./english/35.txt:93:Because of the lack of a central information desk, it was very difficult to
./english/42.txt:78:All speakers insisted on the importance of the acknowledgement of political status and on the need to promote information exchange and joint solidarity work, for instance, the Kalera Project.
./english/44.txt:112:All speakers insisted on the importance of the acknowledgement of political status and on the need to promote information exchange and joint solidarity work, for instance, the Kalera Project.
./english/44.txt:174:At the conclusion of a debate on repressive and fail-safe politics and their repercussions on the most vulnerable members of society, the organisations present proposed the establishment of an information, resistance and warning system given that such policies are being implemented in all countries.
./english/45.txt:23:6.3 Improving information and knowledge on mental health in the EU
./english/45.txt:51:At paragraph 6.3 contact information is included
./english/45.txt:165:- exchange information with society and professionals
./english/45.txt:355:6.3 Improving information and knowledge on mental health in
./english/45.txt:358:For any information you can always contact the following patient organisations:
./english/62.txt:16:• Alexander Buzgalin Information added from Russia
./english/62.txt:58:There are many ways in which we are creating/prefiguring alternatives as we resist, in the ways we live, the ways we consume, the culture we produce, the relationships we create. These aspects of social movement activity is now widely recognised, discussed and systematised. I want to argue that there is a further, more methodological aspect to the ways we pre-figure another world, a new kind of society and economy. I want to argue that in the very ways in which we organise, the forms of co-ordination we are inventing as we try to expand,deepen, communicate and act on our knowledge, we are nurturing the seeds of a new means of social co-ordination. This is less recognised, reflected upon and discussed. Yet the history of recent social movements can be understood as the development or emergence - or at least an important contribution to such a development - of new networked, horizontal, `de-centred’ forms of co-ordination. They are forms of co-ordination which on the one hand start from a recognition of mutual interdependance, of no centre of superior authority, knowledge or power. But which on the other are based on a desire to be effective actors bringing about change in a purposeful way. I’m thinking here of a history which spans the radical, direct democracy of the movements of 1968 through the networking, consciousness raising processes of the womens liberation movement, to the alter-globalisation movement with its networks of global coordination and flows of knowledge as well as its self-conscious use and develoment of the tools of information technology. Though these movements are distinct in many different ways, on thing they have in common is that they developed their ways of organising partly in order to create means of expressing and sharing new knowledge as a necessary condition for being effective transformative subjects. Throughout these nearly 40 years several generations have been We have been searching and experimenting with non-heirarchical, democratic ways of arriving at a comon purpose and a common understanding as a basis of effective action.
./english/62.txt:86:My name is mundo. If you want to maintain the three categories of researchers, activist-researchers and activists, I speak here as a researcher (DEMOS project http://demos.iue.it) on the ph.d. level. I don't want to use the time to talk about my work in detail (see: http://www.wz- berlin.de/zkd/zcm/default.en.htm for more information).
./english/62.txt:109:Alexander Buzgalin Information added from Russia
./english/150.txt:12:A Euro-wide paper, »Marches-Europeenes-News« is produced regularly and this is supplemented by nationally based publications. Much communication takes place via e-mail and use of the internet as continent wide meetings are costly to arrange and incur sizeable travel expenses. However, the »Assizes« are well attended with 500 participants from many countries. These gatherings, together with the counter-summits, provide opportunities for the exchange of information, experiences of struggles and for debate over policies, demands, actions and ways of organising the movement. Although debate can become heated, there is a spirit of cooperation which is just as well with the large number of languages being spoken. The organisation of summer camps in Thessalonika (1998) and Cologne (1999) provides another forum of debate for activists from diverse movements.
./english/162.txt:32:The Keynesian welfare state of the post-war period could appear as an answer to Polanyi's vision. It submitted industrial and financial activity to a social regulation, conceived within each national framework in a more or less democratic fashion. But the dynamics of capitalism rapidly overflowed this national frame, as one can see in the evolution of the world monetary system. After the war, the Bretton Woods treaty tied signatory countries into a system of relatively stable exchange rates, whereby all the currencies were pegged to the dollar, which in turn was convertible into gold. But this system proved untenable, and after the United States suspended convertibility in 1971, the currencies began to "float" against each other; since the outset of the eighties they have been subject to the fluctuations of a highly speculative exchange market, operating at the speed of computers and telecommunications. At the same time, controls on crossborder investments have gradually been lifted, and many state services and industries, considered as unfair competition with the private sector, have been suppressed. In a world which no longer erects any significant barriers to the directive capacity of money, capital flow into the stock markets now commands the majority of productive investments everywhere; and every material reality comes to be dependent on highly volatile financial information. In this way there arises what Rem Koolhaas has called "the world of ¥ € $": a world-economy built around the incessantly changing equivalence of the yen, the euro, and the dollar, representing the three major poles of world prosperity. One can see the convertibility of these three currencies as a new kind of economic language, serving primarily to convey the opportunistic speech of private investors, indeed, of a transnational capitalist class. ¥ € $ is the monetary language of the flexible personality.
./english/162.txt:34:The last twenty years have seen the incredible inventiveness of this worldwide language, which has generated a myriad of private dialects: stocks, futures, options, swaptions, floaters, hedges, and so on through the endless list of derivatives. Despite their appearance of total autonomy, of absolute disconnection from the solid earth, these forms of privately managed credit money have directed the productive apparatus of the world's countries, ever more radically since 1989. In parallel to these developments in the private sphere, a new type of postnational state has slowly come into being, abandoning the former emphasis on social security and public welfare, and seeking instead to encourage the insertion of its most innovative citizens into the worldwide information economy. (10) And the language of ¥ € $ has also taken on cultural, intellectual, organizational and imaginary forms, giving rise to artistic productions, managerial techniques, modes of behaviors, desires and dreams that have served to legitimate the regime of flexible accumulation, while continually feeding it with new innovations. But this very inventiveness, this speculative confidence, has also gnawed away at the ecological, social, political, and financial foundations of the system. We went through the Asian crisis of 1997, which spread to Russia and Brazil, threatening even the American economy; then came the krach of the NASDAQ in spring 2000, sparking a two-year plunge of the world's stock markets (which remain extremely volatile at the date of writing, three years later). The possibility of a systemic crisis, which could be seen on the horizon throughout the 1990s, has rushed suddenly closer at the outset of the new millennium.
./english/162.txt:46:It is well known that the Linux operating-system kernel, and free software generally, is made cooperatively without any money changing hands. This is something that quickly caught the attention of artists and culture critics, as in the discussions over what Richard Barbrook called the "high-tech gift economy." (13) The expression recalls an anthropologist, not Polanyi but Marcel Mauss, the author of the famous essay on The Gift. His essential contribution was to underscore, at the very heart of modern economic exchange, the presence of motives irreducible to the calculation of the value of material objects, and also of the individual interest one might have in possessing them. As Barbrook points out, the heritage of Mauss was very much alive in alternative circles, his ideas having inspired the Situationists, who passed them on to the do-it-yourself media ethic of the Punk movement. But mostly what fueled the discussion of the Internet gift economy was not theory, but the simple practice of adding information to the net. As Rishab Aiyer Ghosh explained, "the economy of the Net begins to look like a vast tribal cooking-pot, surging with production to match consumption, simply because everyone understands – instinctively, perhaps – that trade need not occur in single transactions of barter, and that one product can be exchanged for millions at a time. The cooking-pot keeps boiling because people keep putting in things as they themselves, and others, take things out." (14) By placing the accent on the overflowing abundance and free nature of the available content, Ghosh responded implicitly to one of the most contested themes in Mauss's essay, which cast each gift as the deliberate imposition of a debt on the receiver, instating hierarchies which were quite foreign to the practice of networked information exchange.
./english/162.txt:50:Today, with the popular explosion of Gnutella and other peer-to-peer file-sharing systems, these notions of the high-tech gift economy have begun to form part of common sense. It seems to admit at least a few new things: that the coded creations circulating on the Internet are never "consumed" like a cigarette would be; that use by some people in no way limits their availability for others; and that certain kinds of exchanges therefore have nothing to do with rarity and are quite possible without money. What is less often remarked, because of a denial which is characteristic of free-market rhetoric, is the fact that non-monetary models of exchange have been operating on a very large scale for as long as one can remember, for instance in the realm of academic publishing, where the primary motive for sharing information is not its monetary value but the recognition it brings – a recognition which itself is at least partially dependent on the idea of contributing something to humanity or truth. In fact there exists quite a large movement in the domain of scientific publishing aiming for online release of all the articles carried by specialized journals, in order to make the results universally accessible despite the increasing cost of many essential print publications. (15) Recently, an author by the name of Yochai Benkler has taken the twin examples of free software and academic publishing as a foundation on which to build a general theory of what he calls "commons-based peer production," by which he means non-proprietary informational or cultural production, based on materials which are extremely low cost or inherently free. This voluntary form of self-organized production depends, in his words, "on very large aggregations of individuals independently scouring their information environment in search of opportunities to be creative in small or large increments. These individuals then self-identify for tasks and perform them for complex motivational reasons." (16) Benkler's first aim, however, is not to explain peoples' motivation, but simply to describe the organizational and technological conditions that make this cooperative production possible.
./english/162.txt:51:Four attributes of the networked information economy appear as preconditions of commons-based peer production. First, information must be freely available as inexhaustible raw material for products which, in their turn, will become inexhaustible raw materials for further productions. Second, potential collaborators must be easily able to find the project that inspires them to creativity and labor. Third, the cost of production equipment must be low, as is now the case for things like computers and related media devices. Fourth, it must be possible to broadly distribute the results, for instance, over a telecommunications net. Under these conditions, quite complex tasks can be imagined, divided into small modules, and thrown out into the public realm where individuals will self-identify their competency to meet any given challenge. The only remaining requirement for large-scale production of cultural and informational goods is to be able to perform quality checks and integrate all the individual modules with relatively low effort into a completed whole – but these tasks, it turns out, can often be done on a distributed basis as well. The fact that all of this is possible, and actually happening today, allows Benkler to contradict Ronald Coase's classic theory, which identifies the firm, with its hierarchical command structure, and the market, functioning through the individual's quest for the lowest price, as the only two viable ways to organize human production. In other words, in the cultural and informational domain there is an alternative mode of production, functioning outside the norms of the state-capitalist economy as we know it, but without any rhetorical need to proclaim a clean break or an absolute division between them.
./english/162.txt:52:The notion of the commons refers back to the same pre-capitalist history that Polanyi had invoked; and it does so in the context of what some are calling the "second enclosure movement," resulting in the extension of intellectual property rights, or the privatization of information. Benkler stresses that the word "commons" denotes "the absence of exclusion as the organizing feature of this new mode of production." To be sure, the examples he uses to prove the existence of voluntarily organized large-scale cultural production are strictly electronic projects like the Wikipedia encyclopedia, the Slashdot technews site, the Kuro5hin site, and so on. These are essentially situations where publicly available text plus creativity produces more publicly available text. They are also politically neutral examples, appropriate for an argumentation that aims, among other things, to influence the American legislature on the subject of copyright laws. Yet one could apply exactly the same ideas to the growing phenomenon of networked political protests. It is clear that mass access to email and the possibility to create personal web pages – both of which have been quite necessary to the world expansion of liberal capitalism – almost immediately made possible, not only a greater awareness of globalization and its effects, but also the self-organization of dissenting movements on a world scale. And the scope of the projects that have been realized in this sense has been tremendous.
./english/162.txt:74:These admissions of defeat are well known. (21) But in recent publications, another history of conceptual art has been coming back to light. It is a history that unfolds in Latin America, and particularly in Argentina, in the cities of Buenos Aires and Rosario. It would seem that here, in the context of an authoritarian government and under the pressure of American cultural imperialism, conceptual art could only be received – or invented – as an invitation to act antagonistically within the mass-media sphere. Certain Argentine pop artists considered that the commercial news media could actually be appropriated as an artistic medium, like a canvas or a gallery space. To do this, Roberto Jacoby and Eduardo Costa created an artificial happening, one that never really happened, and they stimulated the media with information about it, so as to achieve specific fictional effects. (22) But this attempt was only a first step towards a fully political appropriation of the communications media by artists. The most characteristic project was Tucumán Arde, or "Tucumán is Burning," realized in 1968. (23) The military government was attempting to "modernize" the sugar-cane industry in the province of Tucumán, with a shift from small, locally owned businesses to larger factories owned by foreign capital; at the same time, the official media painted an idyllic picture of a region which in reality was wracked by impoverishment and intense labor struggles. So a group of some thirty artists and intellectuals from Buenos Aires and Rosario researched the social and economic conditions in the province, carrying out an analysis of all the mass-media coverage of the region, and going out themselves to gather first-hand information and to document the situation using photography and film. They then staged an exhibition that was explicitly designed to feed their work back into the national debate, so as to counter the media picture. Yet the project, although it did not shy away from advertising techniques, could not be reduced to counter-propaganda. As Andrea Giunta writes: "In many of its characteristic traits – such as the exploration of the interaction between languages, the centrality of the activity required from the spectator, the unfinished character, the importance of the documentation, the dissolution of the idea of the author, and the questioning of the art system and the ideas that legitimate it – Tucumán Arde maintains a relation with the repertory of conceptual art. But not with the tautological and self-referential form of conceptualism, in which, from a certain viewpoint, one finds a reconfirmation of the modernist paradigm. Language does not refer back to language, to the specificity of the artistic fact; instead, the contextual relations are so strong that in this case, reality ceases being understood as a space of reflection and comes to be conceived as a possible field of action oriented toward the transformation of society." (24)
./english/162.txt:94:1. There is as yet no "history" of these ongoing movements, but information and stories can be found at www.pga.org.
./english/162.txt:98:5. See, Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, "Terrorism Information Awareness System," www.darpa.mil/iao/TIASystems.htm. Also see military strategist Thomas Barnett: ""If we live in a world increasingly populated by Super-Empowered Individuals, then we field an army of Super-Empowered Individuals," www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets/ThePentagonsNewMap.htm
./english/162.txt:105:12. The opposition structures Manuel Castells' three-volume work on the "information age"; it is discussed in the prologue to The Rise of the Network Society, op. cit., pp. 1-28, and returns throughout the second volume, The Power of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
./english/176.txt:33: In terms of communication, the ‘role of media (who has access, who determines images?) and information-ecologies (who owns, produces, controls relevant data?)’ are of crucial importance for the diffusion of frames (Ibid, 13). However, again the focus of framing studies tends to rest on the mass media, neglecting the functions of more personal media, such as the telephone or email, in the process of framing.
./english/176.txt:52: I distributed 280 questionnaires in the venues where the Paris ESF was taking place and received 257 questionnaires on the spot. The questionnaire was fairly simple, asking respondents about their demographic characteristics, their media use, as well as their methods of mobilization. For reasons already mentioned, it was not possible to obtain a representative or even random sample. The Paris ESF was taking place in four different locations across Paris, so its participants were dispersed in the various venues. What is more, the registration database of the Paris 2003 ESF, containing some information about the participants who
./english/176.txt:88:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 84Mobilization Contexts and Modes of Communication The survey further asked respondents about the contexts that mobilized them to participate in the Paris 2003 European Social Forum. ‘Mobilization’ was defined in terms of obtaining information about the ESF and organizing attendance. The questionnaire distinguished between four mobilization contexts, political or voluntary organizations, friends or relatives, the workplace or the university, and the news media. Distinguishing between different contexts was considered necessary for reasons of analytical clarity, even though it tends to disregard the possible overlaps between the various contexts. For instance, one can be friends with people who belong in the same organization, or be mobilized through a political organization with a university branch. The survey also included some questions about the means of communication that were used in each mobilization context. For instance, did the communication with the political or voluntary organization take place through the telephone, an email list, face-to-face, or the organization’s website? Did respondents talk to friends or relatives face-to-face, on the phone, or via email? The respondents could select one or more means of communication, helping us gain a first insight into the range of media used in each context. An initial breakdown of results showed that 74.2% of the respondents were mobilized by a political or voluntary organization, 65.2% through friends or relatives, 34.1% through the workplace or the university and 36.1% through the news media. Out of the 190 respondents who were mobilized through a political or voluntary organization, 61.6% communicated with the organization face-to-face, 51.1% through email lists and 34.2% through the organization’s website. Table 5 also shows that 18.9% were contacted through mailings, 20% through leaflets and 27.4% through posters. Table 5. Mobilized through political/voluntary organizations Face-to-face 61.6% Email list(s) 51.1% Website 34.2% Mailings 18.9% Leaflets 20.0% Posters 27.4% Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 85Face-to-face contact was also the main
./english/176.txt:110:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 86Associations between communication methods What becomes apparent from this initial breakdown of results is that in each mobilization context respondents used a wide range of communication methods sin order to mobilize for the Paris 2003 European Social Forum. This raises interesting questions about the relationships between these different communication methods. Is face-to-face communication in one context associated with face-to-face contact in another? Is the use of the email negatively associated with face-to-face communication or the use of other media? In order to examine this interplay, I checked for statistically significant associations between the different communication methods used both within and across the various mobilization contexts.2 The crosstabulations produced only weak associations between the different communication media; some of them were hardly surprising, whereas others were quite unexpected and, therefore, interpreted with caution. Within the political or voluntary organizations’ mobilization context, a weak association was discovered between respondents using email lists and respondents getting information from the website of the organization. In addition, a stronger relationship was recorded between respondents being informed through leaflets and through posters. As for respondents mobilized by friends or relatives, a weak association was found between the use of email and use of the telephone. In addition, respondents using email to communicate with friends or relatives also used email to communicate with the workplace/university in order to mobilize for the European Social Forum. Furthermore, within the workplace/university mobilization context weak associations were recorded among almost all of the means of communication. In that respect, face-to-face contact is related with the use of email, the telephone as well as leaflets/posters. Apart from face-to-face communication, the use of email is also related with the use of the telephone and the web. Finally, the use of the web is also associated with the use of the telephone, as well as with leaflets/posters. Therefore, the workplace/university seems to constitute a much denser communicative universe than the contexts of friends and relatives or political and voluntary organizations. A possible interpretation of these results points to the nature of the workplace/university as a site of mobilization. In that respect, the workplace/university constitutes a prime location of daily face-to-face contact as, contrary to other contexts, it is a setting where individuals spend a significant part of their day. This may explain why face-to-face contact is by far the main mode of communication used by the respondents mobilized through this context. What is more, the need to perform certain work-related tasks daily, as well as the availability of communication media and resources, may indicate that work Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 87or university colleagues are regularly in
./english/176.txt:112: In terms of the respondents mobilized through the news media, mobilization through newspapers was weakly related with mobilization through all of the other media, namely television, the radio and the web. In addition, a weak relationship was recorded between mobilization through the radio and through television. However, getting information about the European Social Forum through the web was not associated with either television or the radio, meaning that even though all the other news media are weakly related to each other, the use of the web is relatively isolated. This observation is reinforced after looking for associations between mobilization through the web as a news medium and the use of email or the web in all of the other mobilization contexts. This examination did not produce any statistically significant relationships, indicating that mobilization through news websites is an issue worthy of further research.
./english/176.txt:128:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 92In terms of social movement research, this also highlights the necessity to distinguish between the different internet applications and examine their effects separately, as they favor different modes of communication. Thus, email tends to foster interpersonal communication, while the web adheres more to a broadcast model of communication. Email lists fall somewhere in-between, facilitating the narrowcasting of messages and information. Therefore, bundling up all these applications under the category ‘Internet’ cannot adequately capture the role of new communication technologies in social movement activity. Another major inference provided by this study concerns the possible relationship between internet use and the respondents’ political experience or degree of involvement in politics. The basis for this assumption is supplied by the associations between internet use and the respondents’ age, as well as the context through which they were mobilized. In that respect, the survey results showed that older participants tend more than the younger ones to be mobilized through the email lists or websites of political or voluntary organizations. On the other hand, younger participants tend to be mobilized more through face-to-face contact with friends or relatives. To an extent, this seems as a counter-intuitive result. It can however be explained, if we consider that older activists may refrain from participating in the day-to-day meetings of the political or voluntary organizations they belong to, but still choose to stay in touch and follow the latest news through email lists and the organizations’ websites. For younger activists, on the contrary, participation in a social movement may constitute an opportunity for or be a result of face-to-face socialization with friends and relatives. The interpretation of these results would be aided significantly, if information about the respondents’ political experience and prior participation in the ‘alter-globalization’ or other movements was available. For instance, a study of participants in the anti-war demonstration of the 15th of February 2003 both in Europe and in the USA has revealed that more experienced activists tended to get their political information online, contrary to first-time demonstrators (Bennett, Givens and Willnat 2004, page numbers not available). In my study, even though the respondents’ age can be considered as an indication of their political experience, it is far from conclusive. To address this gap, more information about the political experience of the respondents is being sought through a follow-up study to the 2003 survey. As for the relationship between internet use and mobilization context, the results have revealed that respondents who have used at least one internet application in any mobilization context tend to be mobilized more through political or voluntary organizations than non-users of the internet. On the other hand, respondents who Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 93were mobilized by face-to-face contact in
./english/176.txt:130: This may be suggesting that respondents already in contact with a political or voluntary organization use the internet more than respondents who are not as involved in politics. Still, such an interpretation should be made with caution as it ultimately questions the much-celebrated potential of the internet to revive democracy by facilitating and encouraging the participation of previously indifferent or marginalized individuals. Therefore, this assumption needs to be corroborated with additional empirical data, as the evidence supplied by this survey is just indicative. In that respect, more information concerning the respondents’ political experience could again help us build a sounder basis for interpreting these results.
./english/176.txt:139: Melucci, A. (1996) Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
./english/187.txt:23:The necessity of creating a Common Space for sustained coordination: Given the growing capacity of our calls to action and mobilization, the system is creating the most favorable conditions to fight against us: new economic resources, police impunity, restriction of our liberties, intimidating the population and manipulation information. One vital strategy in this new situation, which was already vital before, is deepening our contact and communication with society, decentralizing our struggle and working intensely in local and regional contexts in a coordinated way and with common objectives. In order to do this, we need to provide ourselves with strategic, long-term projects. There is no better path for moving forward than from an informed social debate, from collective participation and mobilization, from the cohesion of our groups and social movements. In order to advance in the construction of responses and in the coordination of actions in local and global contexts, we need to create a common meeting space from which to begin elaborating common proposals and projects as the basis for this other possible world.
./english/187.txt:110:8. Contacts. Information.
./english/194.txt:4:Sunday afternoon's demo - one hundred thousand people against the war and liberalism - confirmed what we had written in the past few days: the European social Forum of London was a success. With many internal problems, with difficulties, delays and misunderstandings, but a success none the less, also shown by the twenty five thousand people attending in the end. How striking, therefore, the enormous lack of media attention by the Italian press. A lack of curiosity - perhaps due to the absence of violent clashes and teargas - that should make us reflect on the present system of media information but that at the same time reveals a political distance between an "establishment" that is increasingly entangled in the [alchemy/deception] of the "palace" [government bureaucracy], and the spirit that moves the young generations. In London we saw many young people, a lot of desire to participate - not always fulfilled - a great desire not to throw away the most interesting political novelty of the first few years of this century. The fact that we did not find any trace of this in the Italian newspapers, perhaps with some regular critiques, is a sign of the times.
./english/195.txt:7:Perhaps this distinction caused some confusion, since the definition of “horizontality” or “verticality” did not identify a specific group, organisation or network, nor a specific ideology or world view of politics and political events. Often, one could identify "horizontals" in "vertical" organisations and "verticals" in "horizontal" networks. However, we can understand the contrast described by the terminology in terms of modes of doing predicated on opposite organising principles. One, based on participatory, open and inclusive democracy, in which participants through their iterative relational practices reached consensus on both means to be employed and ends to be achieved and were willing to engage in the continuous learning process necessary for these practices. The other in which democracy was identified with a rigid vertical structure within which ends are defined by the few, and the means are seen purely as instrumental to those ends. For “horizontals” the means embody values as much as the ends (whether we use free or corporate software, whether information is posted freely or under coordinating committee control, whether working groups emerge from the ground up or “allowed” by a coordinating committee). Indeed because of this, the shape of ends emerges from negotiations of means. For the “verticals” it was just about “getting the job done”, that is, their concept of “job” and final outcome.
./english/209.txt:7:This distance from the political debates of the rest of the continent has many roots. Britain 's early industrialisation , its sectoral craft based trade unionism, and the way this trade unionism created the Labour Party giving it a monopoly over working class political representation, prevented the growth of a significant Communist Party with internationalist traditions, however ambiguous. A more recent factor, until the blows of Thatcherism, has been the immense self-confidence and industrial strength of the British labour movement, almost to the point of arrogance. This produced a highly independent stance, as if the British trade unions did not need support or allies. They presumed that they could win on their own. If there were problems, these were thought to be merely local ones of betrayal and weak leadership. This was especially true at a national level: from the 70s onwards there were always radical trade unionists organising from the factories of multinational companies to build international workplace to workplace connections, through for example the Transnational Information Exchange. Thatcherism destroyed whatever basis there was for this somewhat arrogant self-confidence. As the unions now rebuild themselves, there is a new orientation towards Europe which is already showing itself in a significant union mobilisation for the London ESF.
./english/209.txt:23:The organisation of the ESF is intended to be process of democratic negotiation and co-operation between all those wishing to participate and who agree with its Charter of Principles. The idea is that different organisations, with different traditions and capacities would share their skills, resources and ideas and in the process learn how to work with each other, and ‘contaminate' each other with new cultures and perspectives. It's not an easy process and the timetable for the London ESF did not give much time for it. But the GLA's philosophy of centralised, almost Jacobin, management has endangered some of the intellectual and organisational resources for this task, built up from trial and error over the first two years of organising the ESF. Fortunately, aspects of the process have established sufficient momentum and infrastructure to be indispensable - most notably Babels ( www.babels.org ), the international network of volunteer interpreters. But the organisation of the ESF website, for example - a vital tool for the new horizontal ways of organising - is something which the GLA was not prepared to delegate to any significant degree. The result is an extremely expensive site which lacks many of the tools for interactivity and for information gathering which are vital to the development of the ESF process. These could have been provided in an expert way and at low cost by the technical activists of the movements. The overtly bureaucratic control of the website is symbolic of a wider problem of mistrust of the capacity of the self- organised new movements.
./english/212.txt:32: The information and permanent reception of participants, many of who feel lost in the maelstrom of stands, flags, etc.
./english/224.txt:25:- Movements can decide actions to be conducted collectively. A specific place must be responsible for centralising and diffusing the information.
./english/229.txt:23:This double role, not easily manageable, is to be treasured and can be fuelled if the networks, the associations, the local Forums and the movements are involved in the organisation of the ESF from the very first day. In such a way, plenary meetings and workshops can be the “cultural projection” of the themes they carry on. This is an ineluctable step, if we want to avoid the domination of the Forum by the leaders of the social movements, who can also play the role of cultural education and information; therefore, it is necessary to have qualified persons involved in the plenary meetings and workshops. “No global” and experts must find their own space to enhance the role of the “space for learning” again. The exponents of networks, associations, trade unions can have their more natural placement in Forum’s meetings and thematic workshops that are organized by netwoks, supposed to be integral parts of the Forum, without being excluded from considerations and moments of education; also the debate on specific themes between political parties and movements can be the occasion for common efforts and possible confluence of ideas.
./english/237.txt:45:As we began socialising our physical spaces volunteers from Indymedia London, as one of the groups fully engaged in the autonomous spaces, also tried to petition the ESF organisers to utilise the movement’s media and networked resources in the same way. We urged them to decentralise the ESF working lists, to socialise the communication tools and to utilise alternative and community media groups. Most of these points were ignored by the official process, however, including the suggestion of setting up Internet cafes and delegate resource centres at Alexandra Palace. So after multiple attempts, Indymedia turned its attention to working autonomously not only with ASs but also with NGOs engaged in advocating communication rights. This coalition highlighted the need for an activist gathering of thousands to address the issue of the freedom to communicate. Working with NGOs was often difficult for a group with very open networks, and potentially confusing information channels, non-9-5 working hours and exploitable energy. However, the result was that we managed to create a looser form of collaboration, which resulted in a wider understanding of communication as it moved from the margins to become a more central theme. The Camden Centre played host to four days of discussion on tactical media and communication rights as well as free internet and a media centre. Meanwhile, the wider collaboration and relationships built with Communication Rights advocates turned into a very real node of critical support when, as a result of an unrelated incident, Indymedia’s servers were seized during the ESF preparations by the FBI.
./english/238.txt:69:In general, Babels could not prevent the de facto officialisation of languages because coordinators were only provided with information about the language profiles of registered speakers and participants two weeks before the ESF took place. Prior to this, it was only able to build up a vague idea of the nationalities of people and sizes of delegations that would be attending from second-hand scraps of information. This is because from the very beginning of the ESF process, Babels coordinators were excluded from the information flows coming in and out of the ESF office, and their recommendations for how to integrate language needs into the heart of the organising process were generally ignored. Babels was also not allowed to have any autonomy over its own coordination budget. In other words, just like languages issues themselves, Babels was marginalised from the decision-making centre consisting of the Mayor of London's political office that runs the GLA, a handful of trade unions, and political sects like the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Action and the Communist Party of Britain. These forces ultimately controlled the ESF and put up political walls and barricades around a supposedly open space.
./english/239.txt:9:At the official ESF we were further astonished to find that a space for children to sleep or to play was not available. Where should a parent go with a three-year-old? In a 2 hour seminar should they sit in the first row? At the information desk we had asked where a quiet corner was to feed our children, we were told to go to the media-centre. Is this a place for kids??! This is appalling when a movement dresses itself with the words that 'another world is possible'! Mothers and fathers are already marginalised in capitalist society. Do we want another world where mothers and fathers are excluded?
./english/240.txt:9:As a result, a second European day of action was launched at the ESF for 2 April 05, claiming freedom of movement and the right to stay as an alternative to the european constitutional process based on exclusion and exploitation. A number of seminars and workshops were held both in the official ESF and the alternative spaces. Speakers from migration related European grassroots groups and migrant self organisations participated, in many panels, discussing work, precariousness, information technologies.
./english/241.txt:15:Concerning the Social Forums process specifically, the question is starting to be addressed with the appearance of new actors. Concretely, there now exists an active Social Forum (SF) Memory working group depending on the World Social Forum International Council. This is a global space to coordinate and facilitate the archiving and systematization initiatives of Social Forums and to establish a protocol of memory coming from each forum. A European partner to this process has also emerged in the guise of the European group for systematization and archiving the information, knowledge and communication generated by the European Social Forum (ESF) process. This is a working group depending on the ESF European Preparatory Assembly. There is also the work developed to systematize the contents of debates and seminars at the Paris ESF 2003 and the Florence one. Unfortunately, the London ESF organizational system doesn’t allow us to have many expectations about the documenting of the London ESF by the UK organising committee and the ESF office, as a lack of attention paid to archiving, systematization or participative communication has created difficulties or disrupted several initiatives.
./english/241.txt:17:The systematization/memory groups are addressing various aspects of the Social Forum. With a very simple (or, on occasion, fictitious) distinction, there are two kinds of information systematization and knowledge production that are considered necessary: one is related to the networking organisational aspect, the other is related to the content. This distinction doesn’t necessarily correspond to that established between “living memory or systematization” and its opposite (at a guess, “non-living memory”).
./english/241.txt:26:But going further, the key for the future is to use technology. The use of technology to advance movements should also be the task of Social Forums and these need to be folded into the memory/systematization process. There are clear synergies amongst the News Technologies of Information and communication, the translation system and the possibilities for the systematization of the process and making it accessible. For example, using the Nomad translation system allows us to have a record of the event. The Website is a basic “wardrobe” of information sources on the Forums and a basic tool to spread the systematization of its results. We look upon the web as the primary organisational tool as well as the primary disseminating mechanism.
./english/241.txt:27:But doing and spreading the systematization of information and knowledge, several formats have to be considered: digital, audio-video and physical/printed.
./english/241.txt:51:The main methods are questionnaires to organizations, web searches and the systematization of information sources generated by the ESFs: for example, the main information source for the European directory is the registration databases for the ESFs and the parallel spaces surrounding them.
./english/241.txt:79:European group for systematization and archiving the information, knowledge and communication generated by the ESF process working group of the European ESF assembly
./english/242.txt:60:It is a technology whose documentation (that makes the free reproduction of the tool possible) can be accessed free of charge. Technologies exist that in themselves are alternative (for example, the GNU-Linux information system that opposes the Windows system) and there are alternative ways to use already existing technologies (e.g. re-use of the magnetic loop): the technology is only truly alternative if it is associated with an alternative practice.
./english/242.txt:66:For more information see: http://nomad.apo33.org or contact: info@apo33.org
./english/244.txt:7:This is a little text that aims to open some basic questions and introduce a personal analysis around how we produce and use information individually and collectively.
./english/244.txt:9:Could we just imagine for one instant the different routes that a “piece” of information, in a material way, can take before being read and understood by its receptor? I take here in my hands some of the free publications I got from ESF in London last October: let's explore them! because they are interesting, rich, complex and various. Those magazines, flyers, CD ROMs were brought to me by a friend of mine, as I couldn't come to London , so they are particularly precious to me. I am a lucky girl – I couldn't get to the ESF in London but some pieces of the information produced there came to me! In a way, when you begin to think about it, it is amazing how material information travels around. Each time that you read, watch or listen to something, you have a piece of data which comes towards you. Will you make use of it? Information travels from the ESF spaces and stands, from the autonomous spaces, from the wooden tables inside the squatted social centers, to our bags and our kitchen tables, tol the places where we will feel comfortable enough to take the time to read this piece of paper, put that CD or video on, put up this poster in your kitchen. Those are the multiple ways that social information travels around and spreads until it can be received, shared, read, commented upon and criticized. Some pieces of information will provoke reactions, actions and thoughts; others will be forgotten, abandoned, never read until the end: with this abandoned info contributing to the debris of mediascape information flows that are shaping more than ever our contemporary societies.
./english/244.txt:11:But our interest in those little individual stories, the ones that explain how you got to be “consuming” this material piece of information, are not just related to a poetic perspective. They are obviously aiming first of all to give a historic background to the ways in which material pieces of information travel around. They give a context to remind you that a person, or a group, is behind the creation of what you are absorbing, and that the pieces of information has been shaped different factors: political, cultural, economic contexts; questions, needs and subjectivities.... In a way, each story that links you to a piece of data in a material sense is rich in knowledge about the reason that this information exists! Nevertheless, that doesn't means you will get to understand, identify or really discover the little stories around the original motivations that produced that information. But playing with this subject you soon begin to wonder about more essential questions:
./english/244.txt:17:One of the main issues of the ESF process is to be able to build a corpus of information and knowledge about social transformation (all levels included: local, national, continental and global) that can get to be used in a sensitive, dynamic and interactive way for all persons who aim to integrate, use and develop this corpus of information and knowledge (two concepts which are related but not the same). After this main issue we could ask ourselves about how to get this informational corpus of knowledge from ESF spaces and spread it out inside the global mediascape of “mass media”?
./english/244.txt:19:But are we really aiming to do that? Do we need to make this step? Or shall we rather work to facilitate those alternative channels of autonomous information until they become powerful enough to be able to compete with mainstream media? AsSensitive approach to the problematic of social transformation would on balance opt for the second option, building new ways to open alternative ICT infrastructures and tools and then take them to mainstream citizens who are consuming information in their everyday life. But at the same time, who says that the mass media and alternative autonomous spaces are not both sides of the same global mediascape? And who says that we should abandon and desert completely broadcast medias that are often controlled by media actors who are slaves to the neo liberal dictatorship?
./english/244.txt:21:When you think about the “general” quality of contents and formats that you find inside the alternative and autonomous information and communication channels, it is always strange to realize that those actors, collectives and organizations sources that are producing so many forms of information aren't already considered as legitimate sources of information. The explanation for this is not simply dependent on the role of institutions or the mass media lobby. It also has to do with information receptors, potentially all of us. Why is it that even if those information sources generally count as diverse and serious, they are not being taken up as realistic sources of information by the wider population?
./english/244.txt:23:Some theories from the science of communication and guerrilla communication have shown us that the delivery of an argument and the multiple analyzes of the social facts that have produced this argument (like “women” and “men” are not receiving the same treatment in working places and in society in general) are not going to be accepted and integrated by an increasing number of individual receptors in a way that is proportional to its “trueness”. It is not because you multiply the supports and ways to spread a “true” fact, that you really get to provoke indignation and conscious amongst the population that is not personally involved in social transformation, people with a political restlessness. And so what? What's so new in all that? Nothing particularly, just my increasing stupefaction at the fact that spreading alter communication, contra-information, and building alternative medias ICT structures, is not perhaps the only solution we should contemplate when we want that information to become effective in a political sense. To say it another way, how can social transformation information become aggressive and perceptive enough to affect mass media information production, in other words, mass public opinion?
./english/244.txt:25:In summary, if we do know, believe or suppose that the good building of alter information is not thought to have a “real” influence upon public opinion, what should we do?, What should we take in consideration when we do try to communicate our analyses, the contents of the activities and networks conversations that we are stimulating inside the alternative mass media spaces for social communication? How should we make it? To whom should we direct that information? How could we guess it has been understood? In fact what do we seek to know better?
./english/244.txt:27:Here it looks as though we are facing a double sociological problem of creating a process where the “analysis” of the situation of a social, political, cultural or gender conflict gets to be relevant enough to produce its own proposals of solutions to those conflicts. In a certain way we could say that the production of information from the social movements and from civil society involved in social transformation needs to be working at some points with networks that are practicing “activist research action”. But this article won't focus on this precise point that would be related with methodologies and contents shaping. We would rather here make a proposal to build more reflection around the way we produce and spread information related to the activities of our organizations and/or affinities groups.
./english/244.txt:29:When someone gets to go to an ESF, inside or surrounding spaces like the “autonomous spaces” s/he looks for several things generally: on the one hand, to learn, hear, meet new groups, persons, activities, debates, methodologies. This means that through coming and assisting to conferences, plenaries, speeches, debates, workshops, he/she is going to enlarge and expand her/his own knowledge of the contemporary objectives of social transformation, and aims and strategies to achieve it. On the other hand, all these dynamics won't depend only of the short laps of time when you get to walk with thousands of other people from one meeting point to another one inside the related spaces of the ESF. Those processes are expanded in your daily life through your communicational habits, your inscription to mailings lists, blogs, newsletters and other online tools to receive online flows of information and data.
./english/244.txt:31:One of my questions is related to the ambivalence of our production and creation of information. It is quite certain that those two dynamics (receptor and emitter) always exist side by side inside the same person. Sometimes we only consume, sometimes we are actively producing and spreading our own info and points of view, but what is usually escaping from us is the possibility to evaluate the exact degree of reception of our production/input inside the info flow. When do we communicate the activities of our group or organization, who are we seeking to read, see, and listen to it? Where is the feedback perception outside the use of NTIC digital tools on line; our newspapers, gazettes, pamphlets, flyers, are the X unknown composite that just travels from one house to another one, from one to the rubbish can, but it is also this piece of paper (recycle paper please!) that is at least a factor that can encourage any citizen to change her/his perception around issues like: immigration, women rights, work flexibility, etc. We are not yet able to answer all those questions, we just hope that they have a place where they can be contemplated and stimulate some debates.
./english/245.txt:30:The truth of these technologies however is that they do suit certain types of organising more than others. It was clear that with the London ESF there was a distinct dislike and rejection of interactive tools that facilitate open horizontal communication and participation. These were rejected in favour of strictly hierarchical models of communication and information flows. For example there seemed to be a clear unwillingness to use email lists for working groups within the organising process. Indeed when calls for an email list to be created for the Programme Working Group became too loud to ignore, one of the few people designated to deal with website based issues suggested they go away and produce a feasibility study into the advantages and disadvantages of setting up an email list! When this was rejected, they then suggested that anyone wanting to send a message to the entire working group could simply email her, and she would ensure that the email was sent out to everyone who had attended a meeting and supplied their email address. This may have been acceptable ten years ago, but not today.
./english/245.txt:36:In parallel a range of activists and individuals created another website based on wiki technology (wiki is essentially an online notepad which allows people to easily add and edit text on a webpage). For a while, this website (www.esf2004.net) became the best source of information about the 2004 ESF, carrying reports, notes, minutes, discussions and notices of meetings, many of which were lacking from the official website – all constructed collaboratively. While it is true that many projects that were critical of the ESF processes found a home on this website, it did show the wider potential of these tools, and provided a space for communication and collaboration which was sadly lacking within the official organising structures. Indeed several initiatives were set up outside of the main ESF organising process, including web facilities, to demonstrate just how easy it is to create appropriate electronic tools to aid memory reporting and archiving efforts.
./english/245.txt:41:One positive development during the ESF 2004 preparatory process was the agreement at a European Assembly meeting to set up an ongoing European working group on web technologies, to try and ensure some continuity from one year to the next, to develop appropriate tools to support the ESF process, and to offer advice within these areas. It’s certainly true that there have been many problems in continuity, for example the handing over of the fse-esf website from one country to another. Related to this is the area of intellectual property and concept of ownership of information gathered, from email addresses to written reports and audio and video material. Problems have already been encountered with such data since there are laws and different frameworks to govern their usage. While attempts were made in London to avoid similar problems occurring again, for example with opt in permission for email addresses to be used in the future for ESF related contacts, this was a result of dealing with specific problems as they arose and not of a political recognition that these issues are part of our struggle for another world. This is an area that campaigners are working on globally to develop alternatives, both in practice and at a government and international institutional lobbying level, and certainly should be an area embraced by the ESF.
./english/245.txt:43:This move coupled with the now ongoing attempt to ‘systematise’ information and communication strategies together with the various ‘memory’ initiatives should strengthen the Social Forums concepts of themselves – something which is urgently needed to aid self-reflection, a process that the ESF is now supposed to be engaged in given the issues in London and the fact that the next forum has been scheduled for 2006 and not 2005. As part of this, it is essential to look closely at the pioneering work being done by the World Social Forum in its efforts to deploy NOMAD, the DIY simultaneous translation infrastructure, and to place free software and communication tools at its heart.
./english/246.txt:39:Since the first WSF one has heard many cries about culture being left out of the discussions, about it not being transversal to the debates etc. While this is certainly true in the sense of the previous paragraph, it is also a bit nonsensical: if we understand culture in the broader sense used above, how could it be outside? This normally means that the people making these demands want more discussion on the specificities of culture in a globalised capitalist world – which ends meaning equalling culture and art or the industry of entertainment, and this can be as much a part of the problem as it is a part of the solution. All the debates I remember at the first three WSFs which were ‘on culture’ had to do with protections for the national audiovisual industries against Hollywood, or politics of national exception, or politics of national protection to endangered cultural heritage, particularly that of minorities. Although these may of course still be useful instruments in a struggle of resistance against homogenisation, they do not tackle the problem of commodification as such, nor do they tackle the ‘lateral’ importance given to cultural debates in the left. By treating culture as art, they assume without question distinctions we have shown to be very characteristic of the society we want to transform. By placing culture as an exception that can only be adequately dealt with by the nation-state, they not only close more questions than they open, but also compartmentalise ‘culture’ as a subject for specialists, as one of the many issues – and not a particularly vital one – to be debated at a forum. This is mirrored by the way, for instance, free software is also ‘a bit on the side’, something for those who use or develop it to discuss; while in some other corner some people talk about digital inclusion, and yet another group somewhere else talks about the persecution and criminalisation of social movements by the mass media, or the monopoly of information held by big transnational conglomerates.
./english/247.txt:21:Once again the construction of the spaces used recycled materials and bioconstruction techniques. The Recycling Shed was revived in partnership with DMLU and the National Movement of Collectors of Solid Residues, emphasizing environmental education and information on the types of residues and the correct way to manage them. A reduction of residues policy was developed through the production of 15,000 polypropylene mugs, reducing the plastic residues in Feeding Squares.
./english/249.txt:15:I have been told from people who participated in the first meetings after Paris , that the “ London bid” was promoted with promises of lots of money to do a great event. Obviously, there was les money to support this year's ESF than the previous years and it wasn't possible to offer free accommodation as was done in Paris . This was not a good start of the process. Before I arrived at the preparatory assembly meeting held in Istanbul in April, I joined the ESF mailing list, expecting to get information on what was to be discussed there. I never received any. Of course this made it impossible for me to discuss the ESF with my people here.
./english/251.txt:50:1. The problem or decision to be made has to be identified and outlined for the whole meeting by the facilitator of the meeting or by the affected parties. It is best if all relevant background information is given. If a particular proposal is being put forth, the details of the proposal should be clear to everyone and how this proposal was created needs to be explained. In smaller groups it is possible to start without a concrete proposal and to brainstorm solutions to the outlined problem, but at larger meetings, it is usually better to only discuss issues in reference to concrete proposals so that it is possible to have a targeted discussion eventually reaching an altered but acceptable version of the original proposal or a different proposal that avoids certain identifiable pitfalls of the original proposal.
./english/261.txt:115:Brief descriptions are given of a number of processes for giving, getting and exchanging information especially in community settings as part of public consultation activities
./english/261.txt:127:A version of focus group (a form of group interview) in which certain structures are used to improve the quality of information and interpretation gained from the group
./english/261.txt:131:Group feedback analysis is an alternative to survey feedback (surveys used to start change programs). The survey is done with small teams or groups, who also choose some of the questions to be answered, and help to interpret the information collected
./english/261.txt:147:A form of interviewing is described in some detail. The interviewing combines some of the features of structured and unstructured interviews, and uses a systematic process to refine the information collected
./english/261.txt:249:Information sharing using voting (28k)
./english/261.txt:251:Allowing participants multiple votes, perhaps within a cyclic voting process, can be used for exchanging information between participants about their priorities
./english/266.txt:20:If you are looking for information on corporations for an activist campaign, investigative article, lawsuit, socially conscious investment, or a school paper, this interactive guide will take you step by step through researching corporations on the Internet.
./english/266.txt:25:You can look it up in a search engine like Google. Browse investor relations information, company annual reports, press releases, products and business locations. If you wish, request an annual report from the company or from a third party service like PRARS: The Public Register's Annual Report Service.
./english/266.txt:30:Step 2: Look for Corporate Information in Business and Financial Resources
./english/266.txt:34:Look up the company with an investor guide like Market Guide, Hoover's Online or Insider Scores. Check out the corporate overview, executive information, stock performance and business news.
./english/266.txt:43:These companies are not required to report to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Finding information can be a bit tricky. Look for information in the business press and/or try:
./english/266.txt:51:Corporate Information
./english/266.txt:73:Use our site search engine to locate information about a company. Also visit our Hot Links by Issue which lists many activist campaigns. See if the company you are investigating is a target. Here are some other helpful resources:
./english/266.txt:81:Center for Defense Information: Search by corporation for information on military contracts.
./english/266.txt:92:RTK Net: Search the Toxics Release Inventory, and other environmental, housing and sustainable development databases and articles. Based on U.S. government information.
./english/266.txt:96:AFL-CIO: The U.S. trade federation has information on legislation affecting workers, CEO salaries, occupational health and safety, and more.
./english/266.txt:98:LaborNet: Information on labor struggles and labor issues world-wide.
./english/266.txt:119:Search for company information in business news sources like:
./english/266.txt:164:Visit your local public library or closest university library for access to magazine and newspaper databases (some public libraries provide access to magazine and newspaper databases over the Internet to library cardholders). Sometimes libraries have access to Lexis-Nexis databases. Ask the business librarian for assistance with business information resources. They know their library inside and out!
./english/266.txt:170:Use a search engine as your last step not as a starting point. Try a search engine like Northern Light or a web information directory like the Open Directory Project. For best results, check the search tips first. Focus your search by including descriptive words with the company name, for example: "general electric" nuclear protest
./english/266.txt:176:If you still have not found the information you need, check our related research links for suggestions.
./english/269.txt:43:Third, the necessity of constructing points of aggregation is clear. Curiously, our process of wandering the city has led us to value more the denied right to territorialize ourselves. If this territorialization cannot take place in a mobile and changing work place, then we will have to construct more open and diffuse spaces within this city-enterprise. The Laboratorio de Trabajadores that we are considering constructing would be an operative place/moment to come together with our conflicts, our resources (legal resources, work, information, mutual care and support, housing, etc.), our information and our sociability. To produce agitation and reflection. A good idea, and a difficult one: at the moment we are thinking about it, not only the practical aspects but particularly the capacity this might have to construct itself as an attractor, connector and mobilizer of sectors as different as domestic workers and telephone operators.
./english/272.txt:10:It is a moment when social movement activists, including activist researchers and also movement activists who are at the same time members of political parties, have become conscious of social movements – including potentially the trade union movement – as producers of knowledge. More than this, we have become conscious that this process of knowledge production is essential to the role of social movements as transformative subjects. As a consequence more and more movement activists are developing tools – of investigation and survey, of communication and exchange of ideas and information, of data collation and presentation through which the full potential of movements as producers and disseminators of emancipatory knowledge is realised. In this process, we are becoming more critically aware of both different kinds of knowledge (the practical, the theoretical, the intuitive, the systematic) and of the different social conditions involved in their production. Important questions remain unanswered about how, if we are critical of the conventional understandings and organisation of knowledge by traditional left political parties, social movements not only co-ordinate and systematise knowledge but how they take strategic decisions and effectively realise their power.
./english/276.txt:53:A strong realism starts from four basic knowledge claims: (i) objectivity: that which is known would be real regardless of whether it is known or not; (ii) fallibility: a claim about what is real can always be refuted by further information; (iii) transphenomenality: knowledge is not restricted to that which appears, but can also be about underlying structures which are of a more enduring character than appearances and which generate and/or render these appearances possible; (iv) counter-phenomenality: knowledge of underlying structures is not just defined by the fact that it goes beyond, or explains, appearances, but by the fact that it can contradict appearances (Collier, 1994: 6-7).
./english/281.txt:44:22 Physical activists are those who perform the tasks that the movement requires, those who clean the toilets, cook, work behind the bar, put their body into actions etc…Theoretical activists are those who generally plan the activities, write flyers, make contacts with other groups, talk as representatives. Women of any age, young males and people from ethical minorities or lower class background are frequently reduced to the role of physical activist. 23 This interview is part of my PhD on the reproduction of gender discrimination within the Radical Social Movement. More information on the thesis on http://www.ub.es/donesMS 24 Pobladoras is a South American term used in relation to women (pobladores is for men) that live in poor neighbours.
./english/282.txt:10:No one could sensibly argue that academic work - and journalism - is of no use to movements. When studies of the inequality of income and wealth distribution appear, for example, we often use them to strengthen our case. We gain usable technical knowledge from ecologists about the workings of pollution, and from geneticists about the dangers of GM foods. The knowledge we have of movements in the past - with which we sometimes identity, and from which we sometimes draw practical 'lessons' - is mostly derived from the work of academic historians. Journalists and academics provide vital information about movements in other countries. Anthropologists - and SF writers! - help us build vision of different ways our species has lived, might live.
./english/284.txt:96:A similar sense of being translocal and internationally-connected is shared by global justice movements. Part of the strength of this global network of local struggles comes from highlighting spatial thinking and developing global consciousness amongst diverse communities. Popular slogans that stress this linking are, for example: “we are everywhere” or “our resistance is as global as capital”. Gupta and Ferguson make reference to a transnational public sphere and the creation of forms of solidarity and identity based on this reconceptualization of space, and a more connected reterritorialized experience (1997: 68). The complex interrelations between the ‘globals’ and ‘locals’ has become not only an interesting intellectual exercise but a key project in developing effective political praxis. How exchanges might flow (of information, experiences, ‘technology’, etc.) along multiple axes between ‘historically inteconnected’ places, is then an important point of reflexivity for the ‘globalized and globalizing’ anthropologist.
./english/285.txt:46:(Patrice Riemens, 1950, is geographer. Formerly he is associate researcher (without pay) at the University of Amsterdam and fellow of the Waag Society for Old and New Media, also in Amsterdam. However, he is mostly known as 'cultural activist' in the realm of the 'new social movements' associated with the information and communication technologies.
./english/290.txt:21:For more information on the Situationist International and their version of the derive see Debord's "Theory of the Derive", available online at http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/314.
./english/290.txt:120:Once brought into the light, the revolutionary potential of care could become the logic that governs our lives, replacing not only the securitary logic but also that other logic which underlies it: that of the imperatives of profit. Now the interests of capital determine production (what, how, and when one produces), spaces (the houses we inhabit, the design of our cities and towns, the very global geography and its borders) and times (labor and leisure, haste, the intensification of time). But, why not begin to imagine and construct an organization of the social that prioritizes persons, that attends to our sustainability - from access to health care to the right to affect - which orients toward our enrichment as human beings - from the access to knowledgedge, education, and information to the freedom to move around the world - that listens to our desires? This is the biopolitical challenge.
./english/291.txt:41:The social context that we live in today is the network-society. The factory has overflowed and has invaded the social, changing it into the principal lever of production. The wave of struggles in the 1960s and 1970s, on one hand, and the saturation of markets, along with the high levels of competition that introduced the process of globalization, on the other, obligated firms to develop techniques and technologies to make themselves more mobile and flexible and also more resistant to conflictivity and crisis: their survival depended, on one hand, on their capacity to detext (and take advantage of) the politico-institutional and social conditions and of the supply of most optimum raw materials, software, and machinery and work force; on the other hand firms' survival depended on their ability to respond within very brief time spans to oscilations of demand, thus in order to create (with a whole set of identification of needs/desires/forms of life and production of signs) the demand for a product even before manufacturing it. The key thus was in the multiplication of contacts and in a flexible and network organization that allowed a maximum fluidification of the circulation of information about local and international markets and an immediate production response to this information. In this manner, externalization, dislocalization and flexibilization became the slogan and communicative and relational work became the essential pivot, the active interface, of this ever more networked production.
./english/292.txt:171:depository of all vital information, to normalize the body can
./english/292.txt:229:3. For more information on the derives[4], consult the book by
./english/292.txt:287:the environment." For more information on the Situationist International
./english/293.txt:307:“Listening and relating, especially relating with people”, thus Carmen describes what she puts to work in her functions as a nurse. Something which she shares with the telephone operators, the domestic workers, the prostitutes and other women in feminine precarious work. For us, the encounter with the telephone operators was a revelation in this sense.[27] The capacity to attend and to empathize, the anticipation of others’ desires, not so much in order to provide solutions as to make the other feel good in a more general sense, patience and the ability to produce a “telephone smile” are fundamental tools based in a common sensibility lauded by some feminists as an ‘ethics of care.’ Technical knowledge, but especially relational knowledge - something which the company rapidly skips over in a 3 day training course (unpaid and with no guarantee of work) and which is mostly learned with the help of more experienced workers - is the key to success.[28] In these training courses, and depending upon the kind of services – technical assistance, information, emergencies, sales, surveys, etc. – they establish guidelines about the length of the call, the methods of retaining, deferring or cutting the call, the line of argumentation to develop, the intonation, the prohibited words and the encouraged ones[29] or the activation of the famous ‘mute’ or ‘telephone tunnel’ through which they may leave the call on hold for any number of reasons, and to which the telephone operators have responded with Without the Mute, the title of the magazine they have produced about labor problems in telemarketing. The control over communicative capacity – emotional as well as argumentative rhetoric – constitutes a vast field for exploration.
./english/293.txt:331:Another interesting element of relationship which merits further investigation is the link between people working together, which was alluded to both by the telephone operators and by our guide in social nursing. In the case of the operators, the companies attempt by all means to reduce the contact between the employees, whether by giving them little physical space to rest - as we had the opportunity to witness in situ, all squeezed together in the Qualytel office – or by using strategies oriented to generate competition and individualism, such as what they call “horizontal promotion”[30] or incentives[31] (which are also used in public health). Nevertheless, the company knows that a good portion of the work is done thanks to the exchange between the workers which assures the transmission of the savoir faire accumulated by the veterans who have been there longer, and – take note – are already more burnt-out[32], and of the information necessary in the course of the telephone calls, information which certainly does not reside in the few folders which we found in the offices, nor in the computers, but rather in the heads of those who are answering the calls. The control of this process rests in modulated management, employing surveillance techniques (listening and recording), hierarchization (operation personnel: operators, coordinators and supervisors, and structural personnel), displacement and time changes (since the job is organized by campaign some workers are located in the headquarters of the operating company while others are in the contracting company, and thus they are continually changing) and differentiation based on salary and value (of the campaign, of the sex of those who are executing it, of their wardrobe, of the company, etc.). The sense of being in transit is permanent: the scientific organization of total work.
./english/298.txt:26:I think it would be good to start with the ‘big picture’, that is how the university is an open system opening onto the larger field of casualised and underpaid ‘socialised labour power’. The latter is also often referred to as ‘mass intellectuality’ or even networked intelligence (an abstract quality of social labour power as it becomes increasingly informational and communicative). I have been thinking about it in terms of the opening up of disciplinary institutions as described by Deleuze in his essay on control societies. I would like to move from the idea that the university is some kind of ivory tower or a self-enclosed institution whose current state and future concerns a minority of professionals to that of the university as part of the ‘diffuse factory’ as described in Autonomist work. I think that their description of a shift from a society where production takes place predominantly in the closed site of the factory to one where it is the whole of society that is turned into a factory – a productive site – is still very fitting politically. But in fact, the debate seems to be stuck in the false opposition between the static, sheltered ivory tower and the dynamic, democratic market.
./english/298.txt:63:TT: Yes, I think that it is an exciting transformation and does not necessarily need to be interpreted as a ‘dumbing down’. On the contrary, the entry of such a mass of students into higher education implies a political transformation in the role of the university – its reinvention, so to speak. The ways in which this transformation is being managed over here is totally predictable and unsurprising. On the one hand, there is a heightened level of top down, managerial, informational control – an endless, centralised output of new guidelines, targets and initiatives which introduce post-industrial management into the old guild-like university system and which in many cases is pushing teaching staff workloads to extreme limits.
./english/298.txt:82:On the other hand, it is not simply reproducing classes and professions but also participating in a larger process of qualitative recomposition at a moment of crisis for post-fordism in the mode of information of which the outsourcing of white collar work from the US is an example. Higher ed is not simply engaged in the production and reproduction of knowledges but also in that of an abstract social labour power which can be multiply deployed across a range of productive sites (from call centres to Reality TV shows).
./english/298.txt:88:MB: That piece just observes that the informationalising or perma-temping of academic labour is not a neutral condition with respect to the knowledge that the academy produces. We call this the problem of ‘Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers.’
./english/298.txt:89:In rhet-comp, which is a subfield of English language studies, traditionally lower in status than literature and linguistics, more than 90 percent of the teaching is done by flex workers. (Flex workers deliver labour ‘in the mode of information,’ as if they were data on the management desktop – easily called up by a keystroke, and then just as easily dropped in the trash.) Tenure is primarily reserved for persons who directly manage the temp workers, or who creatively theorise the work of supervised teaching. To a very real extent, the knowledge produced by the field is a knowledge for managers. Of course not all the knowledge is about the work of management. Much of it is. But I think you could argue that even the field’s knowledges on ‘other questions’ increasingly show the taint of the managerial world-view. There would have to be more research into that.
./english/298.txt:99:MB: I wish there was a similar interest in the US. It’s definitely a question within managerial discourse, but still far less so in the mass of ‘creative’ labour. There is of course the graduate employee union movement, but there’s almost nothing in the undergraduate population. The primary form of undergraduate labour activism remains the anti-sweatshop movement. It’s very encouraging, of course. But it has real limits. It’s not an activism that proceeds from the situation of the student as labour, but from the situation of the student as consumer. The problem of the undergraduate as labour – as you say, an element of production – is almost completely unexplored. I have had two students write dissertations that partially speak to the topic. But there’s really almost nothing on it. At least in the US, there’s very little law and policy on the question as well. That’s what I mean when I talk about the ‘informal economy’ of the informationalised university. The relations of production going on under the sign of ‘student’ or ‘study’ or ‘youth’ are desperately under-regulated. It’s a question of hyper-exploitation.
./english/298.txt:102:TT: Yes, the Protestant spirit is, at many levels, well and alive in managerial discourse. And maybe you have a point when you say that, from capital’s viewpoint, it is simply a matter of building an informational reserve army of workers. On the other hand, we also need to ask what social needs and desires and what processes of subjectivation does this reserve army express – what values it is capable of creating.
./english/298.txt:108:TT: In a way. In another way, this notion of equality still identifies knowledge too much with access to a limited cultural capital – rather than the huge, diverse and mutating flux of specialised knowledges and transversal connections which is a trademark of social production in network societies. It is not only a matter that the best lecturers will tend to flow towards the institutions where working conditions are better (less students and admin; more money for research; access to international academic networks etc.). It is mainly about how a large part of the living labour within the higher education system will be impeded by higher workloads, scarce resources and tighter managerial control from actively engaging and experimenting with the massification of socialised labour power. Such power does not express itself simply as a unified or even fragmented class, but also as a constellation of singularities connected by communication machines and informational dynamics. All of this at a moment when organised labour is lagging behind (or is being easily accommodated by) the huge transformations induced by post-fordism and globalisation.
./english/298.txt:131:MB: Would it be waffling of me to say both are true? Just as the university is industrialised (albeit on a post-fordist footing of perma-temped labour in the mode of information), it – like the factory – becomes the location of an oppositional agency. Students – in their new character as workers in the present rather than the future – will in my view eventually understand themselves as the agents of their own exploitation. In that moment, we’ll understand the information university to have called forth its own gravediggers.
./english/298.txt:158:Marc Bousquet
./english/299.txt:343:The generalized orientation towards communication as a process is fundamental. It is no longer a matter of the old subject-object or emission-message-reception schemes, now it is a different and much more sophisticated model inspired in pragmatism, semiotics, ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism. In this orientation shared and unshared codes are put into play, the meaningless and the misunderstood, the implicit, the performative and the illocutionary force, the mediation and translation of some signs to others, gestures and, in general, incarnation, expectations, tastes and habits. Thus the features of the information regime[48] ≠ fragmentation, preeminence of the visual, modular assemblage, synopsis, des/recontextualization, interchangeability, integrity, motion sensitivity ä- do not form static and discreet functional units as in the industrial period but rather units that are reversible and recombinable, also in function of feedback processes: market studies, polls, call-ins, audience levels and sale of associated products, etc.
./english/302.txt:23:Thus we propose a space open to the exchange of information, support and strategies against precariousness, in which the specific counseling provided by people with experience in confronting difficult situations (related to work, health, housing, migration lawŠ) is not conceived as assistential or unidirectional work sustained only by Œexperts¹, but rather the collective production of practical knowledge, a ³precarious instinct² of resistance for the empowered transformation of the different precariousnesses which touch our lives. Given that these precarious situations are intertwined and are not necessarily ordered according to established categories, falling within the domain of specific professional figures, we lean towards a transversal ³precarious instinct² which might be capable of developing forms of resistance even in the cracks of a Welfare State sometimes oriented more towards control than towards the guaranteeing of rights. We depart from the articulation between different knowledges and experiences in order to construct, beyond the exchange of information and support, a space for collective self-organization. This effort has a name: Todasacien. Agency of Precarious Affairs.
./english/302.txt:44: 3. Communicative axes, in order to make known, beyond the limits of the physical space, the information, ideas, debates and proposals which transit the agency. This might include the production of texts and audiovisuals, the elaboration of an archive or the production of radio programs which keep our precarious instinct sharp and awake, as well as the production of knowledge related to questions of precariousness.
./english/302.txt:48: 4. Devices and resources for self-organizing, which would arise from the counseling, the workshops and the more specifically communicative activities, such as the mailing list and the web-forum, a bulletin board for exchanges between needs and Œexcesses¹ (often we need things but other times we have things to offer) or all kinds (exchanges of services, of work, of information) in order to think through and consolidate proposals of cooperativism and the generation of material resources (self-employment, grants) which permit us to carry out certain initiatives or survive moments of economic impasse (resistance fund).
./english/302.txt:55:So what are we calling for? How do we begin to construct this agency? First of all we would like to invite you to think about how to get this space working in order to give free rein to the ³instinct²: its pieces, its relationship with other organizational tools and knowledge, its imagination, its relationship with other networks and alliances, its material means, its communicative capacityŠ We part from the idea that we are all Œexperts¹ in our own existence, that we have all already developed precarious resources to confront conflicts and to get by, one way or the other, in daily life: shared care-work, sporadic labor protests, health advice, information, legal juggling acts, etc. Some of you, moreover, know well the ins and outs of this or that specific field: the legal system, the health care system, social work, nursing, communication, pleasureŠ Many of you know these fields and feel dissatisfied because they are embedded within institutional logics which domesticate them and impede criticism and contamination. So this is an invitation to produce an estrangement, to think about how to do things in a different way, with different premises and, above all, for other ends. Consider yourselves invited to this first phase, which will consist of a few encounters, first to present the project and then to share ideas and to get the structure of the agency working. Many of you are very busy but we think the gamble is worth it. There is not just one rhythm of participation, together we can invent different forms of participation. The space, the Eskalera Karakola (www.sindominio.net/karakola) in its new location at Embajadores 52 will soon be ready. If you can¹t come to the center we invite you to share your proposals and your concerns through our email: precariasaladeriva@sindominio.net
./english/313.txt:57:Concerning the Social Forums process specifically the question start to be faced appearing new subjects. Concretely, there is active the Social Forums (SF) Memory working group depending on the World social forum International committee. A global space to coordinate and facilitate the Social Forums archive and systematize initiatives and to establish a protocol of memory coming from each forum. It had developed a rich process of “consulta”/survey to define the V WSF main themes of the program, exploring on the participant methodologist to the organization of the Forum. And its recent European partner, the European group for systematization and archiving the information, knowledge and communication generated by the European Social Forum (ESF) process, that it is a working group depending on the European ESF assembly. There is also the work developed to systematize the contents of debates and seminars at the Paris ESF 2003 and the Florence one. Unfortunately the London ESF organizational system doesn’t allows to have many expectative on the documenting of the London ESF by the UK organisers committee and the ESF office.
./english/313.txt:59:The systematizes/memory groups are addressing various aspects of the Social Forum. With a very simple or in occasion’s fictitious distinction, there are two kinds of information systematization and knowledge production that are considered needed: one is related to the networking organisational aspect, the other is content aspect. This difference doesn’t have necessarily to correspond with the difference establish between “live memory or systematizaction” and as opposite, I guess, “not alive memory”.
./english/313.txt:70:Networking organisational aspects: Systematize information to build useful tools: Doing operative the knowledge already driving on the social networks, to potenciate them and to articulate them with the practices.
./english/313.txt:88:The main methods are questionnaires to organizations, web search and systematizing of information sources generated by the ESFs, for example, the main information source for the European directory is the registration databases for the ESFs and the parallel spaces.
./english/313.txt:109:The new technologies of information allows very richly building collaborative working tools, an example is the Wiki. A case of joining Wiki with the open editing logic is the Wiki pedia.
./english/313.txt:111:The open editing process had led to Wikipedia becoming the world's largest encyclopaedia in less than four years of operation, with 450,000 articles and 77 million words in the English edition, and over 1.3 million articles in all language editions combined (as of January 2005). Vandalism is a recognized problem, though much of it is caught and reverted by users who monitor the recent changes. Critics claim that Wikipedia contains much inaccurate information and can never be as authoritative as a traditional encyclopaedia. Nevertheless, Wikipedia is one of the most used reference sites on the World Wide Web and has been widely endorsed.
./english/313.txt:165:European group for systematization and archiving the information, knowledge and communication generated by the ESF process working group depending on the European ESF assembly:
./english/316.txt:111:Alongside such new international/ist media practice has gone democratic international media-campaigning, itself traceable back to the thirdworldist (i.e. statist) New World Information and Communication Order of the 1970s-80s. Today this has a more radical-democratic or social-movement orientation. Media/cyberspace activity finds multi-faceted expression within the World Social Forum, partly in official panels, partly in more marginal ones. It may also, however, find expression within alternative or oppositional spaces during the World Summit on the Information Society, 2003-5. Such activities, within the United Nations system, may now be being seen as secondary to activity within the framework of the WSF. (Cyberspace after Capitalism 2003, ISIS 2003, Leon, Burch and Tamayo 2001, Putting People First 2003, WSF Thematic Area 3 2003).
./english/319.txt:16:It is not conspiracies in corridors and back rooms but indirect exclusion due to lack of resources and information as well as creating an alienating environment that we have to worry about. And constant bickering is doing nothing to enhance and widen participation.
./english/323.txt:27:first collective space, in which to disseminate information and engage in the difficult process
./english/323.txt:251:further information http://www.let.uu.nl/~Rutvica.Andrijasevic/personal/
./english/325.txt:37:Yet, nowadays a big international queer movement exists (just as the feminist movement hasn’t died when it criticized the fixed female identity). However, it took years before the gay and lesbian movement could accept transsexuals, transgenders and drag queens etc. in their movement; they were largely treated as embarrassments in their “legitimate” fight for tolerance, acceptance and equal rights. Aaron Devor and Nicholas Matte (2004) give a clear description of this struggle in the United States from the 1970s till the 2000s. In particular in the lesbian and feminist movement hotly contested battles have taken place over the question of whether or not male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals are women for the purposes of inclusion in women-only organizations. ‘Transgendered and transsexed people have posed the greatest challenges to gender definitions at a historical moment when women in general, and lesbians in particular, have begun only recently to feel that they exist as political players in their own right’ (Devor/Matte, 2004: 181). Many lesbian-feminist organizations insisted on a definition of womanhood that leaves no room for women who were born male. For example at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, a five-day women-only event run every year since 1976, from 1991 on till 2003 trans-women tried to be allowed into the festival and set up an informational and protest ‘Camp Trans’ outside the gates of the festival. Eventually the organizers of the festival bowed to the pressure and said that anyone self-defined as a ‘womyn-born-womyn’ would be allowed into the festival.
./english/331.txt:87:Every week high profile left-wing writers (George Monbiot, Noam Chomsky, Mark Thomas, John Pilger to name a few) comment on the activities of corporate bullies and their partners in crime, corrupt politicians. Landmark publications have fuelled the anti-capitalist fire: Naomi Klein's No Logo was the book that united frustrated protestors into a global movement. Websites such as CorpWatch, Globalise Resistance and IndyMedia disseminate information and propaganda, and mobilise support - not just from rich kids in rich countries, but increasingly diverse groups from developing countries too. Each and every recent meeting of the World Economic Forum, WTO, IMF, World Bank, G8, in Davos, Seattle, Prague, Genoa, New York; environmental summits in Rio and Johannesburg, has had a contingent of protestors challenging the neo-liberal status quo. The left is still there, and it rejects both the conservative and the Third Way’s claim to the moral high ground. To the secular left, morality is compassion and justice on a global, humanitarian scale that transcends religious, ethnic or geo-political boundaries:
./english/331.txt:132:Ryan & Lickona (1987, described in Arthur 2003) propose three elements of character development, knowing, affective & action. This is useful: knowing involves a didactic approach – providing information and examples, sketching out relationships and giving opportunities to begin to develop empathy. The affective is a response to this knowledge and the development of empathy at a specific level. It is the beginning of abstraction through imagination. Considered action can only develop once the affective is fully grounded. It is the very next step in the development of a truly autonomous moral character.
./english/331.txt:150:The Citizenship curriculum covers many abstract concepts that cannot easily be translated into concrete examples or related to pupils’ personal experience of the world. Economic globalisation is one of these. If it is the case that the higher levels of abstract reasoning are only achievable at the stage of transition from adolescence to adulthood – or indeed may not be achieved at all by some people, surely this creates an impasse. In order for pupils to benefit from the use of balanced approaches as the Crick Report recommends, they need to have developed a fairly secure ability to deal with abstract ethical principles. In practice, they should have dealt with similar issues on a ‘concrete’ or personal level and so be able to generalise from these. Alternatively they would need to be skilled in abstract reasoning and have the necessary stored knowledge of ethics to be able to apply both in a critical analysis of the information presented.
./english/331.txt:218:The year 11 class I taught was mixed ability. Anecdotally I could see a gender difference in approaches to the content of lessons – the girls tended to make value judgements on the nature of information presented; the boys were less likely to; however this is likely to be confounded by prior and average attainment levels.
./english/333.txt:37:Packed with revelatory information, the book:
./english/333.txt:60:For further information contact :
./english/343.txt:417:Alternative Information Jerusalem/ Bettlehem
./english/344.txt:31:The word ‘merger’ seems appropriate, secondly, in analogy with the contemporary corporate world, in which it is the boards of directors who are involved, whilst those lower down the hierarchy are either uninformed, passively observe or – where more actively concerned and involved – may at best express some opinions or hope that ‘unity means strength’. In this union case the merger has been virtually invisible to the 176 million or so of union members claimed, to world public opinion in general - and even to that progressive part of such in the new ‘global justice and solidarity movement’ (GJ&SM). Information denial here goes to the point at which a relevant article by the ICFTU’s Joint General Secretary was published not on the ICFTU website, but in Medellin, Colombia (Oliveira 2006).
./english/344.txt:65:Given the extent to which the international unions have been themselves infected, if not significantly affected, by the global justice movement, a totalitarian outcome seems the least imaginable of scenarios. A reformist orientation seems more likely – though one opted for without the information and debate demonstrated by the newest social movements. The founding event will tell us more. I am aware of a number of independent observers who will be present and from whom we can hope for commentary. But further stagnation, disorientation and ambiguity seems likely until and unless an open global dialogue about the merger takes place.
./english/356.txt:38:become part of this process to access the information about the local social
./english/363.txt:172:One important reason for this is that the relevant knowledge - of where the movement is going - is not held by individuals on the basis of a scholastic appropriation of information. That elitist model, rooted in the culture of the service class and a fixation on the state as the instrument of change, is flawed at its root. What is important is what Lukács described as the bearer of orthodoxy in Marxism (1971): the principle of totality, the attempt to grasp the whole, and the sense - grounded in both our own practice and that of previous movements - of where we might be able to find contributions that we do not yet have names for: how to reach beyond ourselves.
./english/364.txt:4:YOUR ACCOUNT INFORMATION
./english/364.txt:14:SUSTAINER PROGRAM INFORMATION
./english/365.txt:5:(Forthcoming: Information, Communication & Society, 2003)
./english/365.txt:16:It is clear that personal digital media are important to these activists. One indicator is the expansion of a web-based communication infrastructure, marked, for example, by the growth of the Indymedia activist information network (www.indymedia.org) from one outlet to more than 100 in the three years following Seattle. Many activists cite the importance of personal digital media in creating networks and coordinating action across diverse political identities and organizations (see on-line interviews at http://www.wtohistory.org). A key issue is whether these communication practices merely reduce the costs or increase the efficiencies of political action, or whether they change the political game itself. My interest in this article is to explore some of the ways in which digital communication networks may be changing the political game in favor of resource poor players who, in many cases, are experimenting with political strategies outside of conventional national political channels such as elections and interest processes.
./english/365.txt:35:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 9 from governments has created a political sphere beyond normal legislative, electoral, and regulatory processes – a sphere that Beck (2000) calls sub-politics. The sub-politics of corporations and transnational economic regimes have been countered by activist sub-politics that include global demonstrations, campaigns against companies and economic development regimes, and the creation of epistemic networks to gather and publicize information on global issues (Keck and Sikkink, 1998).
./english/365.txt:41:The features of global activism outlined above raise interesting challenges for thinking about movements and protest politics. One of the best known models of contentious politics refers to the diffusion of protest networks and the accompanying transformation of collective identities as “scale shift” (McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly, 2001; Tarrow, 2002a). According to this view, scale shift depends on the existence of several mechanisms of human agency: brokerage (creating social links among disconnected sites of protest), diffusion (transfer of information across those links), and attribution of similarity (mutual identification) (McAdam, Tarrow & Tilly, 2001, pp. 331-339). As I understand it, this process generally involves face-to-face agency (brokerage) in the recruitment of protesters and in the negotiation of new identity frames to accommodate the expanding coalitions of groups. A now classic formulation of the identity framing process at the core of this theory of scale shift is Snow and Bensford’s (1992) account of
./english/365.txt:52:• New media can alter information flows through the mass media. The creation of a public sphere based in micro media (e-mail, lists) and middle media Internet channels (blogs, organization sites, e-zines) offers activists an important degree of information and communication independence from the mass media. At the same time “culture jams” and logo campaigns initiated in micro media and middle media have attracted
./english/365.txt:63:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 17 example, Lichbach and Almeida (2001) note that on the dates of the Battle in Seattle, simultaneous protests were held in at least 82 other cities around the world, including 27 locations in the United States, 40 in other “northern” locations including Seoul, London, Paris, Prague, Brisbane, and Tel Aviv, and 15 in “southern” locations such as New Delhi, Manila, and Mexico City. Not only were these other protests not organized centrally by the Seattle campaign coalition, but information about timing and tactics was transmitted almost entirely through activist networks on the Internet. In addition to extending the global reach of single protest events, Internet campaigns also enable activists to create and update rich calendars of planned demonstrations. Lichbach and Almeida (2001) discovered wide Internet postings and network sites for no fewer than 39 scheduled protests between 1994 and 2001. This suggests that Seattle was just one of many events in a permanent protest campaign organized by different organizations in the global activist network.
./english/365.txt:66:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 18 Both the strengths and weaknesses of loosely linked, ideologically thin networks are illustrated in the permanent campaign against Microsoft. This campaign began with labor activism in the early 1990s, and has since expanded to include trade, consumer protection, product innovation and many other issues, with campaign fronts in North America, Japan, and the European Union. During the years of the most rapid growth in the network (1997-2001), an important hub was Netaction (www.netaction.org), an organization created explicitly as an Internet campaign hub to archive information and mobilize activists (Manheim, 2001; Bennett, 2003c). The richness of Netaction reports and papers reflects the rise of epistemic communities promoting diverse causes of consumer protection, product innovation, electronic privacy, business ethics and practices, and open source software and Internet architecture, among others. Netaction later evolved to occupy similar hub positions in other digital democracy campaigns, and it has reappeared as a hub in the Microsoft network as the campaign entered different phases.
./english/365.txt:72:Ideological and identity thinning may also operate in single organizations that adopt open network designs to promote member equality or minimize bureaucracy. Le Grignou and Patou (forthcoming) note this potential for open networks to diminish organizational identity in their analysis of the French organization ATTAC (Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens). ATTAC (www.attac.org) is an interesting case because it began with a very specific organizational goal of creating a tax on global financial transactions and using the funds for sustainable development. ATTAC even formed a Scientific Council to guide the production of high quality information. However, the organization also promoted the autonomy of local chapters through an open communication network that resulted in the posting of diverse concerns from the ATTAC activist membership. Le Grignou and Patou conclude that the easy communication of local interests quickly diversified the organizational agenda to include Commander Marcos, “Mad Cow disease”, human rights in Tunisia, and the labor struggles of Danone employees. Le Grignou and Patou explain that the “click here” logic of the open network at once makes connections between such disparate ideas possible, and at the same time creates an intellectual dilemma for the
./english/365.txt:77:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 22 demands of network partners; 2) organizations that “move on” to other networks to avoid transformation and to maintain their capacity as activist hubs in other campaigns; 3) network organizations created to perform specific tasks that produce successor networks; and 4) organizations that adopt open communication networks and then become transformed by the information exchanges among their members.
./english/365.txt:79:Because easy Internet linkages can open organizations to unpredictable traffic patterns, obscure nodes can become more central hubs in networks. As discussed above, the Netaction organization in the Microsoft campaign became such a rich archive of reports and research information about the corporation and the campaign that it became a central hub in the campaign network (as measured, among other things by overlapping board of director members). The early mission and identity of the organization were synonymous with Microsoft, even though the mission statement promised engagement with a wide range of electronic policy issues. As noted in the next section, Netaction reclaimed its broader policy agenda only by breaking with the Microsoft campaign and “moving on” to hub positions in other campaign networks.
./english/365.txt:83:Because of the potential to become redefined by location in a communication network, many organizations that provide coordinating or information functions in campaign networks adopt a strategy of periodically “moving on” to new networks. As noted above, Netaction (www.netaction.org) maintained its identity as a multi-issue organization in the digital communication policy arena by moving on to other campaigns in areas of digital communication regulation and consumer protection. A recent
./english/365.txt:98:New Media Can Alter Information Flows through Mass Media
./english/365.txt:99:The public spheres created by the Internet and the Web are more than just parallel information universes that exist independently of the traditional mass media. A growing conventional wisdom among communication scholars is that the Internet is changing the way in which news is made. New media provide alternative communication spaces in which information can develop and circulate widely with fewer conventions or editorial filters than in the mainstream media. The gate-keeping capacity of the traditional press is weakened when information appears on the Internet, presenting new material that may prove irresistible to competitors in the world of 24/7 cable news channels that now
./english/365.txt:100:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 29 occupy important niches in the press food chain. Moreover, journalists may actively seek story ideas and information from Web sources, thus creating many pathways for information to flow from micro to mass media.
./english/365.txt:113:It is clear that personal relations remain important in the glue of this movement, giving particular meaning to the now trite slogan that the global is local. Interviews with Seattle WTO protesters make clear that personal contacts were essential to organizing such an effective large scale demonstration (see on line interview transcriptions at www.wtohistory.org). At the same time, the creation of digital information and planning networks eased personal frictions and strengthened fragile relations. More generally, the growing technical capacity of activists to report on their own actions has created
./english/365.txt:116:The rise of distributed electronic public spheres may ultimately become the model for public information in many areas of politics, whether establishment or oppositional. It is clear that conventional news is withering from the erosion of audiences (more in commercial than in public service systems), and from the fragmentation of remaining audiences as channels multiply (Bennett 2003b). Perhaps the next step is a thoroughly personalized information system in which the boundaries of different issues and different political approaches become more permeable, enabling ordinary citizens to join
./english/365.txt:119:Agre. P. (2002) “Real-time politics: The Internet and the political process”. The Information Society. 18: 311-331.
./english/366.txt:8:The net allows large mobilizations to unfold with minimal bureaucracy and hierarchy. "Forced consensus and labored manifestoes are fading into the background," Klein wrote in 2000, "replaced instead by a culture of constant, loosely structured, and sometimes compulsive information-swapping."
./english/366.txt:70:In some ways, the debate over whether online organizing is as "real" or as effective as face-to-face organizing misses the point. What's interesting about meetup.com, the UFPJ website and MoveOn's meeting tool is how they leverage the Internet to get people together face to face in ways (and at speeds and costs) that were simply not possible before. As with the phone, the television or computer-generated direct mail, the Internet won't replace traditional organizing, but it does alter the rules in important ways. Because e-mail is near-instantaneous and costs just fractions of a penny, one can communicate very quickly with a lot of people at the speed of word of mouth. Because it is browsable from home, at any hour, it provides a much easier first point of contact between a campaign and interested participants. Because it is a peer-to-peer tool open to all, it allows geographically dispersed people to find each other easily and coordinate. Because it is still an open-publishing model, free from the constraints of corporate-owned media, it can carry the channels of alternative information essential for sustaining social movements.
./english/367.txt:141:“The participatory budget process is based on open public meetings at the local level. These establish local priorities for government spending, and elect delegates to a regional level, which discusses in greater detail. State officials provide assistance and information, but have no vote in the assembly, which approves and supervises implementation of the final budget…”
./english/368.txt:36:What has been true in the computer industry of the struggle between free activity and the subordination of that activity to profit-producing work, has also been true in the sub-space of computer networks. The same dynamics of struggle between self-activity and work for outside authority have multiplied through both public and private sectors of cyberspace. The state and private corporations are constantly chasing after the new electronic frontiers being created by imaginative pioneers. They seek to enclose the frontiers for purposes of power and profit, e.g., restricting access to "classified" information or industrial secrets, commercializing as much of the informational and communicative flow as possible as well as the infrastructure through which it flows.(8)
./english/368.txt:38:This enclosure resembles that of other capitalists who have fenced off agricultural land or industrial space in order to control it. In cyberspace just as in the geographical frontiers of the Americas (the North American West, the South American Pampas or Rainforests) there has been a dynamic struggle between the pioneers and the profiteers. Just as mountain men, gauchos and poor farmers have sought independence through the flight to and colonization of new lands, so cyberspace pioneers have carved out new spaces and filled them with their own activity. Just as big capital (agribusiness, railroads, etc.) has come hard on the heels of homesteaders, seeking to take over their lands, forcing them out or reducing them to waged labor, so too has business chased after the new electronic frontiers with the object of buy-out or take-over. Those threatened with enclosure, of course, have always fought back. As a result, just as the campesinos of Morelia under the leadership of Zapata cut barbed wire to liberate the land in 1910, electronic hackers have chopped down electronic barriers and liberated information, creating a pirate underground of free activity constantly slipping beyond corporate and state control. So too have the colonists of cyberspace defended their own spaces against monopolization in other ways, including public campaigns both legal and political against big business and state control.(9)
./english/368.txt:40:The first working computer network was ARPANET (on-line in 1969), financed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. Defense Department. ARPANET grew out of a line of Cold War research on making Western military communications possible in the event of nuclear war, i.e., in the event that much of the communications system itself would be destroyed by Soviet nuclear weapons. The design that was developed within this context of military conflict was a highly flexible, geographically dispersed web of multiple linkages. The organization of that web allowed specially formatted information to move from any point to any other point through many, many possible routes. Thus, even if many of those possible routes were destroyed, many others would still be functioning and the information would get through.(10) In the absence of war, ARPANET was developed to facilitate the long distance sharing of computer time by researchers working on military and other government projects. The supersession of ARPANET by a network of interlinked networks (The Matrix or The Net) has involved the multiplication of linkages and increased both the flexibility and certainty of communication for anyone and everyone using it --military AND the ever more numerous civilian users. When the Mexican state sought to block the flow of information about the uprising in Chiapas it was outflanked every bit as effectively as any Soviet strike might have been. It could keep Televisa from reporting the facts, but it couldn't prevent thousands of independent computer operators from passing them on to all who wanted to know.
./english/368.txt:48:While military researchers and peace activists may have the same kind of personal computers sitting on their desks and send mail and information using the same transmission protocols, they are continually constructing and reconstructing two very different kinds of cyberspace. Every piece of hardware and soft ware is subject to the subversion of the purposes for which it was designed.(12)
./english/368.txt:54:Just as important has been the internationalization of cyberspace and the networking it facilitates. On the one hand, business has had increasing recourse to computer communications to co-ordinate its multinational operations of production, finance and sales. This has made it easier to move operations out of areas of high wages and militant environmental or consumer groups into areas of low wages and weak regulations. On the other hand, given access to computers and electronic networks, activists located physically in different countries can link up more easily than ever before. They can share their own experiences, ask for and receive information, compare and contrast struggles, discuss alternative tactics and coordinate strategies as easily as those in the same country.
./english/368.txt:72:As journalistic, humanitarian, religious and indigenous observers have visited the conflict zone in Chiapas and written up what they have found, their reports --often embarrassing to the Mexican government and its supporters because confirming Zapatista statements-- have been circulated through the same computer networks providing vital material for the growing network of solidarity organizations. When grassroots groups came together at the behest of the Zapatistas in early August 1994 at the new Aguacalientes carved out of the jungle to form the Convencion Nacional Democratica, and then again later at San Cristobal, Chiapas (October 11-13, 1994), Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas (November 4-6, 1994) and Queretaro (February 1-5, 1995) speeches, reports and convention documents were circulated on The Net. Much of this material certainly deserves being labeled with the term used by Italian militants: "contro-informazione" (counter-information) opposed to the official reports of governments and commercial mass media.
./english/368.txt:74:As the number of people involved in these processes of uploading, re-posting, translating, etc. has grown, so has their self organization. What began as, and to a degree still is, an interlinked set of spontaneous actions has become more organized. On some lists, for example, a cooperative division of labor has emerged so that a dozen or more people take individual responsibility for tapping and reposting relevant material from particular sources to a single site in cyberspace.(27) In this way the skills and resources of many separate individuals and computer systems are connected in ways that benefit everyone tapping the pooled information. In another case, the best material from a few such poolings is reposted to those who need the information but don't have time to search out even a reduced number of sites.(28) As a result of such co-operation, the work of culling The Net has been drastically reduced for the vast majority of those needing and using information about the struggles in Mexico for purposes of mobilization and solidarity.
./english/368.txt:76:Such co-operation has also made it possible to crystallize some of this continuing flow of useful information into new, hybrid electronic products. One such is the electronic book Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution which was put together by an e-mail coordinated team translating material largely gathered from The Net. Although the anti-copyrighted, electronic book was subsequently published in hard copy, it first became available, and continues to be available in its entirety on The Net.(29) A second such collaboration is presently underway to produce an electronic English translation of the only existing collection of materials on the activities and thoughts of women in Chiapas since the uprising began.(30) A third collective effort is the construction of a multimedia compact disk on the Zapatistas that draws much of its textual material and many images from The Net while combining them with music and video and other, newly created material. The resultant package of information is organized to permit a free ranging exploration of nearly a gigabyte of information on the Zapatista uprising, its background and its effects.(31)
./english/368.txt:78:Throughout this whole process, the circulation of Zapatista materials and reports from independent observers on The Net has been accompanied by increasingly systematic reposting of commercial media stories. While the commercial media has largely ignored The Net as a source of information and understanding about what has been happening in Chiapas, the reverse has not been the case.
./english/368.txt:82:Beyond this access to more diverse and critical sources of information, the various conferences and lists in cyberspace have generally archived all this material, making it permanently available for reference and study. Whereas the single story in a local or national newspaper or newsmagazine usually disappears into the trash or recycling bin in fairly short order, the archives of reg.mexico or Chiapas95 can be accessed through The Net easily and efficiently. Whereas throughout most of this century old newspaper stories or published reports had to be painstakingly dug out of microfilm files or book stacks by the few dedicated people who could make the time, this material has been kept available --for reading, downloading, or forwarding-- via a few keystrokes.(32) Such archives have generally been stored as easily transferable files at FTP and gopher sites.(33) As World Wide Web browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape have become more widely available, a variety of Web home pages have been created facilitating the interface with archived materials. These Web pages are not only more colorful --often containing photographs and other images-- but their hypertext programming makes movement among them wonderfully quick and easy through a click of the mouse button.(34)
./english/368.txt:86:At first, the most pressing issues concerned the shooting war. Mass mobilization to stop the state's military repression and force a withdrawal of the Mexican army was organized on the basis of outrage generated by detailed reports on the bloody character of that repression. Information was downloaded from The Net, gathered from other sources and transformed into flyers, pamphlets, newsletters, articles and eventually books detailing the torture, rapes, summary executions, and other violence being perpetrated by the military, the various police forces and the private "white guards" --hired goons of the big ranchers. Such material fueled the organization of mass marches in Mexico City, San Francisco, New York and other cities around the world. They fired passions that led people to candle-light vigils, letter writing and fax campaigns, Mexican consulate takeovers and other forms of protest. Stories of these actions (often ignored by the media) were then uploaded to The Net and as the reports multiplied they encouraged local militants who could see their own efforts as part of a larger movement. Taken all together, this explosive movement of solidarity certainly forced the government to back off its military solution and to negotiate with the Zapatistas. This was true in January and February of 1994 and a year later in February and March of 1995 after the Zedillo government unilaterally ruptured negotiations with the EZLN and again resorted to military violence.
./english/368.txt:90:As the dual phenomena of a rapidly growing pro-democracy movement and an increasingly unstable and desperate ruling party have became more and more apparent, peoples' sense that things could change significantly in Mexico has grown. As the multiplying flows of information, analysis and debate have provided the sense of collective concern and organizing necessary for committed forms of action, increased numbers of caravans and observers have gone to Chiapas, less to "learn what is happening" than to curb state abuses and bring aid and solidarity to those suffering the brutalities of the state's counterinsurgency strategy of so-called "low intensity warfare", i.e., a generalized terror campaign against all viewed as sympathetic to the EZLN and radical change. In turn, political innovation in Chiapas, from the CND through the formation of a Rebel Government of Transition to the EZLN's calls for a broad-based Liberation Movement and a general plebiscite have circulated to the rest of Mexico and beyond.
./english/368.txt:96:In less public view, researchers in universities and think tanks have been paying much closer attention and have seen serious threats to the current political order. Even before the role of the Internet in the Zapatista struggle was recognized, analysts were beginning to call the attention of policy makers to grassroots uses of electronic communications. One widely quoted report was Sheldon Annis' 1991 "Giving Voice to the Poor" published in Foreign Policy, an influential American journal in that field. Annis provided details of how grassroots utilization of The Net was "empowering" and "emboldening" the poor by undermining elite control of information. Generously, if somewhat naively perhaps, he recommended that state institutions such as local governments and the World Bank shift expenditures toward increasing flows of information which can assist the "political empowerment" of the poor and "processes of democratization".(37)
./english/368.txt:102:One of the more provocative of these analyses to come to light, so far, has been that by national security analysts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt working at RAND Corp.(42) In a 1993 report entitled "CyberWar is Coming!", they formulate two related concepts: cyberwar and netwar --in both of which the role of information is central and critical. The former refers to military war making while the latter refers to "societal-level ideational conflicts waged in part through internetted modes of communication", "most often associated with low intensity conflict". Their examples of cyberwar range from the Mongols to the Gulf War. One of their primary examples of netwar is how "advocacy movements" are "increasingly organizing into cross-border networks and coalitions, identifying more with the development of civil society (even global civil society) than with nation-states and using advanced information and communications technologies to strengthen their activities". While Arquilla and Ronfeldt cite movements concerned with environmental, human-rights and religious issues, the pro-Zapatista movement is clearly another example of the kind of activity they are concerned with. In their discussion the "other side" of such "netwar" is the state and its traditional hierarchical institutions of governance. With their writing directed primarily at the U.S. government --with which they clearly identify-- they warn that new forms of warfare must be developed appropriate to this new arena of power.(43)
./english/368.txt:104:Arquilla and Ronfeldt defend their use of terms like "cyber"war and "cyber"space by pointing out that the Greek root "kybernan" means to steer or govern. They like this prefix because it "bridges the fields of information and governance better than any other available prefix or term". Their discourse on threats to institutional power, especially that of states, therefore, fits within an older discourse on the contemporary problems of "governability".(44)
./english/368.txt:116:With respect specifically to Chiapas, at least two of us who are active in circulating counter-information have separately received lucrative proposals to sell-out by funneling our information to corporate investors. The proposals came in the wake of the peso crisis in December 1994 when many investors lost money in a devaluation they had not foreseen and the government was blaming its moves on the Zapatistas. The proposals, made by an editor of a major business magazine, were for us to provide "relevant information" from "alternative sources" that could be sold to capitalists anxious to be on top of things so as to avoid such unexpected crises and loses. We would "get rich", he said, and of course we could do what we wanted with our money, e.g., support the Zapatistas. This entrepreneurial editor foresaw eventually generalizing this service from information about Mexico to other countries in Latin America and beyond.(51)
./english/368.txt:130:On the other hand, there can be no doubt that the Mexican state has been expanding its overt presence in cyberspace both in Mexico and in the rest of the world. The number of government agencies accessible on-line has been growing. The Consulate General of Mexico in New York and the Mexican Embassy in London have created colorful Web pages offering information about government services and information on Mexico undoubtedly, at least in part, to offset and counter the massive flow of negative information about the Mexican government's actions and policies.
./english/368.txt:132:These pages are dominated, naturally, by the usual government propaganda (statements by Zedillo and press releases by various agencies) and public relations material designed to draw tourists and lure investors (pretty pictures, travel information, recipes for Mexican dishes, pointers to business web sites). The information offered about the situation in Chiapas is minimal. As of November 1st, the UK page has four issues of a newsletter, one of which contains an 11 line "report" on the 3rd round of negotiations (June 1995), one which has an 8 line "report" on the 4th round (July 1995) --half of which is devoted to listing all the supposed efforts of the state to meet the needs of the poor in Chiapas and a third, with 21 lines on the negotiations in San Andres Larrainzar (October 1995) --with a reference to the EZLN Plebiscite that gives the impression that it originated with the Allianza Civica. In September the New York page had only two references to Chiapas, one being the "Dialog Law" and the other a press statement from the Secretariat de Gobernacion. When I returned to check it in early November, the "Dialog Law" had been removed.
./english/368.txt:138:The State of the Struggle in Cyberspace and Beyond Despite scattered attacks by governments in various countries, the initiative in this area still lies almost entirely on the side of those using The Net for the circulation of struggle. So far, those attacks have been rather crude --police raids and censorship-- and caused little disruption to the myriad flows of information and mobilization that continue to criss-cross the globe. The most effective capitalist initiatives in cyberspace have been the commercialization of the Internet and the use of electronic communications for organizing transnational corporate operations. These efforts, however, have not directly impeded the kinds of struggles I have been describing. Indeed, if anything they have provoked greater international organizing to offset the power of multinational capital. Similarly, efforts to introduce legislation in the U.S. to regulate and control information flows have provoked widespread counter-organization and mobilization.
./english/368.txt:146:Indeed the epoch of the Cold War provided ample experience of how a sophisticated propaganda apparatus could be formed and wielded against ideological enemies, both real and imagined. The covert operations of military or intelligence agents were complemented by very overt and much larger scale anti-communist, counter-revolutionary intellectual warfare. Fighting the wave of revolutionary energy that boiled up in anti-colonial movements and continued in anti-NEOcolonial, pro-national liberation struggles required the new Post-W.W.II American empire to create a whole new body of foreign policy elites and a research apparatus to support them with information and ideas.(62) It also required the creation of a sophisticated propaganda machine, both public (e.g., USIA) and private (e.g., think tanks and the mass media).(63) Similarly, in Mexico, the PRI has, over the last decades, built its own apparatuses of ideological warfare and information control.
./english/368.txt:150:The differences in the two situations are worth noting. In the case of the battle over NAFTA, capital had the initiative and two hundred years of free-trade arguments at its disposal. The anti-NAFTA networks were forced to create, virtually from whole cloth, a set of arguments and mass of information to counter that initiative. That they lost is not surprising; that the next round of battle will be on a more even terrain is certain. In the case of the Zapatistas, the campesinos of Chiapas and then their supporters had the initiative, first on the ground, then in the world of ideas. Unable to fit the Zapatistas, their organization and ideas into familiar boxes, the Mexican state has been flailing around defensively, and losing. Its campaign of low-intensity warfare (terrorism) may squeeze many into submission in Chiapas, but it continues to lose the broader battle over the future of Mexico. Its failure to cripple the ability of the Zapatistas to present their arguments against the status quo has forced it to cede more and more ground, if not to the Zapatistas directly then to the democratic reform movement that has taken up their banner.
./english/369.txt:11:The conference had on its agenda: the situation of the left in Europe; the policies of the EU; a common political declaration; the counter-summit in Copenhagen during the upcoming Danish presidency; and a point of information on the general strike in Spain and the mobilisations in Seville.
./english/370.txt:50:These ideas are today being hotly debated in the field of interface design. The general consensus is that interfaces must become more intelligent to be able to guide users in the tapping of computer resources, both the informational wealth of the Internet, as well as the resources of ever more elaborate software applications. But if the debaters agree that interfaces must become smarter, and even that this intelligence will be embodied in agents, they disagree on how the agents should acquire their new capabilities. The debate pits two different traditions of Artificial Intelligence against each other: Symbolic AI, in which hierarchical components predominate, against Behavioral AI, where the meshwork elements are dominant. Basically, while in the former discipline one attempts to endow machines with intelligence by depositing a homogenous set of rules and symbols into a robot's brain, in the latter one attempts to get intelligent behavior to emerge from the interactions of a few simple task-specific modules in the robot's head, and the heterogeneous affordances of its environment. Thus, to build a robot that walks around a room, the first approach would give the robot a map of the room, together with the ability to reason about possible walking scenarios in that model of the room. The second approach, on the other hand, endows the robot with a much simpler set of abilities, embodied in modules that perform simple tasks such as collision-avoidance, and walking-around-the-room behavior emerges from the interactions of these modules and the obstacles and openings that the real room affords the robot as it moves.{8}
./english/372.txt:59:Note: This essay was delivered as a keynote address during the "History Matters: Social Movements Past, Present, and Future" conference at the New School for Social Research (http://www.newschool.edu/gf/historymatters for more information)
./english/375.txt:24:What I want to do briefly is to test that hypothesis against certain factual information, and then come to some conclusions. I’ve written a 15000 word article on the question and I don’t intend to read it out to you.
./english/375.txt:37:Here Hardt and Negri made a great deal of growth of what they call service employment and they give the impression that service employment is all what they call ‘informational’ employment – employment to do with the processing of information.
./english/375.txt:38:The reality of service employment is very different. People confuse the categories of industry and services with the categories of manual work and white collar work. But the services have always included very large numbers of manual workers. Dockers are service workers. Bus workers are service workers. Train drivers are service workers. If you look today at the United States there are 103 million people included in service employment. It is not true that all of these are informational workers, some sort of new category. There are 18 million in occupations with a decidedly manual cast to them – janitors, ‘security personnel’, ‘food services’, cleaners, people who to fill the shelves in shops, and so on. There are another 18 million in routine clerical jobs, terrible jobs in many ways indistinguishable from manual jobs, people involved in typing, filing and so and so forth. There are another six and three quarter million sales assistants, people working on checkouts at stores. Vast groups of workers whose jobs are as routines, as
./english/375.txt:42:If you add to that other changes that are taking way, the way that jobs like teaching are increasingly subject to the payments systems that used to exist only in manufacturing or mining, payment by results, managerial supervision, managerial bullying, assessment procedures, stretching today in Britain today right up to the university level, you talking about the transformation involving more and more people being drawn into the old style of jobs. When people talk about informational jobs, I am more tempted to talk about Macjobs’, of even teaching becoming almost a Macjob, part of a production line.
./english/375.txt:120:My question to Michael is would you say that that basically is a result of our information technology. In the past we could not communicate quickly at a distance, so we had to come together once a year or every three or four years and put together a platform that had to be followed, whereas today we can communicate quickly and in five minutes exchange information in these coalitions quickly. So would you say this is primarily a result of improvement in communication?
./english/375.txt:166:But first I need to clear up a misunderstanding. One of the earlier contributors asked whether the immaterial labour force, those who produce primarily aspects and deal with information etc, if they are going to be the vanguard of the working classes. That is not what I meant. I should have clarified that.
./english/375.txt:169:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 18propose that Microsoft workers in Seattle are going to lead us to the future. It is rather used in an analytical mode to try to recognise how other forms of labour are being transformed, how industry is being informationalised. Even questions of agriculture have much more to do with information. Questions about seeds are questions about information. So various sectors of the economy are becoming informationalised. But there cannot be a hegemony in a political sense of informational workers.
./english/375.txt:188:When 'Empire' says the informational workers are now the ‘hegemonic layer’ I interpret that as meaning we have a movement that has come from people who have slightly less hard work than most people, have more time to think, more time to get together at meetings, more time to demonstrate, to organise and so forth and do the things we do, which is all right. But then we say ‘we are the elite’ and we can ignore the rest of people. And when people say the working class approach ingress the question of women, the fact is that women are being drawn into paid labour at the same time as they have to carry the burden of child care. The contradictory feature of capitalism is that by drawing them into waged labour it makes them more amenable to forms of collective organisation than ever before. And we have to confront this question.
./english/376.txt:25:1. Voice clear and united opposition to the privatisation of information and communication
./english/376.txt:30:2. Articulate clear alternatives to the privatisation of information and communication:
./english/376.txt:32:Promote communication as a human right and as a public good; promote and protect non-commercial, non-profit information, communication, and media systems (while taking care to avoid monopoly control by the state); promote regulation at international, national, and local levels to block the concentration of media ownership in the hands of the multinational conglomerates; promote alternatives to intellectual property rights including limiting such rights to individuals (not corporations); promote the knowledge commons, fair use, and copyright exemptions for poor countries; promote free and open source software; advance the discourse and practice of the global justice movement in taking the battle against neo-liberalism to the field of communication systems, and demand communication systems that serve people before profits.
./english/376.txt:36:Denounce the militarisation of communications, the use of information warfare, the rise of the regime of electronic surveillance, the role of U.S.-based media conglomerates in promoting war and then reaping the spoils--these same conglomerates that promote war include arms manufacturers, and later receive lucrative contracts to 'rebuild' telecom infrastructure and systems.
./english/376.txt:40:Take the decision-making out of the closed rooms of politicians and the corporate sector and into a truly public forum. Create a space or spaces where civil society truly has a diversity of voices in the discussion on what media and information technologies should be, with full participation beyond a rhetorical nod.
./english/376.txt:44:Mainstream all these groups throughout government, civil society, the private sector, multilateral bodies and processes related to information and communication, with adequate funding and mechanisms for participation.
./english/376.txt:59:[This list is currently mostly limited to European and U.S. events. Please circulate information about other relevant events on
./english/376.txt:103:>>World Summit on the Information Society
./english/377.txt:10:Brinda Karat, general secretary of the AIDWA, speaking on a panel discussion on TV, referring to the gathering at the Asian Social Forum, said they are resisting the “Empire”. Indeed the gathering of 14,000 persons in Hyderabad, of whom unusually almost half if not more were dalits, and a good proportion of women, apart from those who work with the rights of the most oppressed and excluded, could be seen as a defining moment for the ‘Empire to strike back’ on many counts. As an expression of the vitality of the numerous identities, like dalits, displaced persons, unorganised workers and their ability to share a common space. As an expression of the widespread understanding of the international order, revealing the fact that information on the ‘big picture’ has reached the remote, thus justifying or affirming the value of forums and networks which have worked hard to carry the message of where and how the increasing pressures on dignity and survival are coming from. As a quest for alternatives to the current political and economic regimes and the theories that back them up. And, last but not the least, evidence that civil society has developed the mode and skills to hold international or world conferences outside of the UN’s initiative; an important step forward, as the UN world conferences are beginning to become counterproductive as the conservative forces and the unipolar world debases them.
./english/379.txt:16:As the third millennium unfolds, one of the most dramatic technological and economic revolutions in history is advancing a set of processes that are changing everything from the ways that people work to the ways that they communicate with each other and spend their leisure time. The technological revolution centres on computer, information, communication and multimedia technologies. These are key aspects of the production of a new economy, described as postindustrial, post-Fordist and postmodern, accompanied by a networked society and cyberspace, and the juggernaut of globalization. There are, of course, furious debates about how to describe the Great Transformation of the contemporary epoch, whether it is positive and negative, and what are the political prospects for democratization and radical social transformation.[1]
./english/379.txt:20:In this paper, I will engage some issues involving globalization, technological revolution and the alleged rise of a new economy, networked society and cyberspace in relationship to the problematic of revolution and the prospects for a radical democratic or socialist transformation of society. Globalization and the rise of a new computer and information technology-based economy and society is interpreted in both popular and academic literature as a revolution in which new technologies are transforming every mode of life from how individuals do research to how people communicate and interact socially. There is some truth in this notion, but it is also true that the technological revolution perpetuates the interests of the dominant economic and political powers, intensifies divisions between haves and have nots, and is a defining feature of a new and improved form of global technocapitalism.
./english/379.txt:28:As to whether globalization renders revolution in the classical Marxian tradition obsolete, I would argue that much significant political struggle today, especially resistance to globalization, is mediated by technopolitics. The use of computer and information technology is becoming a normalized aspect of politics, just as the broadcasting media were some decades ago. Deploying computer-mediated technology for technopolitics, however, opens new terrains of political struggle for voices and groups excluded from the mainstream media and thus increases potential for resistance and intervention by oppositional groups. Hence, if revolution is to have a future in the contemporary era it must incorporate technopolitics as part of its strategy, conceiving of technopolitics, however, as an arm of struggle and not an end in and of itself.
./english/379.txt:42:What is new about computer and information technology mediated politics is that information can be instantly communicated to large numbers of individuals throughout the world who are connected via computer networks. The internet is also potentially interactive, allowing discussion, debate and on-line and archived discussion. The internet is increasingly multimedia in scope, allowing the dissemination of images, sounds, video and other cultural forms. Moreover, the use of computer technology and networks is becoming a normalized aspect of politics, just as the broadcasting media were some decades ago. The use of computer-mediated technology for technopolitics, however, opens new terrains of political struggle for voices and groups excluded from the mainstream media and thus increases potential for intervention by oppositional groups, potentially expanding the scope of democratization.
./english/379.txt:46:Given the extent to which capital and its logic of commodification have colonized ever more areas of everyday life in recent years, it is somewhat astonishing that cyberspace is by and large decommodified for large numbers of people -- at least in the overdeveloped countries like the United States. On the other hand, using computers, transforming information into data-packets that can be sent through networks, and hooking oneself up to computer networks oneself, involves a form of commodified activity, inserting the user in networks and technology that are at the forefront of the information revolution and global restructuring of capital. Thus the internet is highly ambiguous from the perspective of commodification, as from other perspectives.
./english/379.txt:50:Nonetheless, in many areas of the globe, government and educational institutions, and some businesses, provide free internet access and in some cases free computers, or at least workplace access. With flat-rate monthly phone bills (which do not exist, however, in much of the world), one can have access to a cornucopia of information and entertainment on the internet for free, one of the few decommodified spaces in the ultracommodified world of technocapitalism.[2] So far, the åinformation superhighwayπ is a freeway, although powerful interests would like to make it a toll road. Indeed, commercial interests are quickly converting it into a giant mall, thus commercializing the internet and transforming it into a megaconsumer spectacle (see Schiller 1999).
./english/379.txt:54:Obviously, much of the world does not even have telephone service, much less computers, and there are vast discrepancies in terms of who has access to computers and who participates in the technological revolution and cyberdemocracy today. As a result, there have been passionate debates over the extent and nature of the ådigital divideπ between the information haves and have-nots. Critics of new technologies and cyberspace repeat incessantly that it is by and large young, white, middle- or upper-class males who are the dominant players in the cyberspaces of the present. While this is true, statistics and surveys indicate that many more women, people of colour, seniors and individuals from marginalized groups are becoming increasingly active.[3] In addition, computers may become part of the standard household consumer package in the overdeveloped world, although studies are emerging that indicate that large numbers of individuals claim that they have no intention of purchasing computers and using the internet. Yet in the light of the importance of computers for work, social life, entertainment and education, no doubt growing amounts of people will continue to go on-line. Further, there are plans afoot to wire the entire world with satellites that would make the internet and new communication technologies accessible to people who do not now even have a telephone, TV or even electricity, and wireless, interactive technologies are touted as the next stage of networked communication.[4]
./english/379.txt:70:Seeing the progressive potential of advanced communication technologies in revolutionary struggle, Frantz Fanon (1967) described the central role of the radio in the Algerian revolution, and Lenin stressed the importance of film in spreading communist ideology after the Bolshevik revolution. Audiotapes were used to advance the insurrection in Iran and to disseminate alternative information by political movements throughout the world (see Downing 1984 and 2000). The Tienanman Square democracy movement in China and various groups struggling against the remnants of Stalinism in the former communist bloc used computer bulletin boards and networks, as well as a variety of forms of communications, to promote their movements. Anti-NAFTA groups made extensive use of the new communications technology (see Brenner 1994 and Fredericks 1994). Such multinational networking and distribution of information failed to stop NAFTA, but created alliances useful for the politics of the future. As Nick Dyer-Witheford notes:
./english/379.txt:78:Thus, using new technologies to link information and practice and to advance oppositional politics is neither extraneous to political battles nor merely utopian. Even if immediate gains are not won, often the information circulated or the alliances formed can have material effects. There are, moreover, striking examples of how internet-centred organizing campaigns effectively worked against the institutions and corporations of capitalist globalization. Successful struggles against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in 1995-1998 involved websites and e-mail campaigns against the US-supported effort to develop binding rules on how states treat foreign investors and list-serves linking the groups struggling against the åagreementπ. Obviously, the internet alone did not defeat this initiative for capitalist globalization, but it enabled the non-government organizations fighting against it to circulate information, share resources and link their struggles (see Smith and Smythe 2000).
./english/379.txt:82:There have been many campaigns against the excesses of capitalist global corporations such as Nike and McDonald's. Hackers attacked Nike's site in June 2000 and substituted a åglobal justiceπ message for Nike's corporate hype. Many anti-Nike web-sites and list-serves have emerged, helping groups struggling against Nike's labour practices circulate information and organize movements against Nike, which have forced them to modify their labour practices.[7]
./english/379.txt:86:A British group that created an anti-McDonald's website against the junk food corporation and then distributed the information through digital and print media has also received significant attention. This site was developed by supporters of two British activists, Helen Steel and Dave Morris, who were sued by McDonald's for distributing leaflets denouncing the corporation's low wages, advertising practices, involvement in deforestation, cruel treatment of animals and patronage of an unhealthy diet. The activists counterattacked and with help from supporters, organized a McLibel campaign, assembled a McSpotlight website with a tremendous amount of information criticizing the corporation, mobilizing experts to testify and confirm their criticisms. The three-year civil trial, Britain's longest ever, ended ambiguously on June 19, 1997, with the judge defending some of McDonald's claims against the activists, while substantiating some of the activists' criticisms (Vidal 1997: 299-315). The case created unprecedented bad publicity for McDonald's which was disseminated throughout the world via internet websites, mailing lists and discussion groups. The McLibel/McSpotlight group claims that their website was accessed over 15 million times and was visited over two million times in the month of the verdict alone (Vidal 1997: 326). The Guardian reported that the site åclaimed to be the most comprehensive source of information on a multinational corporation ever assembledπ and was part of one of the more successful anticorporate campaigns (22 February 1996; www.mcspotlight.org).
./english/379.txt:90:Anti-Nike, McDonalds and other websites critical of global capitalist corporations have disseminated a tremendous amount of information. Many labour organizations are also beginning to make use of the new technologies. The Clean Clothes Campaign, a movement started by Dutch women in 1990 in support of Filipino garment workers, has supported strikes throughout the world, exposing exploitative working conditions (see www.cleanclothes.org/1/index.html). In 1997, activists involved in Korean workers strikes and the Merseyside dock strike in England used websites to promote international solidarity (for the latter see www.gn.apc.org/ labournet/docks/). Jesse Drew (1998) has extensively interviewed representatives of major US labour organizations to see how they were making use of new communication technologies and how these instruments helped them with their struggles; many of his union activists indicated how useful email, faxes, websites and the internet have been to their struggles and, in particular, indicated how such technopolitics helped organize demonstrations or strikes in favour of striking English or Australian dockworkers, as when US longshoremen organized strikes to boycott ships carrying material loaded by scab workers. Technopolitics thus helps labour create global alliances in order to combat increasingly transnational corporations.[8]
./english/379.txt:94:On the whole, labour organizations, such as the North South Dignity of Labor group, note that computer networks are useful for organizing and distributing information, but cannot replace print media, which are more accessible to many of their members, face-to-face meetings and traditional forms of political action. Thus, the challenge is to articulate one's communications politics with actual movements and struggles so that cyberpolitics is an arm of real battles rather than their replacement or substitute. The most efficacious internet projects have indeed intersected with activist movements encompassing campaigns to free political prisoners, boycotts of corporate projects, and various labour and even revolutionary struggles, as noted above.
./english/379.txt:108:The Seattle protests had some immediate consequences. The day after the demonstrators made good on their promise to shut down the WTO negotiations, Bill Clinton gave a speech endorsing the concept of labour rights enforceable by trade sanctions, thus effectively making impossible any agreement during the Seattle meetings. In addition, at the World Economic Forum in Davos a month later there was much discussion of how concessions were necessary on labour and the environment if consensus over globalization and free trade were to be possible. Importantly, the issues of overcoming divisions between the information-rich and the information-poor, and improving the lot of the disenfranchised and oppressed, bringing these groups the benefits of globalization, were also seriously discussed at the meeting and in the media.
./english/379.txt:116:The movement against capitalist globalization used the internet to organize mass demonstrations and to disseminate information to the world concerning the policies of the institutions of capitalist globalization. The events made clear that the protestors were not against globalization per se, but were against neoliberal globalization, opposing specific policies and institutions that produce intensified exploitation of labour, environmental devastation, growing divisions among social classes and the undermining of democracy. The emerging anti-globalization from above movements are locating these problems in the context of opposition to a restructuring of a neoliberal market capitalism on a worldwide basis for maximum profit with zero accountability. The anti-capitalist movements, by contrast, have made clear the need for democratization, regulation, rules and globalization in the interests of people and not profit.
./english/379.txt:152:The internet is thus a contested terrain, used by the left, right and centre to advance their own agendas and interests. The political battles of the future may well be fought in the streets, factories, parliaments and other sites of past conflicts, but all political struggle is now mediated by media, computer and information technologies and increasingly will be so. Those interested in the politics and culture of the future should therefore be clear on the important role of the new public spheres and act accordingly.
./english/379.txt:156:Active citizens thus need to acquire new forms of technological literacy to intervene in the new public spheres of the media and information society. In addition to traditional literacy skills centred upon reading, writing and speaking, engaged citizens and public intellectuals need to learn to use the new technologies to engage the public and participate in democratic discussion and debate.[12] Computer and digital technologies thus expand the field and capacities of the intellectual as well as the possibilities for political intervention. During the Age of Big Media, critical-oppositional intellectuals were by and large marginalized, unable to gain access to the major sites of mass communication. With the decentralization of the internet, however, new possibilities for public intellectuals exist to reach broad audiences. It is therefore the responsibility of the active citizen to creatively work with these new technologies, as well as to critically analyze the diverse developments of the cyberculture. This requires dialectical thinking that discriminates between the benefits and the costs, the upsides and downsides, of new technologies and devising ways that the technological revolution can be used to promote positive values like education, democracy, enlightenment and ecology. Active citizens thus face new challenges, and the future of democracy depends in part on whether new technologies will be used for domination or democratization, and whether each individual will sit on the sidelines or participate in the development of new democratic public spheres.
./english/379.txt:160:I have not discussed the ways that technopolitics could be used to struggle not only against capitalism, but for socialism. I would argue that socialist ideas are still relevant to the politics of the contemporary era and that in particular Karl Marx's ideas, for from being obsolete, are still essential in developing critical theories of globalization, technology and capitalism in the current conjuncture (see Kellner 1995). It could be that only a socialist politics could overcome the digital divide, making accessible to all the benefits of the technological revolution. A socialist government could provide wireless communications in underdeveloped societies making possible access to the internet and use of new communications and information technology even to societies that are not yet wired, or whose telephone systems extend only to the privileged. Interestingly, societies like Korea, Japan and the Philippines make more extensive use of wireless communications than the US, with wireless messaging systems and internet access made use of by the working classes as forms of popular communication.
./english/379.txt:176:[3] In August 1999, a widely-publicized US Department of Commerce report contended that the ådigital divideπ between the information haves and have-nots was growing; by November, there were critiques that the survey data was severely out of date and that more reliable statistics indicated that the divide was lessening, that more women, people of color, and seniors were connected to the internet, and that more than half of the United States was connected by late 1999. In 2000, several surveys indicated that the digital divide was mainly structured by class and education, and not by race. One should, however, be suspicious of statistics concerning internet access and use, as powerful interests are involved who manipulate figures for their own purposes. Yet there is no doubt that a ådigital divideπ exists and various politicians, groups and corporations are exploiting this problem for their own interests.
./english/379.txt:182:[6] There was, however, an assassination of Zapatista supporters by local death squads in early 1998 -- which once again triggered significant internet-generated pressures on the Mexican government to prosecute the perpetrators. Likewise, there has been ongoing government repression and sporadic violence, although, so far, the kind of massive repression of the movement favoured by many in the Mexican military and political establishment has been avoided. I should also mention here the incredibly conflicting interpretations of the Zapatista movement by its supporters and detractors, and the problem that it has been given iconic significance with all the attendant mythologization in the contemporary era. For my purposes, it represents a strong example of how new technologies can be used as an arm of political struggle and how computer-mediated technologies can help generate global support networks and circulate information of revolutionary struggles and movements.
./english/380.txt:13:Moreover, advocates of a postmodern break in history argue that developments in transnational capitalism are producing a new global historical configuration of post-Fordism, or postmodernism as an emergent cultural logic of capitalism (Harvey 1989; Soja 1989; Jameson 1991; and Gottdiener 1995). Others define the emergent global economy and culture as a "network society" grounded in new communications and information technology (Castells 1996, 1997, and 1998). For others, globalization marks the triumph of capitalism and its market economy (see apologists such as Fukuyama 1992 and Friedman 1999 who perceive this process as positive, while others portray it as negative, such as Mander and Goldsmith 1996; Eisenstein 1998; and Robins and Webster 1999). Some theorists see the emergence of a new transnational ruling elite and the universalization of consumerism (Sklair 2001), while others stress global fragmentation of “the clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1996). Driving “post” discourses into novel realms of theory and politics, Hardt and Negri (2000) present the emergence of “Empire” as producing emergent forms of sovereignty, economy, culture, and political struggle that open the new millennium to an unforeseeable and unpredictable flow of novelties, surprises, and upheavals.
./english/380.txt:33: For critical social theory, globalization involves both capitalist markets and sets of social relations and flows of commodities, capital, technology, ideas, forms of culture, and people across national boundaries via a global networked society (see Castells 1996, 1997, and 1998 and Held, et al 1999). The transmutations of technology and capital work together to create a new globalized and interconnected world. A technological revolution involving the creation of a computerized network of communication, transportation, and exchange is the presupposition of a globalized economy, along with the extension of a world capitalist market system that is absorbing ever more areas of the world and spheres of production, exchange, and consumption into its orbit. The technological revolution presupposes global computerized networks and the free movement of goods, information, and peoples across national boundaries. Hence, the Internet and global computer networks make possible globalization by producing a technological infrastructure for the global economy. Computerized networks, satellite-communication systems, and the software and hardware that link together and facilitate the global economy depend on breakthroughs in microphysics. Technoscience has generated transistors, increasingly powerful and sophisticated computer chips, integrated circuits, high-tech communication systems, and a technological revolution that provides an infrastructure for the global economy and society (see Gilder 1989 and 2000; Kaku 1997; and Best and Kellner 2001).
./english/380.txt:45:For postmodern theorists such as Baudrillard (1993), technologies of information and social reproduction (e.g. simulation) have permeated every aspect of society and created a new social environment. In the movement toward postmodernity, Baudrillard claims that humanity has left behind reality and modern conceptions, as well as the world of modernity. This postmodern adventure is marked by an implosion of technology and the human, which is generating a new posthuman species and postmodern world (see Baudrillard 1993 and the analyses in Kellner 1989b and 1994). For other less extravagant theorists of the technological revolution, the human species is evolving into a novel postindustrial technosociety, culture, and condition where technology, knowledge, and information are the axial or organizing principles (Bell 1976).
./english/380.txt:53:Few legitimating theories of the information and technological revolution, however, contextualize the structuring, implementation, marketing, and use of new technologies in the context of the vicissitudes of contemporary capitalism. The ideologues of the information society act as if technology were an autonomous force and either neglect to theorize the coevolution of capital and technology, or use the advancements of technology to legitimate market capitalism (i.e. Gilder 1989 and 1999; Gates 1995 and 1999; Friedman 1999). Theorists, like Kevin Kelly, for instance, the executive editor of Wired, think that humanity has entered a post-capitalist society that constitutes an original and innovative stage of history and economy where previous categories do not apply (1994 and 1998; see the critique in Best and Kellner 1999). Or, like Bill Gates (1995 and 1999), defenders of the “new economy” imagine computer and information technologies producing a "friction-free capitalism," perceived as a highly creative form of capitalism that goes beyond its previous contradictions, forms, and limitations.
./english/380.txt:69: In particular, an economic determinism and reductionism that merely depicts globalization as the continuation of market capitalism fails to comprehend the new forms and modes of capitalism itself which are based on novel developments in science, technology, culture, and everyday life. Likewise, technological determinism fails to note how the new technologies and new economy are part of a global restructuring of capitalism and are not autonomous forces that themselves are engendering a new society and economy which breaks with the previous mode of social organization. The postindustrial society is sometimes referred to as the "knowledge society," or "information society," in which knowledge and information are given roles more predominant than earlier days (see the survey and critique in Webster 1995). It is now obvious that the knowledge and information sectors are increasingly important domains of our contemporary moment and that therefore the theories of Daniel Bell and other postindustrial theorists are not as ideological and far off the mark as many of his critics on the left once argued. But in order to avoid the technological determinism and idealism of many forms of this theory, one should theorize the information or knowledge "revolution" as part and parcel of a new form of technocapitalism marked by a synthesis of capital and technology.
./english/380.txt:73: Some poststructuralist theories that stress the complexity of globalization exaggerate the disjunctions and autonomous flows of capital, technology, culture, people, and goods, thus a critical theory of globalization grounds globalization in a theory of capitalist restructuring and technological revolution. To paraphrase Max Horkheimer, whoever wants to talk about capitalism, must talk about globalization, and it is impossible to theorize globalization without talking about the restructuring of capitalism. The term "technocapitalism" is useful to describe the synthesis of capital and technology in the present organization of society (Kellner 1989a). Unlike theories of postmodernity (i.e. Baudrillard), or the knowledge and information society, which often argue that technology is the new organizing principle of society, the concept of technocapitalism points to both the increasingly important role of technology and the enduring primacy of capitalist relations of production. In an era of unrestrained capitalism, it would be difficult to deny that contemporary societies are still organized around production and capital accumulation, and that capitalist imperatives continue to dominate production, distribution, and consumption, as well as other cultural, social and political domains.[3] Workers remain exploited by capitalists and capital persists as the hegemonic force -- more so than ever after the collapse of communism.
./english/380.txt:77: Moreover, with the turn toward neo-liberalism as a hegemonic ideology and practice, the market and its logic comes to triumph over public goods and the state is subservient to economic imperatives and logic. Yet the term technocapitalism points to a new configuration of capitalist society in which technical and scientific knowledge, computerization and automation of labor, and information technology and multimedia play a role in the process of production analogous to the function of human labor power, mechanization of the labor process, and machines in an earlier era of capitalism. This process is generating novel modes of societal organization, forms of culture and everyday life, conflicts, and modes of struggle.
./english/380.txt:97: The terrorist acts on the United States on September 11 and subsequent Terror War dramatically disclose the downsides of globalization, the ways that global flows of technology, goods, information, ideologies, and people can have destructive as well as productive effects. The disclosure of powerful anti-Western terrorist networks shows that globalization divides the world as it unifies, that it produces enemies as it incorporates participants. The events disclose explosive contradictions and conflicts at the heart of globalization and that the technologies of information, communication, and transportation that facilitate globalization can also be used to undermine and attack it, and generate instruments of destruction as well as production[k1] .[4]
./english/380.txt:105: The use of powerful technologies as weapons of destruction also discloses current asymmetries of power and emergent forms of terrorism and war, as the new millennium exploded into dangerous conflicts and interventions. As technologies of mass destruction become more available and dispersed, perilous instabilities have emerged that have elicited policing measures to stem the flow of movements of people and goods across borders and internally. In particular, the USA Patriot Act has led to repressive measures that are replacing the spaces of the open and free information society with new forms of surveillance, policing, and repression (see Kellner, forthcoming).
./english/380.txt:117: Consequently, I want to argue that in order to properly theorize globalization one needs to conceptualize several sets of contradictions generated by globalization's combination of technological revolution and restructuring of capital, which in turn generate tensions between capitalism and democracy, and “haves” and “have nots.” Within the world economy, globalization involves the proliferation of the logic of capital, but also the spread of democracy in information, finance, investing, and the diffusion of technology (see Friedman 1999 and Hardt and Negri 2000). Globalization is thus a contradictory amalgam of capitalism and democracy, in which the logic of capital and the market system enter ever more arenas of global life, even as democracy spreads and more political regions and spaces of everyday life are being contested by democratic demands and forces. But the overall process is contradictory. Sometimes globalizing forces promote democracy and sometimes inhibit it, thus either equating capitalism and democracy, or simply opposing them, are problematical. These tensions are especially evident, as I will argue, in the domain of the Internet and the expansion of new realms of technologically-mediated communication, information, and politics.
./english/380.txt:181: The Seattle protests had some immediate consequences. The day after the demonstrators made good on their promise to shut down the WTO negotiations, Bill Clinton gave a speech endorsing the concept of labor rights enforceable by trade sanctions, thus effectively making impossible any agreement and consensus during the Seattle meetings. In addition, at the World Economic Forum in Davos a month later there was much discussion of how concessions were necessary on labor and the environment if consensus over globalization and free trade were to be possible. Importantly, the issue of overcoming divisions between the information rich and poor, and improving the lot of the disenfranchised and oppressed, bringing these groups the benefits of globalization, were also seriously discussed at the meeting and in the media.
./english/380.txt:197: In particular, the movement against capitalist globalization used the Internet to organize mass demonstrations and to disseminate information to the world concerning the policies of the institutions of capitalist globalization. The events made clear that protestors were not against globalization per se, but were against neo-liberal and capitalist globalization, opposing specific policies and institutions that produce intensified exploitation of labor, environmental devastation, growing divisions among the social classes, and the undermining of democracy. The emerging anti-globalization-from-above movements are contextualizing these problems in the framework of a restructuring of capitalism on a worldwide basis for maximum profit with zero accountability and have made clear the need for democratization, regulation, rules, and globalization in the interests of people and not profit.
./english/380.txt:229: The Internet is thus a contested terrain, used by Left, Right, and Center to promote their own agendas and interests. The political battles of the future may well be fought in the streets, factories, parliaments, and other sites of past struggle, but politics is already mediated by broadcast, computer, and information technologies and will increasingly be so in the future. Those interested in the politics and culture of the future should therefore be clear on the important role of the new public spheres and intervene accordingly, while critical pedagogues have the responsibility of teaching students the skills that will enable them to participate in the politics and struggles of the present and future.
./english/380.txt:260: Consequently, although there is admittedly a lot of mystification in the discourse of the postmodern, it signals emphatically the shifts and ruptures in our era, the novelties and originalities, and dramatizes the mutations in culture, subjectivities, and theory which Castells and other theorists of globalization or the information society gloss over. The discourse of the postmodern in relation to analysis of contemporary culture and society is just jargon, however, unless it is rooted in analysis of the global restructuring of capitalism and analysis of the scientific-technological revolution that is part and parcel of it.[14]
./english/380.txt:272: Further, there is utopian potential in the new technologies as well as the possibility for increased domination and the hegemony of capital. While the first generation of computers were large mainframe systems controlled by big government and big business, later generations of "personal computers" and networks created a more decentralized situation in which ever more individuals own their own computers and use them for their own projects and goals. A new generation of wireless communication could enable areas of the world that do not even have electricity to participate in the communication and information revolution of the emergent global era. This would require, of course, something like a Marshall Plan for the developing world which would necessitate help with disseminating technologies that would address problems of world hunger, disease, illiteracy, and poverty.
./english/380.txt:276: In relation to education, the spread and distribution of information and communication technology signifies the possibility of openings of opportunities for research and interaction not previously open to students who did not have the privilege of access to major research libraries or institutions. The Internet opens more information and knowledge to more people than any previous institution in history, although it has its problems and limitations. Moreover, the Internet enables individuals to participate in discussions, to circulate their ideas and work, that were previously closed off to many excluded groups and individuals.
./english/380.txt:280: A progressive reconstruction of education that is done in the interests of democratization would demand access to new technologies for all, helping to overcome the so-called digital divide and divisions of the “haves” and “have nots” (see Kellner 2000). Expanding democratic and multicultural reconstruction of education forces educators and citizens to confront the challenge of the digital divide, in which there are divisions between information and technology “haves” and “have nots,” just as there are class, gender, and race divisions in every sphere of the existing constellations of society and culture. Although the latest surveys of the digital divide indicate that the key indicators are class and education and not race and gender, nonetheless making computers a significant force of democratization of education and society will require significant investment and programs to assure that everyone receives the training, literacies, and tools necessary to properly function in a high-tech global economy and culture.[15]
./english/380.txt:284: Hence, a critical theory of globalization presents globalization as a force of capitalism and democracy, as a set of forces imposed from above in conjunction with resistance from below. In this optic, globalization generates new conflicts, new struggles, and new crises, which in part can be seen as resistance to capitalist logic. In the light of the neo-liberal projects to dismantle the Welfare State, colonize the public sphere, and control globalization, it is up to citizens and activists to create new public spheres, politics, and pedagogies, and to use the new technologies to discuss what kinds of society people today want and to oppose the society against which people resist and struggle. This involves, minimally, demands for more education, health care, welfare, and benefits from the state, and to struggle to create a more democratic and egalitarian society. But one cannot expect that generous corporations and a beneficent state are going to make available to citizens the bounties and benefits of the globalized new information economy. Rather, it is up to individuals and groups to promote democratization and progressive social change.
./english/383.txt:126:International Organizations; 2) Science/Technology and Information/Communications; 3)
./english/383.txt:170:Ismail Serageldin and Nancy Birdsall. Further information and an executive summary may be
./english/385.txt:23:The problem of unfamiliarity with the WTO was aggravated by the fact that black and Latino communities across the U.S. lack internet access compared to many white communities. A July 1999 federal survey showed that among Americans earning $15,000-$35,000 a year, more than 32 percent of white families owned computers but only 19 percent of black and Latino families. In that same income range, only 9 percent of African American and Latino homes had internet access compared to 27 percent of white families. So information about WTO and all the plans for Seattle did not reach many people of color.
./english/389.txt:2:Putting People First in the Information Society
./english/389.txt:9:The World Summit on the Information Society proposes to develop “a common vision and understanding of the information society and the adoption of a declaration and plan of action.” A vision of society must necessarily have people at its center and an understanding of the fundamental rights and needs of humankind. The goals of such a society should be based on principles of social, political and economic justice.
./english/389.txt:11:Technology and infrastructure are the means to human development and not an end in themselves. Any approach that reduces the information society to the tools and channels that store and transmit information, or that relegates citizens to the status of mere users of technology will be unable to achieve the goals of the summit.
./english/389.txt:13:As we consider the nature of the information society, we need to recognize that what matters is human interaction and the exchange of information and content. Communications should facilitate active citizenship, that is participation of all individuals and communities in the public space. As such, it is communication and information–sharing that should be the focus of the Summit.
./english/389.txt:22:• The human right to communicate be considered across all thematic areas, including freedom of expression and information and the right to privacy;
./english/389.txt:25:• Community controlled information infrastructure be prioritized (e.g: free software, fiber networks, wireless technologies, non profit ISPs, interfaces for oral cultures);
./english/389.txt:26:• The variety of new and traditional information and communication technologies and media be included in all discussions of this Summit;
./english/392.txt:16:selected. But in my understanding, all this is very relevant information for those of us interested
./english/392.txt:19:process in the country. So I hope that we will be able to get this information at the January 9−
./english/393.txt:56:Information Note that it issued at the close of the Forum. While the principles contained in this
./english/394.txt:83:networks and of information and communication technologies today – therefore think of the
./english/394.txt:237:informed and there was not a vigorous enough information campaign to make sure that all those
./english/394.txt:253:both for his searching comments and questions and the information he made available to me on the history
./english/395.txt:213:available in many parts of the Forum and crucial information available in several languages, and
./english/395.txt:253:exchange of experience, of strategy, of information, and no larger culture of being an international
./english/395.txt:639:sometimes compulsive information-swapping. What emerged on the streets of Seattle and
./english/396.txt:48:The right to information, the exercise of the freedom of expression and the human right to communicate through the media, access, the appropriation and use of the new technologies, all constitute, at the present, rights denied to the extensive majority of the women.
./english/396.txt:62:· knowledge and information are at the center of the development,
./english/396.txt:64:· access to information is the motor of the economy,
./english/396.txt:82:· information and communications networks are concentrated in a few countries (25% of the countries of the world do not have sufficient fixed capacity of lines for the development of the new technologies, since is calculated that in those countries, the capacity is barely one telephone per 100 persons.),
./english/396.txt:86:· the population of only 55 countries, use 99% of the technologies of the information, as are services, applications and goods.
./english/396.txt:94:We need to transcend the present context, and to do it extensively, and that is the power of the role of radio in Internet. The development of our Web Radio in cyberspace showed us that the transience that characterized radio repeated itself in this new venue. However, Web Radio provided infinite possibilities for information and sound file storage that counteracted the apparent characteristic of immediacy, making interactivity an essential element where the news and information can be heard over and over again.
./english/396.txt:102:One of its main characteristics is that seeks to develop new forms of communications, contributing to change the flow if information in the world order, providing to the world order access to the voices and perspective of women through the combination of traditional radio and new technologies such as computers and telematic, in order to access a new concept of radio.
./english/396.txt:118:FIRE is about an international radio that broadcasts a critical content that combines sound with text and images with colors with an innovative treatment of the information. This interactive concept of radio is the creative process of a group of women that learn day to day to take advantage of the technological resources, in order to open channels that enable conversations within the networks and that allow women to create new forms of inclusion and disclosure of issues and perspectives for the sake of advancing their own human rights and those of all of humanity.
./english/396.txt:172:Through FIRE and CIMAC, the Beijing + 5 Latin American Regional Women’s Articulation developed a media initiative during the Special Session of the General Assembly of the U.N. It consisted of the creation of a regional electronic network of press releases based on coverage of the events in New York and on the FIRE radio broadcasts on Internet. They were sent out on a daily basis to a 250 e-mail list of networks of activists, communicators and journalists throughout the region. Receivers of the information multiplied the news in local radios, newspapers, magazines, television and women’s networks and organizations.
./english/396.txt:176:FIRE covered the meeting in coordination with women’s communications organizations in the region, such as: ISIS Chile, Women’s Feature Service (SEM) Costa Rica, the Latin-American Press Agency (ALAI) Ecuador, Red ADA Bolivia, Flora Tristán and the Center of Communication and Information of the Woman (CIMAC) in Mexico. Together we develop the following media initiatives:
./english/396.txt:230:More than 60 reception reports from all parts of the world were received for FIRE. One of the main characteristics of almost all the letters is that in them, men and women talk about what they did to re-forward, re-broadcast, re-publish and re-distributed the information in venues in their countries, multiplying the information through radio, press written, magazines, TV and in electronic networks beyond the beyond, like the airwaves themselves.
./english/396.txt:258:Women around the world are invited to send their material about the issue for broadcast by FIRE on that day, FIRE produces its own programs by inviting women to come to the station or call by phone to be interviewed, communicators and journalists are invited to listen in, record the sound files and write stories for their own venues or re-broadcast the sound files and reports in their own local radio programs around the world. Radio stations and other webcasting initiatives are invited to link live in a simultaneous way. The Internet audience is also invited to both listen in and write to FIRE and to the women they hear on FIRE, and especially to multiply the information they gather.
./english/396.txt:262:The concept with which FIRE has built these Marathons is three fold: feminist mobilization, thematic focalization and multimedia multiplication. Marathons are a contribution for women and feminists to mobilize to portray to a global audience, their voices about agenda setting, experiences and perspectives; they also become a feminist informational focal point about special issues (portal in sound); it also contributes to distribute the information and amplify the voices of women about the issues in an almost never ending multiplying effect (like the airwaves themselves) because it uses the webcasts, not as a venues alone, but as source for re-distribution to other media venues.
./english/396.txt:439:"The tendency of concentration of what is called the "world data processing society" is given by the rich countries, by which the dissemination is not determined only by the changes in technology, but should be understood in the specific structural and institutional context". (Guillian Marcelle, Coordinator of the Gender Equity working group of the African Information Society.)
./english/396.txt:453:· Unidirectional transfer of information and technology from North- South.
./english/396.txt:459:· Globalization of the economy, centered in the power of the information.
./english/396.txt:471:The role of new information and communications technologies in the world is ever more acknowledged because of the role they play in economics, politics, and the social and cultural spheres.
./english/396.txt:483:According to the United Nations Human Development Report of 1999 (pp. 62) women constituted 38% of the users of goods and services of the new information technologies in the United States, 25% in Brazil, 17% in Japan and South Africa, 16% in Russia, only 7% in China and barely 4% in it Arab countries.
./english/396.txt:569:It is a “multimedia radio” in permanent construction, where the oral language will bring its meaning to the information and communications technology in the process of exchange and navigation in the Internet, while at the same time allowing women to be there in that venue, both as producers and users of its resources.
./english/396.txt:587:The international women’s movement and women’s media through their networks use the FIRE broadcasts and multimedia web features to inform themselves about various issues and events, through direct listening and reception but also by redistributing the information to other media networks, and republishing the content in other media such as websites, electronic and paper magazines, newspapers, radio and television stations. In addition, as feminist activists and journalists, FIRE has been featured in many media productions and outlets worldwide, focusing on their unique strategy of producing Internet radio from women’s perspectives.
./english/396.txt:598:(From the Dominican Republic): Dear FIRE: We are the Church Women’s Foundation of Santiago de los Caballeros, in the Dominican Republic. We have been receiving the information that you have sent to us, and it is excellent. We are studying it, it is outstanding. Here we have been meeting and working with this material. You have really helped to motivate us in our work. A warm greeting from all of us, Ana Rosa Betances, Margarita Santos, Gilberte Marcoux, Dominican Republic.
./english/396.txt:600:(From Uruguay): Dear FIRE: We have been receiving daily your information, and appreciate it greatly. It is especially important and valuable for us because of our great distance from these (Beijing +5) activities. Please keep us on your mailing list. Thank you very much. Fondly, Leonor Rodríguez, National Commission of Follow-up, Uruguay)
./english/396.txt:604:(From Costa Rica): A big hug for the 8th of March, I have been thinking today of all the women who are working there. The information that you have been sending out is very valuable and useful for us. When you return to Costa Rica, I hope you will have lots of information about what occurred at the Beijing +5 forum. Here all is well, we are working to organize the next Feminist Encuentro. A big hug, Roxana Arroyo, Agenda Política de Mujeres, Costa Rica.
./english/396.txt:608:(From Venezuela): Dear FIRE: The information that you send out is stupendous. Each time I receive your e-mail, I send it immediately to the Youth Office of the United Nations in Venezuela and also in Mexico, among other groups. Many thanks for the information, and please keep me on your regular list. Thank you very much, Cristina Cansado, Venezuela.
./english/396.txt:622:(From Costa Rica): Hello FIRE, Thanks for the information that you have been sending to us, which we have been sharing with our colleagues here at the Arias Foundation. From Rosalía Camacho, Center for Human Progress, Arias Foundation.
./english/396.txt:628:(From Mexico): Friends: I would greatly appreciate your putting my name and e-mail address on your list for FIRE in order to receive all of the information that you send out. It will be very useful in my community in the State of Mexico in the coordination of volunteer programs for women’s education in my region. Thanks. Gabriela Careaga.
./english/396.txt:656:(From the USA): Dear FIRE editor: I read with interest about your radio programs. I’d like to get a list of the programs you broadcast, and find out whether it might be possible to obtain some of the programs for rebroadcast on the Equal Access channel for Africa, and possibly for Asia. We are currently looking for distance education initiatives on sustainable development issues with which we can partner for our radio channel…the information will be delivered via a new satellite broadcasting system launched by Worldspace Corporation, which has launched satellites over Africa, Asia and next year over Latin America. We particularly are interested in women’s programming, and your programs were recommended to us. Thank you. Kimberly Weichel, Equal Access, USA.
./english/396.txt:703:Journalists worldwide use information from FIRE broadcasts and web page multimedia features for re-publication in their own media outlets. Letters re
./english/398.txt:20:In his observations on how to make the WSF a more coherent movement without making it into another institution Suwit Watnoo of the Forum of the Poor from Thailand said that the various groups coming to the meeting need to have regular information linkages. He called for the regular organizing of more WSF conferences in the coming years and for global mobilization through the WSF on specific issues such as the demand for immediate release of trade union leaders in South Korea.
./english/400.txt:4:School of Information Management, Leeds Metropolitan University
./english/400.txt:5:Forthcoming (2001) as School of Information Management Research in Progress paper
./english/400.txt:7:This paper uses the concept of social netwar to examine some current developments in industrial conflict. The paper briefly introduces the concept of information warfare and provides a context for the discussion of industrial conflict and social netwar by highlighting some recent changes in industrial relations, particularly at a transnational level. This discussion is organised around three themes, echoing Arquilla and Ronfeldt's (1998a, 1998b) framework and applying concepts of social netwar to organisational and tactical aspects of industrial conflict and to the terrain (physical and virtual) in which these conflicts are played out. The discussion frames the presentation of four examples of industrial campaigns conducted by the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM) and some of its affiliated trade unions. While the unifying theme of these examples is the use of the Internet to support the campaigns, the presentation extends to include organisational and the non-virtual tactics used. A concluding discussion reflects both on the value of the concepts of information warfare and social netwar in consideration of industrial conflict and on how such concepts can inform trade union organisation.
./english/400.txt:8:Information Warfare
./english/400.txt:9:The concept of information warfare, along with related ideas such as information operations, netwar and cyberwar, has gained prominence in US strategic and military circles since the early 1990s. The term 'Information warfare' is used in two broad ways. Defined in technological terms, information warfare particularly emphasises vulnerabilities in digital infrastructures to disruption by physical or digital attack (e.g. Boulanger, 1998; Cobb, 1999) and the growing 'information intensity' of battlefield operation (e.g. Libicki, 1998). The term is also used more broadly to analyse emerging types of conflict in an information society through, for example, the use of information in the management of public and adversary perceptions, and the role of information in the organisational aspects of conflict particularly in the nature and organisation of threats from sub- and non-state actors (Rathmell, 1998; Arquila & Ronfeldt, 1998a, 1998b). Many of the concepts associated with information warfare are also now being used in the analysis of conflict in economic, social and personal, as well as military, spheres (Kovacich, 1997; Cronin & Crawford, 1999a;). In corporate settings, for example, use can be found in discussions of competitor intelligence (Cronin & Crawford, 1999b; McCrohan, 1998) and computer security (Boulanger, 1998; Jajodia et al 1999).
./english/400.txt:10:An important feature of information warfare for this paper is that of resource asymmetry - the ability to inflict substantial damage on a conventionally better equipped adversary (Schwartau, 2000). In general, military conflict has historically been waged by broadly similarly organised and equipped adversaries. Notwithstanding widespread guerrilla campaigns during the 20th Century, the doctrine of deterrence based on largely equivalent, and massive, military capability was a military orthodoxy during the Cold War. Information warfare removes some of the constraints of symmetry, allowing small and relatively ill-equipped groups to confront apparently more powerful conventionally organised and equipped adversaries. The ideal-type of such asymmetric confrontation is perhaps the lone hacker taking advantage of the Internet to infiltrate high-security information systems to cause economic or other damage. A consequence of this asymmetry is the growing significance of non-state actors such as terrorist, criminal or non-governmental organisations as threats to nation states either militarily or economically (Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 1998a; Cronin & Crawford 1998a; Rathmell, 1998; Schwartau, 2000). Other general features or aspects of information warfare include low-intensity operations, targeting of soft assets, zero warning, increasingly vulnerability as technological sophistication increases, initiative resting with the attacker, the ability of the attacker to vary the frequency and intensity of the attack and the ease with which allies may be mobilised (Cronin & Crawford, 1998a).
./english/400.txt:11:Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1998a, 1998b) have elaborated an analytic framework for the study of information warfare. While they approach the topic primarily from a military and strategic studies perspective, they claim a wider applicability for their framework, in particular emphasising its usefulness in analysing the growing importance of non-state actors such as terrorist groups, criminal networks and, of particular interest here, non-governmental organisations. This framework comprises three levels of analysis - organisational, strategic and doctrinal. The analysis of these three levels is underpinned by a general conceptual approach which distinguishes two views of information: an information processing view which concentrates on the organisation, storage and transmission of particular pieces of information; and a 'structural' view of information which addresses meaning and values, and the ways in which information is embedded and embodied in organisations, artefacts and people (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 1998a). These structural and processing views are presented as complementary, rather than rival, ways of looking at information and provide a way of integrating technological and organisational emphasises in discussions of information warfare.
./english/400.txt:12:In looking at conflict beyond the purely military, Arquilla and Ronfeldt distinguish several types of information warfare: the term 'cyberwar' is used to refer to military conflict, and 'netwar' is used to describe non-military and societal conflict. 'Social netwar' is distinguished from other social conflicts including 'ethno-nationalist', 'terrorist', and 'criminal' netwar. and is characterised by:
./english/400.txt:13:"militant activists operating in, and as, [segmented, polymorphic, ideologically integrated networks] or issue networks. Social netwars tend to be anti-establishment, but any particular one may be progressive or reactionary, left- or right-wing, mass or sectarian, public or covert, threatening or promising for a society - it all depends. Whatever the case, networks of activist NGOs challenge a government (or rival NGOs) in a public issue area, and the "war" is mainly over "information" - who knows what, when, where and why. Social netwar aims to affect what an opponent knows, or thinks it knows, not only about a challenger but also about itself and the world around it." Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 1999 p.202
./english/400.txt:16:Contemporaneously with the emergence of a global 'information', 'network' or 'knowledge' economy, the influence of trade unions has waned in most parts of the world. Changes in work organisation, changes in the composition of the labour market, widespread anti-union legislation, technological change and increasingly intense global competition have all contributed to this diminution of power (Olney, 1996). These developments are forcing reconsideration of the way trade unions see and organise themselves (Hyman, 1996; Munck, 1999).
./english/400.txt:20:The growing significance of transnational organising, the increasing use of ICTs and exploration of new tactics in industrial disputes forms the background to the following discussion of information warfare and industrial disputes.
./english/400.txt:21:Information warfare and industrial conflict
./english/400.txt:22:The following discussion is based on Arquilla and Ronfeldt's (1998a; 1998b) framework to examine trade union strategies in industrial disputes. It is organised around the organisational and tactical characteristics of information warfare highlighted in this framework, and the roles of ICTs as both terrain and weapon/target in industrial conflict. Theoretical issues are identified before a discussion of their relevance both to social movements in general and then to trade union organisation in particular.
./english/400.txt:24:Many effective commercial, terrorist, criminal and social organisations to some extent now display network features, at least in part reliant on the ability to exploit current and emerging ICTs (Castells, 1996; Rathmell, 1998). Arquilla & Ronfeldt (1998a) argue further, that networks are the characteristic organisational form of information warfare and that civil society actors such as NGOs have been particularly adept at using networked organisation to enable more flexible and responsive behaviour. Decentralised networks, exploiting (both old and new) communications technologies, allow small and widely scattered actors to collaborate as required, mobilising their distinctive resources jointly to pursue shared objectives. Arquilla & Ronfeldt (1998a) particularly emphasise the importance of 'all-channel' networks, where all actors are connected to all others (a form of network particularly enabled by contemporary ICTs) and which, they assert, are particularly effective in conflict situations providing both speed and redundancy of communications.
./english/400.txt:28:While the emergence of these networks is not primarily a technological development, the growth of ICTs has played an important enabling role (MacShane, 1992; Dropkin, 1996; ICEM, 1996; Waterman, 1998; Lee, 1997). The growing use of ICTs in transnational labour networking is further evidenced by frequent passing references to email and the Internet in the literature of transnational labour organising (e.g. Carr, 1999; Frundt, 1996; Marshall, 1997). Transnational networked organisation is not, however, straightforward: the availability of a technological infrastructure and the skills to use it may be a necessary prerequisite of global network organisation (and establishing the prerequisites globally itself remains a formidable obstacle), but it is not sufficient. Networks are likely to need to adapt, for example to the particular culture and organisation of individual corporations (Spooner, 1998), while organisational, linguistic and cultural difficulties are likely further to continue to provide substantial obstacles to the development of online transnational networks, for example among trade union educators (Walker & Creanor, 2000; Walker, 2000). By the mid-1990s, effective transnational information networks remained largely theoretical (Ramsay, 1997). Neither can the development of networks always be seen as positive. In some cases emerging networks may pose threats to effective transnational organisation, for example where local labour and management form networks to compete for resources with other plants in a multinational company (Martinez Lucio & Weston, 1995). Going further, we may also speculate that decentralised networks, with a tendency to focus on the local may undermine the role of unions as aggregators of employee interests, making it harder to develop solidarity around more global issues.
./english/400.txt:29:Transnational networks comprised solely of labour activists may face fundamental problems. Apart from 'elite' actors who operate at transnational levels, most trade unionists remain located in diverse national contexts. Collective action among these nationally-situated actors requires the development of trust, reciprocity and a shared 'cultural learning'. The circumstances in which these can develop may prove to be very limited (Tarrow, 2000). Arquilla & Ronfeldt suggest (1998a) it is not necessarily the case that networked organisation is the only possible mode of organisation in information-intensive conflict, but that mastery of its techniques are essential. The combination of hierarchical and decentralised organisation ultimately may prove to be effective in transnational labour organising: campaigns in support of Guatemalan coffee workers benefitted on the one hand from the rapid transfer of information, decision making and grassroots involvement of workers and other social groups, and on the other hand with the ability to mobilise people and to provide financial and infrastructure resources possible from the more traditionally accountable IUF (Kidder & McGinn, 1995). Similar relationships between centralised hierarchies and decentralised networks can be seen in the apparently decentralised networks of 'new' social movements. For example human rights, issue-based networks may include decentralised organisations linked to local social movements typically concerned with struggling to establish or defend their own human rights, alongside organisations, such as international governmental organisations and private foundations concerned with the defence of others' rights (Sikkink, 1993; Sharpe, 2000). The environmental movement similarly includes organisations such as Greenpeace which has a highly centralised organisation in combination with a decentralised global network of local groups and activists (Castells, 1997).
./english/400.txt:31:Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1998b) have argued that the characteristic strategic approach of information warfare, enabled by information-intensive networked organisation, is that of 'swarming' in which small, dispersed and mobile forces come together rapidly to engage with an adversary before rapidly dissolving. The ability to continue swarming attacks by repeatedly dispersing and coalescing as a series of 'sustainable pulses' becomes the key feature of 'swarm networks'. Swarming in social conflict has a long history - Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1989b) illustrate this with the example of Marx's description of workers and peasants confrontation with state authorities on the streets of Paris in 1848 (Marx 1850; 1959: pp. 281-307). More recent reminders of the continuing significance of physical swarming in social conflict can be found in the case of protests against the World Bank and IMF in Seattle (Financial Times, 1999) and Prague (Anderson, 2000).
./english/400.txt:33:Arquila & Ronfeldt’s information warfare framework suggests that the corporate campaign may prove to be a characteristic strategy for trade unions for two reasons. Firstly, broadening the dispute into the public arena makes it an information-intensive battle for ‘hearts and minds’. Both sides of the conflict engage in campaigns to control what information is available and the meanings that are widely attached to it. Secondly, the approach is network-oriented both in the attempt to mobilise wider networks of social and governmental/regulatory actors (McGuiness, 1996) and in the identification of actors in the corporate adversary’s financial, supply-chain or other networks as legitimate targets.
./english/400.txt:35:The importance of ICTs in social netwar is twofold. Firstly, they provide the communications infrastructure by which networked organisation can be sustained particularly at a transnational level. Secondly, they constitute a terrain on which aspects of social conflicts are played out. Discussion of ICTs and information as terrain is separated here into their related structural and procedural aspects (Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 1998a). The structural dimension is concerned with ideas and values, and ways in which the Internet and more conventional media provide an arena for 'hearts and minds' battles for wider public support. The information processing aspects are seen more directly in discussions of issues such as denial of service and Internet security.
./english/400.txt:37:At the information processing level ICTs, and in particular the Internet, provide both weapons and targets in social netwar. ICT systems and infrastructures may be vulnerable to digital and or to physical attack (e.g. Boulanger, 1998; Cobb, 1999). The objective of such an attack may be the basic denial or disruption of service to an adversary, as for example in the case of 'ping' attacks aimed at disabling major internet portal sites early in 2000 (Financial Times, 2000). Alternatively, a digital attack may involve gaining illicit access to an adversary's information system in order to subvert it. Examples of both of these types of attack are apparent in social movement campaigns. Protesters subverted the Nike Web site, redirecting users to a site calling for the disruption of a world economic summit in Australia (Richtel, 2000). Following the breakdown if the Middle East peace process, both Palestinian and Israeli activists and supporters have attempted to disable the other side's Web sites by using widely available software to overload a server by bombarding it with email or 'ping' requests (Whitaker, 2000).
./english/400.txt:38:To date, trade unions have made limited use of the Internet either as a terrain or more directly as a weapon. Perhaps the most extensive use of the Internet to win public support for an industrial dispute has been seen in striking journalists from the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, who established an alternative on-line newspaper, the Detroit Journal to help to build community support for their strike (Lee, 1997: 82-84). There have also been examples of using the Internet and other communications media to protest to companies during industrial disputes, as for example in the UK Communications Workers Union with label-printers Critchley (Gibbs, 1999). There is little evidence of unions attempting to disable corporate information systems outright through covert action, and it would appear that these would be unlikely to be adopted widely by unions organised as democratic organisations and hence readily open to legal identification and action. However, sabotage by individual workers has historically featured in industrial disputes and there is little reason to suppose that information systems would be immune. Certainly, computer security analysts have identified hostile individual employees as sources of risk to systems.
./english/400.txt:39:Denial of access to ICT infrastructure is, however, a feature of industrial relations. While some employers have been willing to negotiate access to their communications infrastructures for trade unions, others have sought to restrict access to email for union purposes. In the USA, the legality of denying union access to employees through email is currently a matter of some debate (Spognardi & Bro, 1998; The Economist, 2000). Elsewhere, it is likely that the law will give less protection to employees. For example, in the UK, in the absence of clear legal guidelines, over 80% of employers reportedly monitor employee communications (Eaglesham, 2001). A potentially wider area of corporate interference with union access to the global information infrastructure has also been apparent, through denial of access to particular services. For example, in the late 1980s, trade union researchers were denied access to selected areas of corporate information database by the major database Dialog (Angus & LaPlante, 1987). More recently, the Internet portal Yahoo! refused to place advertising banners in support of the US union SEIU’s campaign to unionise workers at Los Angeles International Airport (Rewick, 2000).
./english/400.txt:41:The preceding section has sought to explore how concepts of information warfare can contribute to an understanding of trade union use of the Internet. The following section examines examples of one union organisation's use of the Internet as a campaigning tool.
./english/400.txt:45:ICEM, and some of its predecessor organisations, particularly the International Chemical Workers' Federation (ICF) and the International Federation of Chemical, Energy and General Workers' Unions (ICEF), have perhaps been among the more alert labour organisations to the potential of information and communication technologies over the last 30 years. In 1972, the then General Secretary of the ICF was already discussing the use of computerised databases to monitor the activities of multinational enterprises and the potential of using the telex network to support international education activities (Levinson, 1972). During the early 1980s ICEF began to develop its use of commercial electronic databases as research tools when responding to affiliates' requests for information about multinational corporations. By the early 1990s, the ICEF reported using these databases in response to over 2,000 such requests and using email to improve communications with, and information dissemination to, at least some affiliates (Catterson 1992). The use of databases and email to collect and disseminate information played an important role in the international campaign to end a dispute at an aluminium plant in Ravenswood, USA. in which the ICEF played an important role (Herod, 1995).
./english/400.txt:76:Campaign B addressed the wider issue of non-payment of wages in Russia, in particular seeking to raise the profile of the issue outside Russia. Consequently the web site had a much greater informational content. While the cybercampaign was less directly linked to the protests against non-payment, it did not exist in isolation from them. Campaign C was not tied to a specific industrial dispute, although locally-initiated industrial action occurred during the campaign at company-owned facilities, particularly in Australia and Indonesia, and the Web site publicised these. As part of the campaign, an international week of action was held in July 2000 with protest actions reported in a total of eleven countries, including 24 hour strike actions in Australia.
./english/400.txt:79:Campaign A, the first of the cybercampaigns set the general tone for those that followed. The Web pages carried background information about the campaign and contact details for the company and as third parties such as shareholders, investors and high-profile companies stocking or using tyres made by BFS. Where possible, these included email addresses with the invitation to send protest email messages, with graphic file attachments. Perhaps because of the novelty of the cybercampaign technique, the Web site itself became a 'hook' on which several major media outlets hung high-profile pieces covering both the dispute and trade union use of the Internet (e.g. Financial Times 1996; Arsenault, 1996.). The web pages for Campaign C included detailed briefings and background information about the company (including two 'Stakeholder reports' produced for company AGMs), links to relevant sites, and invitations to send messages of protest to the company, associated companies and governments. A second 'Coalition of Rio Tinto Shareholders' web site was established in 2000, co-sponsored by ICEM aimed particularly at winning support for the proposals submitted to the AGM. As with the earlier campaigns. the Campaign D pages allowed supporters to protest electronically to both the subsidiary involved directly in the dispute and to the parent company, this time including 'e-postcard' images. Images available to be sent to the US subsidiary illustrated the extent of global support while those to the German-based parent emphasised the very different approach to industrial relations apparent in the US, in comparison with that in Germany. The cybercampaign also sought to politicise the campaign by highlighting possible links between German politicians and the parent company, and encouraging email protests to German ministers and the Labor Counsellor at the German Embassy in Washington. This campaign also included more direct contributions from the replaced workers themselves, for example in an audio file containing an introduction to the dispute by the President of the USWA Local involved.
./english/400.txt:83:Campaign B: Russia Extensive stoppages and demonstrations by affiliated unions in RussiaJoint ICEM/ICFTU case presented to the ILO; Extensive information on ongoing situation;Protest messages international financial and other institutions, Russian national and local government, multinational corporations Solidarity messages to Russian affiliates
./english/400.txt:87:The Campaign B pages similarly included protest links, this time primarily to email addresses and web sites of the Russian government and intergovernmental financial institutions. The Web pages had a greater informational component than the industrial campaigns. They provided detailed background information and briefings on the developing economic and political situation in Russia, with a strong emphasis on the protests of Russian trade unions (derived both from first-hand reports from affiliates and from international newswires and news databases). As with the other campaigns, the pages invited visitors to send protest messages, this time to national and international institutions involved in or influencing Russian economic policy. Given the emphasis on providing information to an international audience, the pages were predominantly in English though some were also available in Russian. The site attracted substantial interest from academics, business people and labour activists with an interest in Russia. The campaign attained a greater profile on the Internet with prominent links from major sites with an interest in Russia, as well as recommendations and listings in Russian sections of Web directories such as 'Excite' and 'Yahoo!', and the Web sites of conventional media organisations. Numbers of visitors to the campaign pages showed substantial increases during high-profile activities in Russia such as the national Day of Action by Russian trade unions on October 7, 1998 and the campaign pages continued to attract substantial traffic into early 2000.
./english/400.txt:89:For ICEM the cybercampaigns have primarily been 'hearts and minds' operations (primarily addressing structural rather processing informational aspects, in Arqilla & Ronfeldt's terms) seeking to use the web to raise the profile of the various disputes both directly and indirectly. They have gone beyond simply disseminating information, to provide mechanisms for supporters to register support for the campaign. The opportunities to send protest messages were not, however, intended primarily to disrupt adversaries' information systems - rather they aimed to give a way for passive readers of the pages to become more active participants in the campaigns. An internal secretariat report emphasised this as follows: "The interactive nature of the technology lends itself perfectly to changing readers into concerned observers and then into active participants". However, the cybercampaigns do appear to have had an impact on the availability of adversary's service in at least two cases. In the first case (Campaign A), despite claiming that they had received relatively few protest messages, the company were reported as having established a parallel email system as a contingency (Arsenault, 1996). In Campaign D, internal mailing lists, the addresses of which had been known to ICEM were either removed, or had access controlled, shortly after their publication on the campaign Web sites.
./english/400.txt:90:In the three industrial campaigns, the companies' use of the Internet also appear to have developed. In Campaign A, the company made no online response. In Campaign C, the company, which has also been the target of environmental and other criticism, contains general statements on environment, community relations and human rights (e.g. Rio Tinto, 2000) but does not acknowledge or respond to specific claims. In Campaign D, the parent company established web pages to counter the ICEM/USWA case directly. These pages included a chronology of the dispute, a point by point response to the USWA allegations, press releases and links to press coverage. As well as hyperlinks to Continental sites in the USA and Germany, these pages included links directly to the ICEM campaign pages and to the North Carolina Department of Labor. The company informed ICEM of the link to the cybercampaign, and asked for a reciprocal link to the company's pages about the dispute. Continental AG, in effect, elected to respond in kind to the cybercampaign engaging the unions directly in the information netwar. As others have suggested (e.g. Bray, 1998) this may indicate an increasingly sophisticated response to such cybercampaigns by companies.
./english/400.txt:98:This paper has applied some of the concepts of information warfare - particularly as developed in Arquilla and Ronfeldt's (1998a, 1998b) framework to industrial conflict in general, and to the example of Web-based cybercampaigning as carried out by the ICEM in particular.
./english/400.txt:104:The information warfare framework used has provided a valuable framework for examining international labour campaigning in general and the use of ICT in particular. In both the general discussion and the particular case studies it has highlighted the role of the network as an organisational form and 'swarming' - both virtual and physical - as tactics in conflict situations.
./english/400.txt:110:Arquilla, J. & Ronfeldt, D. (1998a) Preparing for Information-Age Conflict: Part 1 Conceptual and organizational dimensions, Information, Communication & Society 1(1) pp. 1-22
./english/400.txt:111:Arquilla, J. & Ronfeldt, D. (1998b) Preparing for Information-Age Conflict: Part 2 Doctrinal and strategic dimensions, Information, Communication & Society 1(2) pp. 121-143
./english/400.txt:115:Boulanger, A. (1998) Catapults and Grappling Hooks: The techniques of Information Warfare, IBM Systems Journal 37(1)
./english/400.txt:118:Castells, M. (1996), The Rise of the Network Society - The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. 1, Blackwell; Cambridge, MA
./english/400.txt:119:Castells, M. (1997) The Power of Identity - The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. 2, Blackwell, Oxford
./english/400.txt:120:Catterson, J. (1992) Electronic Mail for International Solidarity paper presented to 'Information Technology, Electronic Communications and the Labour Movement' Conference, Manchester, April 1992
./english/400.txt:123:Cronin, B. & Crawford, H. (1999a) Information Warfare: Its Application in Military and Civilian Contexts, The Information Society 15 pp. 257-263
./english/400.txt:124:Cronin, B. & Crawford, H. (1999b) Raising the intelligence stakes: Corporate information warfare and strategic surprise, Competitive Intelligence Review 10(3) pp. 58-66
./english/400.txt:145:Jajodia, S. Ammann, P. &. McCollum, C. (1999) Surviving Information Warfare Attacks, Computer, 32(4)
./english/400.txt:148:Kovacich, G. (1997) Information Warfare and the Information Systems Security Professional, Information Systems Security 6(2) 45-55
./english/400.txt:151:Libicki, M. (1998) InformationWar, Information Peace, Journal of International Affairs 51(2) 411-428
./english/400.txt:163:Rathmell, A. (1998) Information Warfare and Sub-State Actors: An organisational approach, Information, Communication and Society 1(4)
./english/400.txt:171:Scott, A. & Street, J. (2000) From Media Politics to E-protest, Information, Communication and Society 3(2) pp. 215-240
./english/400.txt:176:Spooner, (1998) Trade Union Telematics for International Collective Bargaining pp. 277-288 in Sussman, G. & Lent, J. (eds) Global Productions: Labor in the Making of the "Information Society", Hampton Press, New Jersey
./english/401.txt:120:Costa deals with the problems and possibilities for Portugal, as a small and peripheral European country with an authoritarian history, and with two major national union confederations - one of the social-democratic and one of the communist tradition. There have been problems concerning the 'more-European' UGT, and the 'more-Portuguese' GCTP, insofar as the social-democratic UGT has been more incorporated into the social-democratic European structures, and the communist CGTP has been stronger on the ground in Portugal. This tension seems, however, have been attenuated along with the traditional ideological distinctions, as well as by the opportunities both see for using advanced European unions and legislation to defend and improve worker conditions in backward Portugal. Costa also considers that, in confronting obstacles to the development of the EWCs, the worker cause can be advanced. These obstacles include: employer imposition of worker representatives; the logic of union competition (UGT v. CGTP); worker skepticism toward unions and participation at company level; the understanding of EWCs in an economistic and instrumental manner instead of as a means for increasing information, solidarity and influence. Costa sees the main advantages won through EWCs for Portuguese workers as follows:
./english/401.txt:122:From among the main conquests made possible for the Portuguese workers by the EWCs, I would emphasise the following: to be able to share problems of national scope at transnational level (in a more extended forum) so as to try and seek joint solutions for them; to have a more concrete understanding of the type of involvement manifested by the workers of a same multinational, albeit of different countries, regarding the EWCs; to know the labour realities of other countries better, ensuring a better communication and more visibility among all the workforce of a same multinational; to learn about the trade union action strategies of the country of the parent company regarding the trade unions of the countries of the subsidiaries, thereby testing the transnational effectiveness of trade union solidarity; to allow the access to initiatives or to information with are not limited to a pure model of company management, etc.
./english/401.txt:193: L&W establish the credentials of SIGTUR by reference to the classical socialist values of international labor solidarity and social emancipation, to its chequered history, and to recent social theorizing on globalization, the discontents it creates and the movements it provokes. It is the last of these sources – or discussions - that is most challenging since it leads them to criticize a common 'infatuation with new information systems' in such theorizing, and to argue for the necessity of the new networked, global and social movement to be based on, or grow within, the historical union institutions. L&W also favor a 'grounded' approach to globalization and opposition to such, which seems to mean a focus on 'globalization from below', as it expresses itself where people live and work. They see this as both justifying their approach and expressed by SIGTUR itself.
./english/402.txt:22:I am actually favourable to, even enthusiastic about, the creation of such a network. In part this is because there exists no such internationally. In part because it is going to provide information and ideas on a continuing basis - and to those people/places otherwise excluded from the periodic Forums. In so far as this will have an existence in ‘real virtuality’ (Manuel Castells), it may go beyond a WSF that remains largely earth-bound and institutional. Apart from the questions above, certain crucial others remain (about which I may only have yet other questions).
./english/402.txt:24:Is the network going to be primarily political/institutional or primarily communicational? In the first case, communication is likely to be made functional to the political/institutional. In the second case, we may be into a different ballgame or ballpark. In the first case, there is likely to operate a ‘banking’ model of information, in which maximum information is collected, to be then dealt out to customers in terms of power and profit. In the second case, there can operate the principle of the potlatch, or gift economy, in which individual generosity is understood to benefit the community. The understanding here is a common African saying: I am who I am because of other people.
./english/402.txt:26:Even in the best of all possible cyberworlds, however, there remain questions of appropriate modes (information, ideas, dialogue), of form (printed word at one end, multimedia at the other) and control (handling cybernuts and our own homegrown fundamentalists). There do exist various relevant, if partial, models of international social-movement, civil society, anti-globalisation networks – earth-bound or cyberspatial. Indy Media Centre (IMC) has got to be the most important here, and needs to be reflected upon both for what it can do and what it doesn’t. Finally, any SMWN is going to have to go beyond network babble and recognise that networks do not exist on one, emancipatory, model. In discussing networks, Arturo Escobar (2003) has said that
./english/402.txt:36:The FSM website remains a disgrace – promoting year-old ideas (chosen by whom?) in its meagre library. Trying to reach a human being on this site, to whom one could pose a question, reminds one strongly of Gertrude Stein (or whoever) on Oakland, California: ‘There is no there there’. The only FSM daily is Terra Viva, an admirable effort by the customarily unaccountable NGO, but which this year seemed to me to add to its space-limitations, delays and superficialities a heavier bias toward the Forum establishment. The more-professional, substantial and independent regional paper, Zero Hora, gave wide coverage but only in Portuguese. For background information and orientation one was this year dependent on free handouts of La Vie/Le Monde (marked by a certain social Catholicism?), and Ode, a glossy, multi-lingual, New Age, magazine from Rotterdam, with impressively relevant coverage (which I have used in this paper).
./english/402.txt:50:I am concerned about the future of the Forum process but not worried. Pandora has opened her box, the genie has is out of the lamp, the secret of fire is now an open one. Already in Florence, young libertarians were mumbling, ‘Another Forum is Possible’. This possibility is not only a matter of information and communication technology (which has yet to produce an English/Spanish translation programme with an appropriate vocabulary). It may be the combination, precisely, of this with youth, given that urban kids have grown up with cellular phones, playing arcade computer games, and therefore with an affinity for any computer technology, and a healthy disregard for attempts to coral such. (I was moved to produce my first-ever Power Point production, on WSF2, by my 12-year-old granddaughter, Joelle, who is also puzzled about my resistance to the cell phone, text-messaging and computer chat).
./english/403.txt:1:Information and Communication in Contemporary Anti-Capitalist Movements
./english/403.txt:3:Pondering Information and Communication in Contemporary Anti-Capitalist Movements
./english/403.txt:5:What follows are some thoughts about the role played by information and communication technologies (ICT) within current movements against global capital. These reflections are prompted by my own passing involvement in a number of such online projects from the mid-nineties onwards. Is the nature of information and communication something self-evident, or instead might they be too often taken for granted, and perhaps deserving of broader discussion?
./english/403.txt:35:If the enthusiastic embrace of ICT has been the norm within the social movements that aim to challenge global capital, its use has not been without controversy. Some, working from a Green perspective, are critical of those who hold that ‘technology is "neutral" and could be made to serve social justice’ (Starr 2000: 177). Beyond this, the criticisms of the place of ICT within radical politics has been couched in terms of how time and energy invested in the ‘virtual’ relates to activity in the ‘real’ world. For example, some participants have feared the possibility of a situation in which ‘information circulates endlessly between computers without being put back into a human context’ (ECN 1992). In a related manner, others have argued that the unconsidered application of electronic communications may serve to undermine more traditional forms of linkage. In the words of Randy Stoecker (2000), not only is there the risk that ‘the Internet is isolating us in front of our monitors, keeping us off the streets’, but many of the relationships that are established online will by their very nature remain superficial — ‘faceless one-dimensional stranger to stranger interaction’. Then again, if Mario Diani is right, this risk may be overtstated. Diani (2000: 393-4) makes the point that different kinds of social movement networks use ICT in different ways, consistent with their broader approach to marshalling support and effecting social change. More than this, he suggests that ‘the most distinctive contribution’ of CMC [computer-mediated communication] to social movements’, particularly those premised upon a participatory organisational structure oriented towards direct action, has been ‘of an instrumental rather than symbolic kind’. In other words, the use of ICT in such circles has largely been to ‘reinforce face-to-face acquaintances and exchanges’ (Diani 2000: 397, 391).
./english/403.txt:39:Information Overload
./english/403.txt:41:Is more media always better, even if it is alternative media? Can there be such a thing as too much information? The problem of information overload in electronic environments has been a topic of periodic discussion over the past two decades or so (Valovic 2000; Hiltz & Turoff 1985). With the West’s embrace of the Internet, David Shenk (1997: 30-1) sees growing ‘data smog’ as the dark reality at the heart of today’s so-called information society. As the volume of information accelerates relentlessly, ‘noise’ overshadows ‘signal’. Communication may be speedier thanks to the Internet, but it is increasingly coupled with ‘bad decision making’ (137) that serves only to strengthen existing relations of power (15). Far from levelling social inequities, Shenk concludes, ‘cyberspace is Republican’ (174). Developing aspects of Shenk’s argument further, Tim Jordan (2000: 118) has identified two kinds of information overload: that which arises from excess volume, and that arising from information so ‘chaotically organised’ as to be useless. Together, he argues, these aspects of information overload fuse together in a ‘spiral’ (128) that constantly reproduces the existing power relations of the Internet.
./english/403.txt:43:The practical implications of information overload for those seeking to challenge the powers-that-be have been clearly articulated by Anne Scott’s (2001: 417) reflections on feminist activism:
./english/403.txt:45:Expectations are being raised, moreover, in regard to the quantity and quality of information needed before a plausible case can be said to exist. As one respondent noted, people want more and more information before taking action. But there is a point at which one has enough information to act; the acquisition of more information beyond this point can be confusing and paralyzing — and can actually block the taking of effective action.
./english/403.txt:47:Jim Walch (1997: 72) has noted the range of strategies for dealing with information overload that he has observed in activist circles. For the most part, these tend to involve shifting responsibility elsewhere (into electronic folders, onto other people, or blocking certain information flows altogether through the use of filtering software). While conceding that these are understandable coping strategies, he argues that such efforts to ‘manage’ information flows also carry risks, both in terms of the construction of meaning, and of denying access to ‘new and unexpected information and contacts’. Walch’s concerns here echo those of Howard Besser, who has asserted that
./english/403.txt:49:One of the identifying characteristics of the information age is to get people directly to the information they need without exposing them to tangentially interesting or relevant material (Besser 1995: 70).
./english/403.txt:51:Although ultimately inconclusive, a debate on information overload within social movements that took place around the Second Intercontinental Encuentro of 1997 helps throw further light on the question. The First Encuentro, held the previous year in Chiapas, had brought together some 3,000 activists from a range of circles — above all in North America and Europe — linked by a sense of affinity with the Zapatistas of Southern Mexico. One of the proposals arising from the First Encuentro was for an international network of communication, able to circulate news and views of the ‘One "Nos" and Many "Yeses" opposed to global neo-liberalism, and consideration of how best to achieve this was placed on the agenda for the follow up gathering in Spain.
./english/403.txt:55:Abstractly this is fine, but it begs essential questions: what is to be communicated, by whom to whom? In the "information age," it is all too easy to be deluged with information. This is not helpful unless the information is well organized for some use — which only raises the question, who will organize the information? The EZLN and its supporters have been marvellously inventive in using networks, but multiply Chiapas by even 10, never mind the thousands needed: how many channels can the mind consider? This is not the individual's problem. Sorting information requires political collectivity. It implies calculated division of labor and aspects of centralization: someone else will decide for you (presumably with your consent) what reaches you and what is the most important information. It also poses the related problem: what struggles deserve what attention, and who decides?
./english/403.txt:57:In other words, any discussion of how to process the volume of information circulating within and between the various movements engaged with the Zapatistas immediately raised questions about the nature of the power relations existing within and between the various class forces with which they were associated. For his own part, Neill (1997b) saw no simple solution to the problem; any real answer, he believed, would only follow from a serious exploration of how to challenge the more general problem of ‘hierarchy — of race, gender, nation, work, wages — within the [global working] class’.
./english/403.txt:59:The most detailed response to Neill came from Stefan Wray (1997), who argued that what might at first seem to be political issues were often instead technical problems with software solutions. Criticising one push-based model for a global communications network (RICA 1996) that threatened to bury recipients under what he termed ‘a mountain of information’, Wray argued instead for a ‘user-based information retrieval system’. In his model, e-mail would be deposited at an archive, where automated software residing on subscribers’ computers could interrogate it by keyword, selecting only those files identified as relevant to the individual user.
./english/403.txt:61:Tim Jordan (1999: 122), at least, is sceptical that technical approaches to information overload do anything more than exacerbate the problem. This is because clearing the decks of unwanted and/or irrelevant information simply provides more space for other sources of information to take their place — much as freeway extensions or widenings commonly only increase the volume of automobile traffic. In any case, as one participant in the Encuentro debate pointed out, something like the system proposed by Wray already existed in the form of Usenet groups (Kerne 1997). On the other hand, as another list member based in the South reminded everyone, ‘Although we are living in a new era, although globalism presents us every opportunity of technology in every country, it is not for every one’ (sungu 1997).
./english/403.txt:63:Any discussion of global activism and the Internet quickly raises questions about the distribution of resources between the North and South. Here again the volume of information is a pressing issue. As Walch (1997: 55) has indicated, ICT access can be expensive for many living in Asia and Africa, and all but inaccessible for others. Connections to groups elsewhere can bring not only new affinities, but also the risk of ‘information dump’, with local channels clogged by electronic messages originating from locales where bandwidth may not be an issue. Nevertheless Walch is optimistic about the possibilities of electronic connectivity between social movements, arguing that even as simple a step as linking web sites can enhance the ‘inter-organizational transfer of information’ (74). Har and Hutnyk (1999) point to the obverse of Walch’s problem: that connections to North-based social movements frequently forces ‘activists from South East Asia to continuously send information to (careerist?) activists in the west’, when that time might be better spent in other activities. While they do not call for the abandonment of electronic communication, Har and Hutnyk (1999) echo Stoecker’s (2000) concern that ICT be understood in a properly instrumental way, as a tool that is useful only so long as it facilitates the movement’s efforts at social change. They conclude with a call for more reflective moments within activist practice:
./english/403.txt:65:the beast of capitalism takes such forms that require more than documentation. The danger would be if the Internet encourages only an information rich, but analysis poor edification. More education is more important than more information.
./english/403.txt:67:Can information be managed in social movements?
./english/403.txt:71:Not surprisingly, then, few studies to date have attempted to ascertain what, if anything, social movements might usefully learn from knowledge management as a discipline. One such attempt, by Karen Nowé (2001), argues that knowledge management itself has too often concentrated on technological fixes when trying to think through information flows within organisations. Noting that social movement organisations are typically poor in terms of finances and physical resources, she adds that they face the additional problem of peaks and troughs in membership and activity as a consequence of the very ebbs and flows of cycles of protest:
./english/403.txt:73:It is important that the knowledge … can be kept alive through the periods of low activity. How do social movements manage that? It is clear that this has more to do with cultures and people than with simple information technology solutions.
./english/403.txt:75:In other words, Nowé returns us to the same problems raised amongst others by Neill (1997a and b), Har and Hutnyk (1999). Like them, she freely admits that for now, such problems remain unresolved, while arguing that information flows within social movements that aspire to self-managed organisational practices may well conflict with what knowledge management as a discipline would deem to be ‘a rational decision making procedure’.
./english/403.txt:77:I’d like to end with a few questions worthy of further reflection. The first concerns the nature of information itself, which has been talked of in a fairly unproblematic way throughout these notes. In many ways, the circulation of information has indeed been one of the success stories in social movement use of ICT to date. As Cleaver (1999) has pointed out, ICT has been used with effect:
./english/403.txt:79:‘to obtain accurate information on a given situation and then circulate it widely’; to facilitate ‘the circulation of interpretation and evaluation’ of such information through ‘discussion and debate’, so as to enable ‘various kinds of off-line activities’. Just the same, perhaps Har and Hutnyk (1999) are correct in arguing that more thought needs to be paid to our understandings of the nature of information itself. After all, the standard metaphor of the communication of information via value-free ‘conduits’ (Day 2001a: 38-46) is unable to grasp that
./english/403.txt:83:Seeking a critical — that is, self-reflexive, historically specific — definition of information, Ron Day (2001a: 120) has offered the following:
./english/403.txt:85:Information is the quality of being informed. But this is a highly ambiguous — ‘theoretical’ and affective — state of affairs, one that leaves the nature of knowledge, as well as of the world and the subject, still to be formed and discovered.
./english/403.txt:87:Day’s definition suggests rather more than ‘transmission’, and is far away from notions that see information as indifferent to its medium. At the same time, it also provides a useful starting point for making sense of the ways in which information is handled in organisations and movements that claim commitment to participatory decision making processes.
./english/403.txt:89:Another relevant point concerns the possibility of a ‘cosmopolitan language’ (Hardt & Negri 2000) able to facilitate the circulation of struggles between social movements. How might such an entity be formed? And can such a project begin without wrestling with the problem of translation, and all that this implies for the generation of information and knowledge? (Day 1994) For as Walter Benjamin (1969: 69) pointed out long ago, ‘any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information — hence, something inessential’.
./english/403.txt:91:This touches in turn upon some arguments raised in an interview that Anita Lacey and I recently conducted with another Melbourne comrade, as part of a small, ongoing enquiry into the use of information and ICT in local anti-capitalist politics. Active in a network that seeks to open up space for an ongoing dialogue between environmental and workplace activists, Colin defined useful information as ‘what can facilitate the process of building bridges and crossing borders’. Sceptical of the notion that trust — ‘the most important question’ — could be established ‘through the screen’, his biggest concern was that the enormous quantities of information available online may blind us to the knowledge and wisdom available from face-to-face encounters with those who have experienced and learned from earlier struggles against capital and the state.
./english/403.txt:97:If we take this requirement to listen and understand ‘before you speak’ seriously, then maybe we need to rethink our understanding of the process of communication itself. Perhaps then we’ll also find the need for some new starting points in grappling with the meaning and utility of information, as part of our reconsideration of those with and from whom we aim to be informed.
./english/403.txt:109:Besser, H. (1995) ‘From Internet to Information Superhighway’, in Brook, J. & Boal, I. (eds.) Resisting the Virtual: The Culture and Politics of Information. San Francisco: City Life.
./english/403.txt:127:Day, R. (1994) ‘Animal Songs: Translation, Community, the Question of the "Animal" :: Information’, http://www.lisp.wayne.edu/~ai2398/animal.htm, accessed 1 March 2002.
./english/403.txt:129:Day, R. (2001a) The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
./english/403.txt:131:Day, R. (2001b) ‘Totality and Representation. A History of Knowledge Management Through European Documentation, Critical Modernity, and Post-Fordism’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 52 (9), June.
./english/403.txt:135:Diani, M. (2000) ‘Social Movement Networks Virtual and Real’, Information, Communication & Society 3 (3).
./english/403.txt:155:Hiltz, S. & Turoff, M. (1985) ‘Structuring Computer-mediated Communications Systems to Avoid Information Overload’, Communications of the ACM, 28 (7), July, 680-689.
./english/403.txt:159:Kerne, A. (1997) ‘Re: Equalizing the Net and Solving Information Overload’, Web Foro Encounter 2, http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/nave/webforo.pl?read=27, accessed 25 October 2001.
./english/403.txt:173:Nowé, K. (2001) ‘Social movements and Information management — an outline of a possible research project’, http://www.hb.se/bhs/seminar/semdoc/nowe.htm, accessed 9 January 2002.
./english/403.txt:179:Scott, A. (2001) ‘(In)forming Politics: Processes of Feminist Activism in the Information Age’, Women’s Studies International Forum 24 (3/4).
./english/403.txt:181:Shenk, D. (1997) Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut. New York: Harper Edge.
./english/403.txt:183:Shumway, C. (2001) ‘Participatory Media Networks: A New Model for Producing and Disseminating Progressive News and Information’, http://chris.shumway.tripod.com/pmn.htm, accessed 1 August 2001.
./english/403.txt:189:sungu (1997) ‘Re: Equalizing the Net and Solving Information Overload’, Web Foro Encounter 2, http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/nave/webforo.pl?read=32, accessed 25 October 2001.
./english/403.txt:199:Wray, S. (1997) ‘Equalizing the Net and Solving Information Overload’, Web Foro Encounter 2, http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/nave/webforo.pl?read=22, accessed 25 October 2001.
./english/409.txt:19:Which is where the World Social Forum came in: ATTAC saw the conference as an opportunity to bring together the best minds working on alternatives to neoliberal economic policies--not just new systems of taxation but everything from sustainable farming to participatory democracy to cooperative production to independent media. From this process of information swapping ATTAC believed its "common agenda" would emerge.
./english/409.txt:33:One thing that wasnt so big at the World Social Forum was the United States. There were daily protests against Plan Colombia, the "wall of death" between the United States and Mexico, as well as George W. Bushs announcement that the new administration will suspend foreign aid to groups that provide information on abortion. In the workshops and lectures there was much talk of American imperialism, of the tyranny of the English language. Actual US citizens, though, were notably scarce. The AFL-CIO barely had a presence (John Sweeney was at Davos), and there was no one there from the National Organization for Women. Even Noam Chomsky, who said the forum "offers opportunities of unparalleled importance to bring together popular forces," sent only his regrets. Public Citizen had two people in Porto Alegre, but their star, Lori Wallach, was in Davos.
./english/410.txt:8:The Forum indeed offered plenty of opportunity to hear about the alternative globalization from prominent intellectuals such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Leonardo Boff, and Antonio Negri. Other events were characterized by the sharp rhetoric of large international activist groups, such as the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens (ATTAC). One could attend information sessions by international trade unions from Latin America, East Asia, Europe, and other parts of the world. Or one could talk to smaller NGOs and projects, ranging from Third World Foundations to groups such as the Coalition for a World Parliament.
./english/417.txt:411:cellor Merkel. Attac Germany promises to follow up the information given to the German
./english/419.txt:41:IE. 3. Difficult to understand how EPA functions for external people (lack of information in the web-site, not possible to access information about networks, no agenda……)
./english/419.txt:47:IL. 1. Website need clarification: is it updated? who’s in charge? what next? Not possible to access information. Too difficult to access
./english/419.txt:66:PM. 6. Make sure that information on network is spread; by website with info: who’s contact person, how to join, practical info on the network functioning
./english/472.txt:54:The debate over internal democracy has largely occurred among the participants from the North, or those exposed to the debate through their international NGO network connections. It does not much affect the thousands of participants who come from smaller grassroots organizations or who simply show up on their own. Those who come moved by a single issue can give their presentations, compare notes with others who share their concerns and be satisfied. In this way, what goes on in the small workshops and in the corridors is far more important to them than the decisions made ahead of time or the large plenaries. And those who come on their own, of whom there are many, come primarily as consumers of information. They rarely seek to influence structural decisions.
./english/510.txt:18:So the question came up: what to do in 2006? The idea of several simultaneous Forums, at the same date as the Davos Economic Forum, had been proposed in the 2001 information memo. This was thus taken up again to organize a polycentric WSF.
./english/522.txt:39:The tensions, contradictions and setbacks should also be analysed. I will content myself with raising five here - mentioning first the organisational problems (like the deficient information on programming) which probably made life difficult for the individual “unorganised” participants.
./english/532.txt:11:[…] communal management and open access to the informational resources for production, openness to contributions from a diverse range of users/producers, flat hierarchies, and a fluid organisational structure.[3]
./english/532.txt:80:The working parts of journalism are exposed. Open publishing assumes the reader is smart and creative and might want to be a writer and an editor and a distributor and even a software programmer [...] Open publishing is free software. It’s freedom of information, freedom for creativity.[16]
./english/532.txt:99:To examine how much this ‘pretence’ is the rule within the social movement is beyond the scope of this piece. But what is clear is that each of the five characteristics of ‘openness’ described above, when subjected to scrutiny, reveal themselves as extremely compromised. The details, for example, of meetings and discussions are published and circulated, but this information is primarily received by those who are able (and often privileged to be able) to connect to certain (technological/social) networks. Likewise, the language of a ‘call’ or equivalent can determine whether a party will feel comfortable or suitable to respond to it: like PGA’s ‘hallmarks’, language and phraseology is a point of ‘soft control’, but not one that is openly discussed and studied. Furthermore, meetings may be ‘open to all’, but they can quickly become hostile environments for parties who do not or cannot observe the ‘basic’ consensus that is often tacitly agreed between long-term actors in a particular scene. This peer consensus can indeed, on occasion, so determine the movement’s ‘open’ decision-making process as to turn it into a war of attrition on difference, with divergent points of view gradually giving themselves up to peer opinion as the ‘debate’ wears on and on. The ‘block’ or ‘veto’ is in fact rarely used because of the peer pressure placed on those who would use it (‘Aw, come on, you’re not going to block, are you?’ – a common enough plaint at movement meetings). In some cases the apparently neutral ‘moderator’ role can also become bizarrely instrumentalised, giving rise to the sensation that ‘something has already been decided’, and that the meeting is just for performative purposes.
./english/532.txt:138:JJ King
./english/534.txt:16:Reflecting these language politics, IPS's forum newspaper, Terraviva, that previously had been published in several languages, appeared exclusively in Spanish in Caracas. For the first time, the youth camp had its own newspaper called, El Querrequerre (named after a local bird that dies if held in captivity); it was published almost entirely bilingually, in Spanish and English. Community radio broadcasts provided additional sources of information on the forum further enlivening discussions.
./english/535.txt:20:The organizers of the WSF provided some statistical information from last year’s forum in Porto Alegre to help us better understand who participates in the forum and why. They found that 49.8% of the people at the WSF said the reason they attended was for the exchange of experience among the participants. 47.9% attended because they wanted to contribute towards a fairer society. 42.4% came for the democratic debate of ideas and 20.6% came to contribute towards the formulation of alternative proposals to the neoliberal model.
./english/550.txt:6:Appended to, an information about the great demonstration against
./english/550.txt:36:informations and solidarities between the struggles, others attach more
./english/550.txt:37:importance to the exchanges of informations, analysis and plans and to
./english/550.txt:61:informations about this plan.
./english/553.txt:96: * Tackle non-trade barriers and aim for regulatory convergence. Apart from the usual SPS, TBT, IPR issues, DG Trade wants to open up a new frontier: it sees barriers not only in certain measures themselves, but also in the way they are introduced “without sufficient consultation”. Therefore discipline is needed, including “dispute avoidance mechanisms”. This goes in the direction of the “prior consultation commitments” that the USA is seeking in its bilaterals. In the case of the US, when countries want to change their rules affecting business and trade, they need to involve their trading partners during the decision-making process. The EU calls for “consultation, early warning procedures, exchange of information and the possibility to comment”. The Commission also proposes stronger monitoring, enforcement and dispute resolution mechanism which should be accessible to the industry.
./english/553.txt:116:The external dimension must be taken into account at an early stage of decision making in order to minimise regulatory frictions with trading partners. “International regulatory cooperation is the right tool”, says the Commission, “helping to choose the least trade restrictive system, minimize the cost of regulations for domestic business and ‘upstream’ dispute resolution… One good example has been the consultation process for the REACH directive where the voice of the industry outside Europe became heard…. We should be ready to improve our level of transparency, prior information, chance to comment…”
./english/565.txt:45:cooperation, and the belief that "information should be free".
./english/565.txt:262:information. Yippie revolutionary Abbie Hoffman provides yet another
./english/565.txt:276:distribute one's own information. However, the encounter that is
./english/565.txt:305:information and responsibility to all those who would agree.
./english/565.txt:328:street action counter-information, a number of initiatives, collectives
./english/565.txt:344:information exchange, community building and developing a hybrid mix of
./english/565.txt:349:Subversive Center for Information Interchange) [25], bringing together
./english/565.txt:454:Seattle. Thanks to an instant dissemination of information, it has been
./english/565.txt:500:activist information revolution: Indymedia!
./english/565.txt:502:· Indymedia: information, from the bottom to the top
./english/565.txt:505:misinformation and outrageously biased media coverage of radical
./english/565.txt:509:network for counter-information, providing an alternative to mainstream
./english/565.txt:517:anyone to instantly publish or comment on information. As a portal of
./english/565.txt:526:relay information from its source, allowing activists to avoid mediatic
./english/565.txt:533:"information has to be free!".
./english/565.txt:667:between users, while their politics involved open flows of information.
./english/565.txt:681:[1] For more background information on what hackers are, and what they
./english/565.txt:725:information on http://agp.org/ and http://pgaconference.org/.
./english/565.txt:731:and links to background information, see http://www.infoshop.org/octo/.
./english/565.txt:794:related content, and http://hackmeeting.org/ for information about
./english/565.txt:798:years of public activities. More information on the hackmeeting on
./english/565.txt:800:http://sindominio.net/hackmeeting/ for informations about Spanish
./english/565.txt:807:[39] More information on the THK on http://trans.hackmeeting.org/. The
./english/565.txt:822:information super hypeway": http://cat.org.au/
./english/565.txt:830:[46] For information about Radikal and digital copies, visit
./english/565.txt:839:For more information, see http://swpat.ffii.org/.
./english/566.txt:63:make extensive use of other information-management tools, some of
./english/566.txt:91:quantitative analysis. We've built systems to manage information, not
./english/566.txt:101:Google has remarkably broad dissemination of information within the
./english/574.txt:8:`We are getting tired’ said Gianfranco Benzi, from the leadership of the Italian trade union CGIL. `It is more difficult to get people to come…it’s not clear what is coming out of it’. Or from where the pressures on local activists engaged in social movements are particularly intense, Dot Keet researcher for Alternative Information on Development Economics (AIDC) describes how she ` had real foreboding that the Forum would lose it’s purpose if it did not manage to achieve more cross-fertilisation and joint actions between the variety of participants. Without this, instead a source of support, it could become a distraction to activists struggling to build movements on the ground."
./english/580.txt:102:The second reason for our ability to bring in more coherence, was our failure to communicate extensively the details of registered events. Without such information being actively disseminated (though it was available on the website) many groups were unable to come together in advance.
./english/582.txt:34:He impresses for the rich information that he has, for the agility with which he manages, for his capability to formulate concrete alternatives. He already defended the creation of a Word Taxes Organization ( to fight the fiscal wars between countries), a new IMF, an international mechanism to automatically interrupt the currencies negotiations, when they are under speculators attack. But one of his information will cause special impact on the public. The international financial order in force nowadays is so unfair, explains Sonny, that, under it, is India who aids to support the consumptions and the investments of North American people ( including the arms race) and not vice- versa
./english/589.txt:134:Coca Cola appealed to the division bench of the court with two judges which suspended the initial judgement and granted a later deadline to Coca Cola (10 February 2004) for precise information on the quantities of water extracted from each well. As was the case with the previous judgement, this is important particularly as it obliges Coca Cola to be transparent: Coca Cola is obliged to install meters on each well to ensure that public authorities can determine the exact quantity of water extracted.
./english/611.txt:32:Two central tensions of the WSF still exist, however. First, the WSF has been a venue for information exchange. When you do that over and over, with the information remaining mostly familiar...you start to atrophy. Taking the event to a new continent means reaching new audiences so that old substance is rejuvenated by reaching new listeners. But many people want more than that. They feel that with a burgeoning momentum of connections and commitments spanning the world, there ought to be aprogram that the WSF adopts, furthers, and wins. What about the WSF programmatically addressing war, say - or corporate globalization, or the trends in India, for that matter, or even something narrower such as boycotting particular firms engaged in especially horrible practice.
./english/611.txt:40:What about this as a possibility? The Social Forum process, at every level, is about information exchange. One big improvement would be if the information exchanged, especially that which is highlighted and emphasized in the most major and best promoted sessions, swung more toward issues of vision, strategy, and practical lessons from what people are doing, and away from descriptions of oppression and analyses of oppressions all too familiar systemic roots. But even this reorienting of focus, as positive as it would be, would still leave us with a gigantic apparatus being used only to talk, dance, sing, and otherwise experience one anothers views and styles, and to do so only for a few days each year. Cant the WSF apparatus do something that is more sustained, without pulling apart inwardly?
./english/611.txt:42:Well, if the purpose of the WSF is to debate, assess, and help people utilize information - why cant the forum movement try to facilitate worthy and inspiring information flow all the time, and not only during the events? Why cant it put its weight behind aggressively supporting alternative media, on the one hand - and behind aggressively assaulting mainstream media, on the other hand?
./english/611.txt:48:The only ideology this media movement would need is that truth in media is better than lies in media and that media concern for the well being of billions is better than media concern for the well being of thousands and that media in the hands of the people is better than media in the hands of corporate behemoths. And this ideology could be adopted without violating or even transcending the WSFs current definition - which is to facilitate honest, respectful, progressive, information exchange. A WSF media focus might provide excitement and momentum sufficient to rejuvenate and galvanize the forum process, as well as providing an immensely valuable contribution to movements worldwide.
./english/620.txt:13:We would like to take it as given that WSF should not be limited to only a reflective space but also should facilitate global anti-imperialist struggles. However, we agree that WSF itself should not be seen to be an organisation, which either builds or leads such struggles. This distinction is important as those who are constructing this open space for movements should not end up by substituting themselves for the movements. The movements in various countries are the spearhead of struggle against imperialism – either its militaristic, coercive version or its more insidious economic version. The WSF, as a platform, enables these movements to come together -- as either one network or a multiple set of networks – in order to take this struggle forward. For this, the WSF space can be consciously constructed to bring together the concerns, experiences, information and issues of diverse movements and groups, and also catalyse the formation of networks around these issues.
./english/629.txt:86:One last outcome of the character of the Forum-space is the feeling of mutual responsibility that permeates the realization of its events. The fact that it is a “square without owner” promotes this fairly easily, more than in movements where the development of this feeling is sought. In the Forum nobody can go against anybody, nor is willing to supervise each other’s commitments. Even the errors of the organizers - in general a lot, considering the dimension that the events have taken - are accepted and corrected by the initiatives and creativity of the participants. In the WSF 2003 edition in Porto Alegre a serious and involuntary mistake - that forced the organizers to make a great effort trying to minimize its effects - could have destroyed the entire event: only on the 2nd day were the workshops’ programs published. Nevertheless, the participants found ways to compensate the failure by their own, and there were even initiatives from “outside”- as the “savage” publication of the program which availed itself of the Internet information in the evening prior to the beginning of the works.
./english/646.txt:68:One aspect of decision-making somewhat neglected in the WSF process is the possibilities opened up by information technology. Of course, much of the informal decision-making and strategic planning of the forum takes place through e-mail. The organisers have, however, been reluctant to explore ways in which cyberspace could be used in organising more formal decision-making processes. Peter Waterman has argued insightfully and provocatively that the WSF “uses the media, culture and cyberspace but it does not think of itself in primarily cultural/communicational terms, nor does it live fully within this increasingly central and infinitely expanding universe”. He sees the WSF as “a shrine of the written and spoken word”
./english/658.txt:15:Naturally, the purely quantitative aspects are not the most important, but in several articles, figures were mentioned to show that the second Forum was greater in numbers than the first. However, a close analysis of the numbers reveals a lack of balance in the proportions. Obviously, the Forum assembled mostly Brazilians (8,503 delegates out of a total of 15,230) followed by Italians (993), Argentines (924), and French (718). These four groups accounted for approximately 80% of the total attendance. I dont have the exact information, but I believe there was a total of 200 Asians. In the meeting of delegates by continents, there were more or less 100 from Asia. From India, there were about 30 and from China less than a dozen (at very the most). Certainly, there were more Africans than the previous year, but given the increase in "Latins" from America and Europe, proportionately, the Africans presence was smaller.