Why should the interent , like all media not be a two edged sword? Last
year I went down a long dirt track to a primary school in Southern Chile
where the poulation was mainly indigenous Mapuche people of Chile. There I
found three computers coneected to the internet where previously the
school never saw a newspaper. There are clear reasons to question who puts
the news on the internet, but the same questions could be raised about
newspaper ownership. However these children had access to stuff they never
had before. There is a school of thought that as everbody will now be
getting their information from "liberal democracies" we reach the end of
history (a sort of Fukayama hypothesis). However these children and their
families were just getting to the point of creating their own web pages
and services ( in the nearest town, Concun, there was state/university
support for this). Samizdat has never been easier.
The locals were also appropriating the technology for their own uses in
other ways. Children of secondary age would be at boarding school during
the week. Parents used these facilities to communincate with their
children.
All this experience has echoes in the work which several of my colleagues
have been doing in developing new forms of political dialogue for
autochthonous linguistic minorities in Europe (including Finns in northern
Sweeden, Eva). We linguistic minorities ( with the possible exception of
the Catalunyan's) tend to live on Europe's (or whatever state we are in)
economic and geographic periphery (like Gallega, already discussed this
week). Historically we have always had to articulate our political and
economic dialogue with the economic "core". Non-iron and tarmac economic
communication systems are allowing us to experiment directly with other
peripheral regions, seeking ways to find economic exploitation of our
cultural diversity.
I sometimes think those rushing to invest in companies establishing brand
identity of the 'net (TW_AOL etc) have lost the plot. Brands will mean
little when intelligent agents will find you the cheapest and most
reliable source of goods and services, and the cost of production and
distribution of information content is dropping. Ultimately it is talent
and imagination that produces compulsive communincation, and increasingly
they will not need Holywood, CNN or Time-Warner resources to be creative.
Martin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 01 2000 - 01:02:08 PST