[ICTs-and-Society] (no subject)

[Unwin, Tim]

Colleagues

Just to add:


The ICT4D Collective and the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation are hosting a half day session on mobiles, social media and democracy at the ICTD2012 conference in Atlanta on the morning of Thursday 15th March.

Thanks to Caitlin Bentley, the session will be streamed ( http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ict4d), and we are encouraging live participation and interaction through Twitter.  All relevant tweets will be posted onto the screen during the session, so those not able to be there in person can participate.  We will be using the hashtag #SocMed4Dem, but if you wish to engage with wider debates you might also like to use these tags as well #socialmedia, #democracy and #ict4d.

The session will begin with a debate around the theme of whether social media are an effective way of enhancing democracy (with contributions from the ITU, Tinopolis, al Jazeera and others), and this will be followed by a series of round table discussions.

Please spread the word!

Best wishes
Tim


On 03/03/2012 16:55, "Laura Wexler" <laura.wexler at yale.edu> wrote:

Dear all:  May I just simply add my thanks to have been added to this list in the past few days, which has already instructed and encouraged me greatly.  I am hoping to be able to come to the conference, but in any event I much look forward to continuing reading and meeting both online and off.  Warmly, Laura Wexler

Sent from my iPhone

On Mar 3, 2012, at 10:49 AM, Iurii Mielkov <ym173 at ya.ru> wrote:

Hello, everyone!



I think I would not be able to come to the conference, but thank you so much for the thread and for the ability to learn fresh ideas expressed by so many smart people without going to meet them in person! And that is indeed a sign for the importance of new media and technologies.

Of course, Sylvain is right that believing that new media will immediately bring us democracy is rather techno-determinism. But that does not actually mean that technologies have nothing to do with the social development. As Marx used to note in his times: “In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist” (“The Poverty of philosophy” – P.49).

We can just continue with that little list of mills further on, and make a supposition that true democracy is to remain unattainable utopia until humankind would become energetically independent (autotrophic) turning to renewable sources of energy – that is, until the mill would again in turn be powered by wind or solar energy. While ecological rhetoric is quite fashionable and widely used in today’s society, capital-oriented economics is still unable to consider nature as being anything else but a source of raw materials – means for achieving goals that have nothing to do with ecology or democracy (that is, goals and values of private profit). To put it in figurative Marx-like terms, it would be solar battery that will give us society with democracy (or, communism). By the way, that’s what Lenin meant by his formula: ‘Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country’, and electrification of machines in question had never been achieved yet.

>From such point of view, Internet is a great tool of communication – not only for social activists between themselves, but rather as a tool for everyone’s communication with the cultural heritage of the whole humankind, as means for cultural development of human personalities necessary to overcome the crisis of present representative modes of pseudo-democracy. But, at the same time, social online media could be used for achieving other goals as well, and less noble ones at that, as they are found to be quite convenient tools for manipulating people’s consciousness.

For example: Kristina said about uproar going on right now in Russia – but why, do Western observers still believe everything Western media (both traditional and Internet) tell them about ‘uproars’ in Asia, Egypt, or Russia? Observers in Moscow stated that in February, there were two times as many people participating in street actions organized in support of Putin, than in those made up by opposition groups. Still the most important thing is that working people support Putin – and not billionaires and other political adventurers who run against him. In fact, having Internet access and Facebook profiles in Russia and other poor countries, means possessing rather high level of income – and a lot of free time as well. As a result, ‘color revolutions’ are made by office staff who have little to do with either understanding political theory or performing economical practices, – and not by actual workers. While Putin himself is surely not an ideal candidate, his main rival, who is the today's hero in blogspaces and iPhones, is a billionaire capitalist trying to enforce the 12-hours working day laws over the rest of Russian population.

In other words, the freedom of social online media – like the very name of revolution – often appears today as a false signboard covering good old manipulation. That’s what we had experienced here in Ukraine in 2004: a crowd gathered up by Western-paid agencies and demagogues rejected the results of rather just elections in favor of a pro-Western candidate who self-proclaimed his forged victory. Of course, that was neither revolution nor act of democracy many people believed it to be.

And that means that, as many participants here have already said, while promoting social media as great new means for enriching and augmenting real egalitarian democracy, we should be more concerned in clearing out the goals those means are supposed to achieve – or in other case, they would be used to achieve some latent and opposite goals.



Thanks for reading and best wishes!

Iurii Mielkov (Kiev, Ukraine).


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Tim Unwin

UNESCO Chair in ICT4D and
Emeritus Professor of Geography
Room 109, Bowyer Building,
Royal Holloway, University of London
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TW20 0EX, UK
tim.unwin at rhul.ac.uk <http://tim.unwin@rhul.ac.uk>

Also, CEO of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation
t.unwin at cto.int   http://www.cto.int

And Chair of the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission
tim.unwin at cscuk.org.uk  http://cscuk.dfid.gov.uk

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