Thus, let us not air it.
• Phagocytosing of the topic by some journalists, that love being the subject of their own news, instead of reporting the real characters of the movement.

After the 15M, some media begin to cover the events, but also to discredit both the movement and some of the more visible heads (or arbitrary so-called heads of the movement — which were not).

Some of the things that have happened — and media still have to learn — is that lots lots of things have happened since 15M, there are lots of people involved, the movement is evolving… and nonetheless, it is still being ignored.

Lluís Bassets

We have to think of mass media as institutions that are evolving themselves, and sometimes it is this very same evolution or transformation of the media the most interesting event. Media are not mirrors of the society, but institutions that are part of it. And, as such, are actors worth being analysed too.

We also have to deal with the 15M phenomenon in its context: the Arab Spring and the economic crisis. This is a global revolution due to a crisis of representation, of mediation: the mediation of governments, of trade unions, of media.

What is a TV, a radio, a newspaper on the Internet? sections? a 24-hour cycle? Media have to become just the contrary of what they nowadays are. And journalists do still have a future — and a very bright one, indeed — if they stick to their core values: verifying the sources.

But big journalism needs time, reflection, quietness. And the problem is that the pace of the new times is so fast that makes it difficult for this journalism to take its time.

Manuel Campo Vidal

Media are in a deep and long transition. And not only because of the crisis of the paper vs. digital, and not only because of the crisis of advertisement. The economic crisis only implies more speed and depth, but the transition is not a consequence of the economic crisis. The nature of crisis of media is the divergence between old and new media.

But conspiracies might not be the best way to explain what is happening, the reasons why media companies and most journalists are fighting against the unstoppable change. It has to be acknowledged that we are living in disconcert: we know what we are leaving behind, but we do not know where are we heading to.

The Arab Spring was tweeted, but Twitter did not spark the Tunis or the Egypt revolution. Or Facebook. Or any other social networking site. The Internet was a valuous instrument, one without which the revolutions may have not been the way there were, but by no means the revolutions began on the Internet.

The real challenge now for traditional media is to recover their lost reputation. Reputation, in an Information Society, is the only thing of value (information is free), and that is the capital that a journalist should take care of.

Mayte Pascual

There is a mutual lack of confidence between traditional media and digital or new media. And mutual understanding would be highly beneficial for both parties.

We need to be more communication-literate to understand the new era we are entering. More and more things will be explainable in terms of communication, and thus we must know how communication happens, how it shapes people’s minds, etc.

And traditional media have to learn too how the inner functioning of social movements.

Klaudia Álvarez

What is relevant is not whether a medium is traditional or new or digital, but who owns it, who is speaking through it.

Related to that, another huge different is whether in a given medium sender and receiver are interchangeable or not. Can I be a sender and not only a receiver in that medium? This really makes a difference.

Being a writer and not a reader, having a blog, is not only writing or having a blog, but changing your mindset: you are building your own reality, they are now aware of their possibility to create a reality. Communication autonomy is about building realities.

But empowerment happens only for people that can actually be empowered, that is, people in the bad side of the digital divide, or socially excluded, are more difficult to reach by empowering tools.

And empowerment comes in detriment of (traditional) media. And traditional media usually fight this loss power, which indeed happened in the 15M.

Discussion

Manuel Castells: if there is something left to journalism, it is credibility. And there is a clear deadline for the disappearance of traditional media: the day all people now aged 60 or older are already gone. There is thus an unavoidable need for a transition, but this transition has to be smooth, with as less victims as possible.

Arnau Monterde: the collective intelligence is transforming the way information is created and distributed, the way the sources are verified. Thus, it is very difficult to state that media-literacy is a personal must, because now the media are produced by the collective and collectively. It is the outcome of minor contributions that becomes a major contribution.

Campo Vidal: there is a media bubble that is unsustainable, both economically and socially speaking. There are — in some fields — too much media (e.g. digital TV) and clearly overrated.

More information

• Mesa V. Los límites de los medios de comunicación y la emergencia de la autocomunicación de masas a la era digital, by Ricard Espelt.

The incidence of the new social movements. Exploring new fields for political action
Joana Conill (UOC-IN3, chair), Mònica Oltra (Coalició Compromís), Joan Subirats (IGOP), Raúl Sanchez Cedillo (Nomad University)

Mònica Oltra

Increasingly, governments and political parties lie as if their citizens were uninformed idiots. The political discourse has reached astonishing levels of misery that thus keeps the citizen away from politics. And it is very difficult to articulate a political discourse out of the party system, out of partidism.

Added to that, we live in an information blackout, as mass media have been taken over by political parties and lobbies.

Did the 15M Spanish Indignants movement had any impact on political parties and governments? Partly yes, as minority parties were just making the very same demands on the democratic process that were made on the 15M protests. Thus, these minority parties have somewhat been legitimated in their demands by the movements and, vice-versa, the social movements have also somewhat been legitimated by a part of the formal political institutions that are represented by the minority political parties.

But social movements should not be capitalized and appropriated by political parties, even minority ones. Parties should take part and participate in the movements — preferably at an individual or personal level —, but not appropriate them.

What parties can do is to represent the rhetoric of the invisible ones, the ones that are not represented by anyone, any political party, the ones that do not appear in the political agenda.

And the way to make (new) politics should be reporting accompanied by making proposals: “destroying” accompanied by “building”.

Participation is not freedom of choice amongst some given options, but freedom to decide what has to be chosen.

Joan Subirats

Democracy has been emptied out of values, and only the rules, the procedures remain:

• Representation: citizens do not believe that political parties represent them anymore.
• Intermediation: political parties do not seem to be channelling the needs of the citizens to the places where decision-taking happens.
• Function: political parties do not represent the citizens because they are no more their equals. Politicians are privileged ones and thus cannot understand nor share the needs of “normal” citizens.
• Insiders: political parties have evolved from citizen tools to influence the institutions to tools of the institutions to influence on the citizens.

The 15M movement is stating that politics can happen outside of institutions; that the public sphere is not the monopoly of the public powers; and that representation do not compulsory has to take place by means of institutions.

We need not to improve, but to transform. And this transformation might be a shift back to the commons:

Raúl Sánchez

It is difficult to tell where the thresholds of a movement are when it is based on network architecture and collective intelligence.

The 15M movement is an open, autopoietic system that is constantly creating and reshaping itself. The 15M is a movement based on Spinozan affections and the estigmergies amongst its members.

The 15M movement proved that it is possible to take decisions without anyone taking them. The 15M is a actor in a non-place, a neuronal network without a central subject, challenging the current scenario of politics, contesting the statement that things cannot be different.

Discussion

Q: does the 15M need to move from movement, and embody itself in an organization? Sánchez: most probably the network that the 15M is definitely in need of a “body”, a formal way to present itself before the others. And this can happen formalizing its members in an organization, or achieving some milestones that define the movement through specific actions.

Mayo Fuster: I sometimes have the feeling to be watching a 15M ad, in the sense that few people acknowledge that many things just happened, without much planning, and most of them difficult to foresee. How do you see the 15M in a 10 year horizon? Oltra: got plenty of hope with people camping on the streets, hope that the movement won’t be absorbed by other movements or institutions, that it will achieve something. Subirats: don’t think that the 15M is not a movement, but the expression of a change of era. Thus, in a 10 years future, what is likely to happen is that some structural changes if have not happen they will certainly be slowly happening. Sánchez: most probably there will be the very same sense of transition that we are now living in, only deeper.

More information

• Taula IV. La incidencia de los nuevos movimientos sociales y la investigación de nuevos escenarios para la acción política, by Ricard Espelt.

The transformations of Civil Society in the Information and Knowledge Society
Oscar Mateos (Ramon Llull University, chair), Joan Coscubiela (UOC-IN3), Gemma Galdón (UOC), Ada Colau (Plataforma d’Afectats per la Hipoteca).

Òscar Mateos

What are the big changes that we are facing? It is not an era of change, but a change of era, Joan Subirats. The 15M movement has put the spotlight on many ongoing dynamics that were working for the change. And, arguably, the ones that understand the 15M are part of it, and one can only be part of it if one understands the movement. There are new languages, platforms, ways to communicate, and that is part of the change too. And maybe these processes are the very true outcomes of the movement, and not what it is traditionally asked to a movement: an impact on institutions or the taking of power.

Joan Coscubiela

Our society is in a dire crisis, especially in our social organizations. And this crisis is boosted by technological change.

The relationships between economics and politics, and between corporations and unions have been altered, and the balance of power amongst these institutions has radically changed. Some reasons are that the habitat (the factory) has been radically transformed; the disappearance of the aggregation of interests due to the disaggregation of identities; the difficulty to build a collective identity upon which to leverage a movement.

The dismantlement of the factory, the dismantlement of the national economy, and the dismantlement of the nation-estate. The integrated factory becomes the networked enterprise. There are central workers and workers on the periphery.

There is also a crisis of the communication channels in traditional unions, based on the integrated Fordist factory and the assembly of workers.

All these crises are undoubtedly weakening the strength and even legitimacy of traditional trade unions. But, if this crisis of legitimacy will be especially tough in Anglo-Saxon unions (based on the firm or the factory, or European unions (based on the economic sector), it might be that Mediterranean-type unions (based on the notion of class, or of social equity) will have it more easy to regain legitimacy, even if a deep transformation is notwithstanding required.

The great opportunity for trade unions is how to leverage the power of ICTs to regain legitimacy to refund the forms of participation.

Gemma Galdón

With the coming of the Internet and the intensive use of social networking sites and similar tools make the medium become the message: the fact that the 15M movement is very live on the Internet is part of its very definition, of its DNA, and tells much on the nature and characteristics of the movement.

There is a qualitative leap in the way participation is understood: besides being present on a demonstration, being active on the Internet (gathering information, commenting, creating opinions, broadcasting messges, etc.) can be as much important as physical presence. Notwithstanding, either on the street or on the Internet, legitimacy comes not from the diffusion of information, but from being committed with the movement. Only commitment leads to legitimacy and reputation, and not only mere participation by being active on social networking sites.

The logic of expansion of social movements is no more centralized, but rhizomatic: it obeys to no traditional logics, especially cultural logics or logics of power.

Indeed, social movements of the past five years have detached themselves from the international political and economic agenda. Nowadays movements no more follow international leaders to their international meetings of the World Bank or the G8. Social movements increasing have their own agenda, and an agenda that is created and updated ad-hoc.

This change is partly due because information and the communication tools have been democratized to the limit. What is difficult now is opacity and non-transparency. Diffusion of information and ideas and calls to action are now cheap and fast. On the other hand, this is a double-edged sword: repression is now more easy than ever for the ones in power, as identification of individuals and collectives is immediate.

The problem is: are we making any impact? When the whole world protested against the second invasion of Irak, nothing happened. And, worst indeed, there does not seem to exist an alternative to the broken representative democracy.

The challenge is how to leverage the common sense we reconquered and turn it into a driver of change, based on new forms of political transformation.

Ada Colau

The new forms of participation not only surprised the traditional social movements, but also the newer ones, that became “obsolete” even if they were recent. These newer social movements were based on platforms that (a) focused on a specific issue and (b) acted as a helping collective so you could reach out (instead of a vertical organization where the individual helps the organization to reach out). These platforms had to transform into networks and the new ways to organized that the Internet and, especially, social networking sites made possible.

That was the case of V de Vivienda [H stands for Housing] in Spain, on of the seeds that afterwards would nourish the 15M Spanish Indignants movement. V de Vivienda was auto-convened and auto-organized, by means of SMSs and e-mails.

V de Vivienda succeeded in putting on the political agenda the housing bubble and the social and economic problems derived from it.

The answer from the political institutions to the movement was very shy and myopic. So, after all the energies poured into the movement, it does not seem be having much impact. What to do about it? How to keep on without being discouraged? The new strategy is increasingly being civil disobedience, so that a change in the Law is forced. But civil disobedience is individual, not collective, so the collective has to find ways to support the individuals that will enter civil disobedience (i.e. in the present case debated here, resistance to eviction and the movement helping people to resist evictions and, at last, stop them).

The network helped in building a critical mass around the issue of mortgages and evictions, as this is not a geographically concentrated problem, but quite a spread one.

Discussion

Manuel Castells: one of the reasons of the crisis of trade unions is that they are part of the power, they come from a paternalistic way to understand society. And social movements are fighting just against that.

Manuel Castells: changes, real and structural changes need their time and own pace, and that that change begins with a change in the processes.

Ismael Peña-López: acknowledging the truth of the aforementioned statement, the problem is that people’s lives happen in the short run (evictions, unemployment subsidies have limited time spans in the range of months), and thus some milestones have to be achieved in the short run. This is especially true not only to protect the victims of economic crisis, but also to avoid the draining of energy of social movements, that can fade away and dissolve if anything tangible and concrete can be achieved (and this should be achieved without violence).

More information

• Mesa III: Las transformaciones de la Sociedad Civil en la Sociedad de la Información y el Conocimiento, by Ricard Espelt.

Net neutrality struggle and new movements in the digital era
Ismael Peña-López (chair), Txarlie (Hacktivistas.net), Carlos Sánchez Almeida (Bufet Almeida), Gala Pin (X.net)

Txarlie

Hacktivism works as a free software project: it collects information, documents the processes and implements actions. The idea is avoiding reinventing the wheel but implementing the same ideas and processes in other social projects — in this specific case, the Spanish Ley Sinde.

Each revolution has its tool. The Protestant Reformation cannot be understood without the printing press, the soviet revolution without fliers and posters, and the 1960s protests without the television.

The Internet is thus the tool of the 15M movement, and not only the Internet as a device, but also as a philosophy, as an architecture, with distributed power, policentric. Indeed, the 15M movement is not a protest without leadership, but, on the contrary, it is a protest with multiple leaders, more leaders than ever.

When it comes to Net Neutrality, the idea is do not wait until the Net is not neutral, but to actually prevent its enclosure. And there is indeed an urgent need to digitally empower people, so that there is no need to prevent the stealing of liberties, freedom instead of having to recover it.

Facebook is becoming less of a social networking site, of a democracy site, and more of a shopping mall. That is why activists are constantly moving from one platform to another one. This is not happening, though, with Twitter, that is keeping its horizontal, totally flat essence.

It is interesting to stress the fact that often people use some applications for their own purposes, and purposes that were not foreseen by the owners. And sometimes these new usages do confront the current law and thus the owner of the tool either takes sides with the activists or against them, but can no more remain neutral.

It is not a crisis, it is the system. The only difference is that we are now better informed on what is happening. Let us, so, take the chance to make an informed change.

Carlos Sanchez Almeida

Sometimes it is possible to define common rules for a collective, but sometimes it is not. And sometimes it is the very design of a system the one that has its own rules embedded in its architecture. That is happening on the Internet, that was designed in a way that included its functioning rules.

When a new territory is conquered, the first thing is imposing one’s will, the second one is to try and justify it morally, and last comes the making of rules to accommodate the new reality. The conquest of (or attempt to conquer) the Internet is no different in its aims… even if we have not yet gone through the first stage.

But as the Internet is resisting the siege, the power is trying to come through the back door and impose new rules. But the way these rules are legitimated is through media and by changing people’s minds. Thus, the centre of the power are media. What tools do we have to achieve that?

The problem with the Internet is that there are as many tools as initiatives, and as much initiatives as people.

What happened with the Spanish Ley Sinde is that it indirectly and unwillingly contributed in clustering all the different initiatives fighting for different liberties, ending up in a unique voice that colluded against the attack to social rights.

Once out of the narrowness of Internet-focussed fights, it is now the time for the assault to the very fundamentals of power: money and the media.

Gala Pin

The attacks against the Internet are not attacks against a technology, but against civil liberties like the freedom of expression, the freedom of thought, etc.

On the other hand, promoting the changes that the new technologies now enable does not necessarily goes against some private interests (e.g. the artists’). On the contrary, it quite often defends those interests, although most times requires a redefinition of how things are made.

Hacking is another type of civil disobedience, and especially effective one in this new territory that is the Internet. Hacking plus collective intelligence is certainly a very powerful combination to resist the attacks to the Net.

Discussion

Carlos Sánchez Almeida: there is a high probability that cybercrime will increasingly be on the papers, as it will be the alibi that the power will use to be able to be “legitimate” in attacking the Internet. The first aggression will be against the place where we met to prepare our revolutions.

Q: on the one hand we picture the power as a very smart institution and, on the other hand, we also picture the power as completely clueless. Isn’t that a contradiction? Txarlie: it’s probably both. It is true that the power understands the Internet as a whole, looking at its possibilities and the powers it challenges; but it is also true that its forms are mostly unknown, partly because the Net is so flexible that it is very difficult to predict in its next action. The collective intelligence moves in the boundaries and thus circumvents the power. The power understands its potential, but not its boundaries. Carlos Sánchez Almeida: one of the reasons the governments have attacked P2P networks — when they kept people quite and numb at home — is because they are not the ones in power: the power is financial and the corporations (who own what is exchanged in P2P networks).

Q: so, what’s the next step? Carlos Sánchez Almeida: we need a democracy; a new and reformed one, but a democracy. And this new democracy must be more transparent and, over all, more accountable. In the case of Spain, bipartidism should be broken by voting the smaller parties.

Mayo Fuster: why has not the 15M and other activisms taken more into account the tradition of the commons, of cooperatives, etc.? Txarlie: partly this has been due to the fact that it was preferable to begin from scratch, to avoid predefined mindsets, to promote trial and error, to experiment. The idea was that any solution had to come from the debate within the 15M itself to be legitimate.

Mayo Fuster: what is going to happen after the 15M with the Internet? will it become a 11S of the Internet? Gala Pin: We are living a dire crisis while which there has been poor or any proposal at all to improve people’s lives. The 15M has been, in many ways, the only thing that has happened to directly address the crisis. Thus, it is not a only movement of protest, but the expression of a general feeling of a real need of change.

Mayo Fuster: how does power works inside the 15M? Carlos Sánchez Almeida: there is no power in the 15M movement, the power is outside. The 15M is a network of networks, with their own programme, working autonomously. Thus, there is no such thing as power in the 15M movement, which is but a mere platform. The Indignants Movement cannot be defined in terms of power, of structure, of hierarchy. The movement must not provide answers, but communication channels, build agorae where debate can take place.

Net neutrality struggle and new movements in the digital era.
John Perry Barlow (Electronic Frontier Foundation).

The opposite of a trivial truth is false; the opposite of a great truth is also truth, Niels Bohr.

We are living in an era where we are both able of greatest advances in human technology and, at the same time, able to destroy ourselves or endanger the lives of all of us. The corporation is supposed to be made of humans, but as a construct they are more than that. Corporations used to mediate between people, and because of the instantaneous network of global communications all those processes have been increasingly accelerated. And they corporations are now in the process of swallowing the Earth, for the benefit of all of us, but at the same time against our survival.

While it is true that huge corporations are like a cancer, it is also true that each individual is like a cell that is part of that tumour. And, thus, the question is: as a cell from a tumour, what do you do?

Once there is a possibility to communicate your thoughts instantly across the world, the you as a container of thought, or knowledge, is challenged. And this is related with the crisis of monotheism, which is based on thoughts not easily spread and shared, about the monopoly of thought. Monotheism is opposed to pantheism, as the unity of thought is opposed to the multiplicity of thought.

The same tools that are so useful for sharing your thoughts and acts are, at the very same time, the best surveillance tools ever. And not only in the real time, but also in past times, as your actions can be traced back because of the breadcrumbs you left behind.

And there is almost no way to avoid the visibility. Privacy is thus arguably not defensible — even sometimes not desirable either — but this does not mean that we have to change the way institutions look down on people, or to change the way that institutions present themselves before the public. But until this change happens, there have to be ways to balance the powers of institutions and citizens.

There is a will to control expression and its spread. And copyright has become one of the main barriers to expression, despite the fact that it was designed to protect the freedom of expression. Sharing is hardcoded in human beings, and the fact that sharing can be prevented because somebody owns them is, basically, against the future.

An incredible gift to the future is the ability to be able to discover everything that one needs to know.

There is a problem that we must address: the growing concentration of wealth, energy and power. And a concentration that still wants more, as stated in Barlow’s Law of Economic insufficiency: the more you have, the shorter it feels. We have to collectively stand up and find ways that they do not get more, of that the more they get the more it gets redistributed. We have to find ways to make the world work the same way that we found ways to make the Internet work, taking into consideration the ecology of the resources.

Discussion

Manuel Castells: the world is run by “ungrateful dead”, the institutions that rule the world are dead and it is impossible to expect from them any kind of change, or even reflection. And, as some demonstrators said, it’s not about the crisis, is that I don’t love you anymore. So, dead institutions on one side, people willing to love something else on the other side. The way of reconstruct this world is through a long process, so we need patience and a road map for the long run. But something quick must be done also in the short term to avoid the total collapse of the system. Surely the networks of solidarity will work to avoid collapse.

Q: We have to try help people understand that the nature of authority has changed. John Perry Barlow: If you change consciousness, politics will change itself. The problem is that some issues are like a religious view that might not be able to change. Maybe half the population has to die first before a change is acknowledged.

Ismael Peña-López: will the death of half the population really make a change? Won’t we hit a glass ceiling that will prevent any kind of change? JP Barlow: the cyberspace is, in may ways, a feminine movement, made of sharing, of collaboration. And even if women are still struggling with their own glass ceiling, they are actually changing the mentality of many, substituting a monotheism (male) with a new pantheism (feminine).

Panel: Politics in the Internet age (II)
Arnau Monterde (chair), Marta G. Franco (Acampada Sol participant), Javier Toret (Democracia Real Ya Barcelona participant), Mayo Fuster (Berkman center for Internet & Society)

Arnau Monterde

The different movements that have been born on the Internet (especially) during 2011 have many things in common, and not only about the form, but also in what are their goals, their purposes, the reasons and causes behind their protests, etc.

On the other hand, forms also matter. There is, beyond the organization of the protests, a sort of metaorganization linking and binding together the sprawl of local movements at a global level, thus contributing in the emergence of a global movement and its organization.

The globalization of the movement, or the collectivization of the movement, have also meant that despair due to lack of a clear horizon has turned out into hope due to the openness of the movement itself.

Javier Toret

Technopolitics and the 15M: flow, power, hack, translate, sensibility.

Nowadays, communication and organization are increasingly tied together: most communications actually invite people to engage in a specific action, and do not only give a piece of information or news to a passive receiver.

Our literacies are determined by new technologies that require new literacies. Indeed, these new literacies determine our habits, the way we interact, the way we consume… the way we live.

In this framework, how were the 15m protests in Spain organized?

In February 2011, a group of people meets on Face book and creates a platform to coordinate their actions and to call the citizenry to action. The reaction of people fed back the project and, in many senses, helped in defining what was acceptable in a society and what was bearable (or unbearable, as a matter of fact). The definition of what was unbearable became the actual message to spread and driver for further mobilizations.

Especially, the first big success was building a communicative ball that succeeded in going through the communication wall of mass media.

The movement took the plazas partly because there was an actual list of social demands, but more importantly because it succeeded in creating a collective frame of mind about specific issues and its broad context.

There was a collective building of a Twitter strategy, where many different Twitter users swarmed together to globally broadcast a few, direct, clear messages and a huge debate around them. The openness and simplicity of the process (Twitter + camp) helped the movement to be replicated all around the world. And the fact that most information could be geolocalized also contributed in making the different local initiatives be part of a global movement.

An interesting outcome of the movements has been the reflection about the process of organization and the proliferation of free software tools to empower and boost the optimization of such processes and its cheap and fast replication.

Marta G. Franco

Acampada Sol started as a way to reflect together and settle things down after the demonstration of 15m. The idea behind the acampada was not to stay or not, but to stay together and try to overcome everyone’s fears.

This sense of collective spreads beyond the geographical bounds of the acampadas, as they begin to link and talk one to another one, share fears, ideas, doubts, feelings.

The challenge was how to have a single voice without centralizing the thousand of voices of the movement. That became particularly evident when it came to registering the Internet domain(s) where to publish a website. In the end, there were as many domains/pages as camps or initiatives that joined the movement implicitly.

Another challenge was how to put together the online and offline worlds, each one with their one procedures and processes and ways of acting. A certain degree of success came whenever it was possible to take the best of both worlds, but that was not always an easy thing to do.

In general, mass media missed the way the Indignants were organized, what they were claiming, etc. In fact, most of them ended up taking Acampada Sol (the Madrid Camp of the Indignants) as their unique source of news and information, thus forgetting that Acampada Sol did not represent anyone (any other acampada) but themselves. On the other hand, though, many journalists would be more confident reporting from the sources of user generated media rather than form “official” communicates, even citing verbatim non-official declaration by particular individuals taking part in the protests. Twitter was used to hack the mass media system.

Alternative tools, like the social networking site N-1, were used to stand free from the potential control of third parties, in a sort of techno-political strategies of activism.

Mayo Fuster

Most of social movements are thought as ways to challenge the political agenda and the conventional political organization. Another dimension is challenging the established productive model and the cultural codes.

Besides the usual ways to manage the resources by either the State or the market, a third way is a model of management and provision of resources by the civil society: the commons.

The origin of the new digital commons can be tracked back until the 1950s with the hacker culture and the hippy contraculture, the free software ideology and communities, the Creative Commons, etc. The logic of the commons is opposite to the corporate logic, the former one based on openness, freedom and autonomy. In this sense, the system becomes an open one with a governance that enables participation. The conflict between both logics is the reason behind the free culture (and knowledge) movement.

If we link the 15M movement with the free culture movement, it is easy to find out that beyond the specific demands, there is a very important — arguably the most important one — goal that aims at changing the productive model, and it is a goal that goes implicit in the way the protests and the organization if performed: freely, openly, heavily relying on the idea of the public commons.

Some examples of these are Lawrence Lessig’s move from Creative Commons to Change Congress, or, in the case of Spain, the move from the campaign against the “Ley Sinde” to the “No les votes” campaign. In both cases, especially the latter, the free culture movement merges itself with the Indignants movement. There is somewhat the acknowledgement that there will be no “free culture” unless the whole system is transformed, thus why the change of target from culture itself (the “what”) to the political institutions (the “why”).

It is important to note that this change of the system is non-partisan, and being non-partisan is an explicit tactic so that the movement can be comprehensive and inclusive.

Discussion

Òscar Mateos: in a certain way, the 15M movements have witnessed the coexistence of the traditional civic movements with a more post-modern ones. How has this happened or been made possible? Toret: Democracia Real Ya was more a platform than an institution, and this implied that as there was no central message to be imposed over the members, anyone felt free to contribute with their own voice, either at the individual level or organized in traditional movements. Notwithstanding, there have been clashes between a more chaotic or networked way of working and the vertical and traditional ways to organize civil movements. Franco: the crisis of media and political parties — and their dependence from ideological and economic lobbies — definitely helped the movement to be something plural, a window open to fresh and unfiltered information, which was something that every citizen, despite their origin (traditional or post-modern) was in very much need of.

Gala Pin: how can the digital divide be overcome so that no people is left behind? Toret: the digital divide is addressed on a peer-to-peer basis. Many workshops and training sessions are being organized so that everyone catches up with the state-of-the art skills and technologies.

Q: how was the offline linked with he online? Toret: there was continuous feedback between both worlds. Many documents were printed or distributed in many analogue ways, but also some creations in paper or in speech were digitized (photos, footage, etc.) and spread through social networking sites.

Gala Pin: how can we focus, how can be optimize the energies poured into the movement so that they are more efficient (how can be participation optimized)? Franco: there is an ongoing challenge on how to be able to map, link and somehow organize the zillion platforms where the conversation takes place. Castells: maybe a solution could be to get in touch with research centres that are specialized in just that, so that synergies can be built between activists and people willing to do research on activism.

More information

• Mesa II. La política en la era de Internet (II), by Ricard Espelt.

Presentation by Joan Coscubiela, co-director of the Seminar

The IN3 has made up this year a research seminar called Communication and Civil Society to debate around the new role of communications in politics, especially when the tools to broadcast a message have become of personal use.

In this framework or communication revolution also come political revolutions like the Arab Spring, the Spanish Indignants Movement (or 15M movement) and the Occupy Wall Street Movement. To analyse these movements we need not only to approach them from the ivory tower, but from the inside, with an activist and participatory approach.

The goal of the seminar is, thus, to find out what the social impact is of this crossroads between communication and politics.

Panel: Politics in the Internet age (I)
Manuel Castells, Joana Conill, Amalia Cardenas

Manuel Castells

Politics is the exercise of power to accomplish common goals within the established institutions; while social movements aim at changing values of the society, at transforming people’s minds. And the problem comes when common goals and social values are disconnected. Then comes revolution, which is the occupation of the institutions by non-established means to impose the new values and transform or rewrite the rules according to them.

We live in specific communication frameworks, with which we communicate with our peers, build communities… and build our own minds in the process. It is not exactly that technology determines the way we are, but it certainly has a major role on how we build our societies. When the communication framework changes, society changes: we are shifting towards communicative autonomy, that leads towards social autonomy.

When there is oppression, there is resistance. Thus, the new communication tools that provide autonomy have had two consequences: on the one hand, the explosion of resistance; on the other hand, the attempt to control such tools to avoid resistance.

The Tunisian Revolution is a clear case of this increase of resistance to impose, through social activism, the change of a system. In Tunisia, the feeling of humiliation is worst than exploitation, as it is portrayed by the immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi.

Fear is one of the strongest feelings and one of the main barriers for revolutions. Fear is a mechanism of survival of the species. Fear paralyses and stops us from self-destruction. But once fear is overridden, the sense of community provides a feeling of security and then comes enthusiasm. That is what happens after the Tunisian Revolution, that spreads enthusiastically to Egypt, and then to Spain.

But what is the spark that helps overriding fear? In the Tunisian case that is Internet. The first call for a revolution in Egypt comes through the Internet in January 25th, 2011, when Asmaa Mahfouz posted a video of her calling out for a protest.

After that, movements like the April 6 Youth Movement join the call and activate their networks to raise the population up. And the activation is very fast because of the flat structures of the networks.

When the government tries to stop the revolution by cutting down communications, the international community comes to the rescue with several solutions. This international community is partly made up by for-profit firms (e.g. Google, Twitter, Facebook) that are interested in the success of the movement: they are in the business of selling freedom and, thus, that is their business, to provide freedom to communicate. As Lotan, Graeff, Ananny, Gaffney, Pearce and boyd demonstrated, The revolutions were tweeted.

Indeed, the total blackout of communications is nearly impossible. If the international community of hackers — like Anonymous and Telecomix in Egypt — is committed to restablishing a way of being connected, a government can make it more difficult, but not impossible.

When there is communication, a movement is strong. When communication fails, the movement gets waek and normally ends up violently, as it is the ultimate lasting resource.

Main characteristics of these movements

• Instantly generated, sparked by indignation.
• Multimodal, images impacting people thanks to distributed by networks.
• Horizontal, and based on trust.
• Disintermediation of the formal political representation.
• Viral, expansive.
• Have no centre, they cannot be controlled, they reconfigure their architectures all the time.
• Both local and global.
• Self reflective, on a continuous process of deliberation.
• Both online and offline.
• Leaderless, with no strong affinities.
• Do not aim at political projects, but at specific goals.
• Deeply transforming, deeply political, without being programmatic.
• Express feelings, generate debates, but do not support political parties or governments.
• Aim at rebuilding democracy, more base on direct and/or deliberative democracy. They generate utopias not as unreachable things, but as drivers of change.

Joana Conill, Amalia Cardenas

After all these revolutions, especially in Spain, what has been achieved?

It is important to note that not all achievements necessarily mean taking the (political) power.

On the one hand, a huge achievement has been transforming the processes. The processes to share information and opinion, or the process of deliberation. Within these processes, some achievements have been the acknowledgement that being wrong can be right, or that errors can be discussed and their solutions be fed back onto the deliberation process.

Meetings are facilitated so that everyone can speak despite of their gender, status, shyness. And conflict resolution mechanisms are put into practice so that participation does not only come smoothly, but conflicts are solved and actually provide good input into what is being discussed.

Feelings are put into the equation. There is a shift from the I think towards the I feel, including I believe, I guess, in my opinion, from my point of view, etc.

The ultimate goal is more and better participation.

And it is not only about more and better participation of people, about not excluding people from the process, but also about not excluding some values from the process.

The relationships amongst people determine the quality of the interchange, of the communication. If communication determines society and politics, it is crucial that we care about the quality of personal relationships.

Discussion

Q: Why people do not have (enough) fear in Spain? Why do all people agree with the Indignants but so few people participate? Why is there so much resignation? Castells: there is fear, and a lot of it: there is fear of losing one’s job or fear of breaking the rules or fear of being hit by the police. All these fears are stopping many people from participating. Nowadays, institutions are not sustained by legitimacy, but by resignation.

More information

• Mesa I. La política en la era de Internet (I), by Ricard Espelt.

1. First of all, it goes back to the neolithic revolution and then to the industrial revolution to reflect on how things used to be before the digital revolution. Then, it briefly aims at showing how the exercise of democracy has been (potentially) turned upside down as democratic institutions see their roles totally transformed. This is essentially the same discourse (though adapted to governments and democracies) I explained in From teaching institutions to learning people, the reason being that I believe there is a common approach when dealing about education, governments or even businesses (e.g. the recording industry) that focus on institutions, their role, their added value, and how digital technologies help citizens to circumvent them.
2. After the potential benefits of “democracy 2.0″, the second part focuses on the barriers and, even more important, the threats, especially those related with (ironically) forgetting about “democracy 1.0″. In this sense, I will stress the point that democracy is time-consuming activity and that those with time and training (and technological mastership) can benefit and even corrupt democratic institutions (even unwillinglly). This is the point I brought in The disempowering Goverati: e-Aristocrats or the Delusion of e-Democracy.
3. Last, I am using the “power = governance + empowerment” model also developed in the previous article to analyse the Egypt and Spanish revolts during the spring of 2011.

Please see below my presentation. You can also visit my bibliographic file for La Sociedad Red: derechos, políticas y ejercicio de la democracia (the original title) for downloads both in English and Spanish.

I am taking part in a round table on “Active Citizenship” the 11 May 2011 at 17:45 with Susan Moeller (University of Maryland), Manuel Pinto (Universidade do Minho), Vladimir Gai (UNESCO) and chaired by Laura Cervi.

My presentation will heavily rely on my recently published work The disempowering Goverati: e-Aristocrats or the Delusion of e-Democracy and will showcase the revolutions in Tunisia and, especially, Egypt, were (in my opinion) a small elite of goverati successfully managed to (1) leverage the power of social networking sites to coordinate and mobilize their peers and (2) used social media to reach mainstream international mass media to speak out with images and video what was happening on the streets, thus also reaching international decision-takers, like the US Secretary of State.

Delete. The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

(Talk based on Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s book Delete. The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.)

What once has been put on the Web, it is never again forgotten: people is losing jobs, being banned from entering countries, etc. for having put content online that has afterwards been found by third parties, and these third parties judged the content and acted in consequence. Even if the content was long out-dated, even if the content had been removed, even if the content was addressed to other people than the ones that finally accessed it.

For ages, the problem was remembering and the norm was forgetting. Many activities had precisely remembering as their goal: language, storytelling, painting, etc. And neither the book or the phone made a change by making remembering less hard or less time consuming.

But digital technologies have.

And many institutions backed their power on the capability to remember: through scribes, the printing press, the panopticon, etc.

And it is not only about power, but about time, decision and how some decisions were made at a specific time. Seen from a distance, a decision made long ago might not be easy to understand in present time. Not being able to forget, we lose the ability to generalize and look instead at the detail (taken from Borges). We might them turn from an unforgetting to an unforgiving society.

What can be done?

Privacy rights. We can empower citizens to manage their own privacy. But what we find is that people do not care.

Information ecology. We can just use/store the necessary amount of information strictly needed to perform a task. But the problem is that we cannot foresee the future and know exactly what we will be needing or not.

Digital abstinence. That is, not sharing anything on Facebook, etc. But is that realistic?

Full contextualization. Instead of abstinence, we should put all the information we have so that a reliable context can be built around any piece of information given. It is proposal of a full transparent society, but is it feasible? is it affordable in matters of time?

Cognitive adjustment. Adjust our society, our individual processing of how we evaluate information. But history tells that forcing the human being to change just won’t work, brain rewiring is not something than can be easily done. And, indeed, what would be the appropriate mechanism to do so?

Privacy DRM. Instead of changing humans, changing technology. To ensure that only those that we have given permission to see our content can actually access it. But, then, we have to build a surveillance system that watches our moves and watches that these (registered) moves are not used for wrong purposes. That is a little bit of a contradiction.

Why not reintroducing forgetting?

Expiration date of information. Once the date expires, the content disappears. This would be the digital equivalent of oral communication. It would also link content to a specific time, keeping the sense of context with it.

The Digital Shoebox in the Attic. A way of keeping content alive, but dormant. It has to be explicitly retrieved, thus avoiding serendipity.

Forgetting should be the default, not remembering.

Discussion

Q: Who defines what we have to forget? A: This is a difficult question. For instance, in a transaction, who sets the expiration date? the customer or the seller? But sometimes there might be benefits in this. e.g. Amazon knows all the books I bought in the last 10 years, but does not know what interests me now: Amazon would be happy to know, and I would have an incentive on updating that information (by setting expiration dates) so that Amazon could do better suggestions to me.

Sandra González-Bailon: wouldn’t it be better to forgive and not to forget? A: That would be nice, but it seems that, psychologically, forgiving and forgetting are very related. Forgiving is thinking that something of the past is not relevant any more. But recalling it again and again makes forgiveness more difficult.

Q: wouldn’t full transparency help in levelling information (i.e. power) imbalances in the world? A: It might work in some cases, but not all cases are about overcoming power imbalances: there are many many personal cases were full transparency would be harmful and not a matter of power.

Mike Jensen: making politicians accountable requires an active memory. We want protective forgetting, but don’t we want some protective remembering for some individuals? A: This is not about an ignorant society that does not remember anything. In ancient times, when remembering was expensive, people remembered what was valuable. So let’s try to shift the default from remembering to forgetting, make remembering the exception, and concentrate in remembering what is worth.

Q: isn’t putting an expiration date an active act of remembering (and not forgetting)? wouldn’t be recalling that something is about to expire recalling the fact itself and then remembering it again (and again)? A: It seems that humans cannot only automatically forget, but also actively forget. So, if I wish to actively forget something, the recalling won’t be activated by the expiration date.

Q: Wouldn’t be negotiation costs of agreeing in an expiration date very high? A: Technology can help in this, and enable information capturing devices with software that talks to other devices (e.g. my e-ID card, with several levels of recording permission) and acknowledges a specific expiration date.

More information

• Internet, Politics, Policy 2010: Closing keynote by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger at the OII Blog.

Political Economy of the Network Neutrality in the European Union
Meelis Kitsing, Department of Political Science, National Center for Digital Government, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Network neutrality: access providers should not charge higher prices for priority delivery, elimination of price discrimination and traffic prioritization, no denial of access to specific services or applications, etc.

In Europe both content providers and network operators supported the final version of the EU telecom packages, while normally (e.g. in the US) they have opposite visions. The reason may be that they provide complementary groups, so regulations on one party might end up impacting the other party. Of course this may be context-dependent and valid only where functional separation prevails. In any case, it is more like a coordination game, like the battle of the sexes game.

But the debate is scarce and narrowed to technical issues, leaving aside ideology.

On the other hand, even if there is an agreement at the European level, regulations have to be transposed at the national level.

Estonia is a small but critical case in pioneering ICT-related legislation, maybe because of the importance of Skype at the international level.

Let’s Get Physical: Methodologies for Framing Critical Internet Policy and Governance Issues from a Sustainable Development Perspective
Don MacLean, International Institute for Sustainable Development

The information society perspective is terrific (more access to more content in less time, etc.), as terrific as terrible is the perspective over sustainable development: the ecological footprint has surpassed the biocapacity of our planet and now we are incurring into an ecological debt (WWW (2008). Living planet report, p.22), though there are several policies that could reduce this ecological debt (íbid. p.23).

Impacts of Internet and ICTs on sustainable development: first order effects (direct), second order effects (indirect) and third order effects (systemic). And some uncertainties: what technological designs and standards to connect everything and minimize environmental impacts, policies to convert first and second order effects into systemic transformation, governance principles, how to connect the Internet and ICTs to sustainable development, etc.

A project identified 10 critical Internet policy uncertainties and explored the impact on sustainable development of policy choices based on government-led, market-led, security-driven, and community-based governance scenarios.

Some recommendations are to consolidate the existing research on relationship of the Internet with sustainable development, survey research on the web 1.0 relationship between second and third order effects (individual behaviour, attitudes, values, economic structures, social structures, government structures).

Canada’s internet policy: Is ‘inclusiveness’ road-kill on the information highway
Mary C. Milliken, University of New Brunswick

Many people do not participate because (a) they have no access but especially (b) they are not included in the design of the participation processes.

In Canada, civil society organizations were excluded from telecommunication policy, though they had been included and active in media policy.

Governments have a very business-oriented approach when regulating telecommunications and broadcast media, and the people have been left aside.

The CBC began using the Internet in order to be really universal, though they didn’t had specific resources to do so. After a restructure, the CBC labels itself as a content provider, and a provider of content that has to be possible to broadcast in any channel or platform.

But the Internet has no attached requirement to be a public service, and be regulated as such. If the Internet had been understood as a broadcasting media, it could have been regulated as other platforms and have attached this public service requirement/criteria.

Policy-making for digital development: the role of the government
Ismael Peña-López, Open University of Catalonia

Papers

• Kitsing: Political Economy of the Network Neutrality in the European Union
• Maclean, Barg: Let’s Get Physical: Methodologies for Framing Critical Internet Policy and Governance Issues from a Sustainable Development Perspective
• Milliken: Canada’s internet policy: Is ‘inclusiveness’ road-kill on the information
• Peña-López: Policy-making for digital development: the role of the government

Digital Politics Divide: does the Digital Divide still matter?
Andrea Calderaro, European University Institute

From the Digital Divide (Norris, 2001) to the Digital Skills Divide (Van Dijk, 2009) to the Digital Participation Divide.

Wealth factor are still one of the main reasons why people use or do not use the Internet. But also there is an uneven distribution of ownership of web hosts and ownership of Internet domains [I wonder: cause or consequence?].

Concerning the political arena, there are cyber-pessimist and cyber-optimist points of view that need being bridged. The fact is that political parties are also unevenly on line depending on the country.

The reasons for that are the number of internet users, the level of democracy, and the GDP.

Unraveling Different Barriers to Technology Use: Urban Residents and Neighborhood Effects
Karen Mossberger, University of Illinois at Chicago

Uneven access to the Internet may have a negative impact in the opportunities of the people and thus drive them towards social exclusion. And living in poor neighbourhoods, having a low income or lower educational levels are reasons that explain lower access to the Internet.

When asked the citizens of Chicago why they did not had broadband at home, 30% said they were not interested, 27% cost, 9% difficulty.

Per neighbourhood, “not interested” is a reason much likely answered by whites and Asian-Americans (42%), then African-Americans (29%) and then Latinos (19%). By age, older people are more likely (30%) to say that the reason for not having broadband is “lack of skills”, the same ratio when looking at the income.

Neighbourhoods magnify these barriers to access the Internet, because they magnify cot and skill barriers for residents of areas with high concentrations of African-Americans and Latinos. There is a double burden of concentrated poverty.

Amazonian Geeks and Social Activism: An ethnographic study on the appropriation of ICTs in the Brazilian Amazon
Marie Ellen Sluis, University of Amsterdam

Instead of talking about access, talking about what means to have or not to have access: meaningful access. And the same for inclusion and meaning digital inclusion.

Projeto Puraqué is a collective of social activists using ICT as a tool for social inclusion, increasing critical knowledge on regional socio-political problems and issues. ICTs a tool rather than an end.

Examples: opening up the computre to demystify technology and enhance self-steem, raise awareness on e-waste and fostering reuse and recycling as gambiarra alternative,

The project operates in a certain framework that seeks social transformation in the long term and on a sustainability basis. It is the people who decide what is beneficial for them, and the project is a lot about the digitization of what Brazilians do most: social networking.

Indicators of the digital divide and its link with other exclusions
Jocelyne Trémenbert, Institut Telecom / Telecom Bretagne, Université Européenne de Bretagne, Marsouin

The goals of the research is to explore the polymorphism of the digital divide and its links with other forms of exclusion. Is the distance to the Internet different for different types of exclusion? Do we find within the digital divide expressions of exclusion?

Aage, gender, educational level, income, occupational category and localisation enable to predict with +70% accuracy the use of the Internet, especially the occupational category and the educational level. Non-users are often isolated people: the digital divide goes hand in hand with the social divide.

Five types (clusters) of non-users: the users to be (5%), the potential users (19%), probably / hesitants (41%), the resistants (16%), the excluded (19%).

We need new indicators of the digital divide, new elements about the specificities of some categories of non-users, and a new quantitative typology of non-users based on data on inhibitors,motivations, points of view and picturing.

Papers

• Calderaro: Digital Politics Divide: does the Digital Divide still matter?
• Mossberger, Tolbert, Jimenez, Bowen: Unraveling Different Barriers to Technology Use: Urban Residents and Neighborhood Effects
• Sluis: Amazonian Geeks and Social Activism: An ethnographic study on the appropriation of ICTs in the Brazilian Amazon
• Trémenbert: Indicators of the digital divide and its link with other exclusions