[ICTs-and-Society] Pre-Conference Online Discussion

[S.M.Ali]

Greetings, all!

I should like to offer the following article, which takes a somewhat 'critical' stance on digital activism, as a contribution to pre-conference discussion:

"Social Opposition in the Age of Internet: Desktop 'Militants' and Public Intellectuals" by James Petras
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27761

Kind regards

Dr Syed Mustafa Ali, UK

________________________________
From: Gilson Schwartz [gilson.schwartz at gmail.com]
Sent: 20 January 2012 06:48
To: Louis Suárez-Potts
Cc: discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net
Subject: Re: [ICTs-and-Society] Pre-Conference Online Discussion

Dear Louis and friends,

Your concept of "productive peer communities" as well as the moral/survival issues involved as well as foundations for a critical discourse for a new political economy of digital emancipation is very much the perspective of the City of Knowledge, created some 12 years ago at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of São Paulo.

This experimental "language pattern" lab has evolved into a social incubator and design house connecting the concentrated knowledge of the largest public university in Brazil to social groups, projects and more intelligent communities - productive in a creative sense.

We have called this new value creation (and thus survival as well as moral) framework "iconomics" and our next step is a large-scale and global operation of "creative currencies" to be traded locally as well as online.

This is a critical experiment in the social design of value that seems to be an applied and constructive contribution to "digital emancipation".

We have implemented dozen of local projects in different areas of Brazil and the City is now also a regional Latin American hub for the "Games for Change" initiative (www.gamesforchange.org<http://www.gamesforchange.org> and www.gamesforchange.org.br<http://www.gamesforchange.org.br>).

Is the iconomic paradigm a post-liberal ideology? Should we replace "oikos" for "eikon" if we really want to understand the differences between machines, animals and human beings?

Underlying and pressing issues as the vast majority of the population is managed as garbage or cattle.

Best regards,

Gilson Schwartz
City of Knowledge
www.cidade.usp.br<http://www.cidade.usp.br>





On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 10:55 PM, Louis Suárez-Potts <louis at ageofpeers.com<mailto:louis at ageofpeers.com>> wrote:
Thanks, Khalid, for the prompt and introduction of the list.

About me: I used to "lead" the OpenOffice.org<http://OpenOffice.org> Project community for about 11 years, until the code and much else was handed over to the Apache Software Foundation; I continue to be active there, and invite others here to participate. See http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/

But my interest now lies with establishing productive peer communities and ensuring that they are at the least locally sustainable. I mean by this that they do not necessarily depend upon the good will (read: commercial and self-serving interest) of a remote contributor. That sort of power relation tends to reinscribe neoliberalism, and as we have seen with the continuing collapse of the financial house of cards initiated in 2008 or so, such arrangements are designed locally and temporally insular: locally uncaring and shortsighted.

Given the burdens of the future the past has thrust upon us, like global climate change and the grotesque legacies of colonialism, we really have to think longterm and always whether the work we do as a community (locally grounded, ethereally networked) is sustainable. It's not a moral thing, exactly, except in the broadest sense. I see it more as a question of survival.

But if the key, as I see it, is the formation of productive communities, how does one go about devising them? Clearly, there are many ways, and some are scripted better than others. I would submit that there is no "best practices," rather, there are strategies of listening and communication per locale, and though there may be gross similarities among the strategies and techniques, there are also huge differences in the value each is apportioned by the people who actually end up composing the effective communities. For instance, as is well known, in Brazil, Orkut ended up being popular--but hardly anywhere else. Not clear why. In Japan, Facebook continues to fail--and we can guess for cultural reasons. (But such reasons are often enough simply rationalizations, "Just so" stories.)

I'd be interested in learning more from others on the list….

Cheers,

Louis <- based in Canada.

-

Louis Suarez-Potts, PhD
Age of Peers


On 2012-01-09, at 11:56 , khalid abu arja wrote:

The ICTs and Society network has a mailing list. By registering to the network, you also register to the mailing list that poses the possibility for pre-conference discussions around conference-related issues like Internet & power relations today, the scandals of Internet/social media & capitalism, how an alternative Internet can look like, etc. Join the network and the mailing list and feel free to start pre-conference discussions on the mailing list by posting to discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net<mailto:discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net> (posting is only possible after confirmed registration by the admin). The more discussions we start before the conference and the more controversial, critical, and in-depth these discussions are, the more interesting the actual event will be…

Thanks
Name: Khaled F. Abu Arja
Qatar
Mobile: +974 55523368<tel:%2B974%2055523368>

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