Español: Estimad@s OURMedia: les escribo desde mi nuevo hogar en Barranquilla, Colombia, donde estaré este semestre invitada por la Universidad del Norte. Debido a la transición no había podido ocuparme mucho de esta lista, pero ya esta semana volveré a mantenerl@s al corriente de temas y cuestiones de interés para todos y todas.
El mensaje que sigue fue circulado hace unos días por Sasha Costanza-Chock. Es sobre una nueva lista de correo llamada "incomunicado" diseñada para discutir temas relacionado con las tecnologías de información y comunicación, y su apropiación en el sur global. La lista funciona en varios idiomas, incluido el español. Para informacion ir a http://www.incommunicado.info.
'incommunicado' no comienza de cero. Es el siguiente capítulo de
la lista Solaris list, fundada en 2001 por Geert
Lovink Michael
Gurstein. Con 'incommunicado' se espera continuar el
debate comenzado con Solaris. Lo mismo puede decirse de la difunta
generation_online donde se discutió "Empire" de Michael Hardt y Toni
Negri.
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English: Dear OURMedia: I write from my new home in Barranquilla, Colombia, where I will be working as Visiting Professor invited by the Universidad del Norte. The transicion has made it difficult to maintain the list, but this week I will go back to it in order to update you on issues of our interest. This message below was circulated a few days ago by Sasha Costansa-Chock.
incommunicado
a research list on civil society, ICT and
post-development
<http://www.incommunicado.info>
Dear
All,
We would like to invite you to join 'incommunicado', a new
electronic
mailinglist that focuses on the spread and reappropriation of ICT
across the
'Global South'.
In the politics of communication and
information, many have come to call for
'rights' rather than 'freedoms'.
Questions regarding access and
accountability might indeed require the use of
the idiom of (human) rights,
but we also wonder what it means when a politics
of rights comes to serve as
the ultimate horizon of any politics whatsoever.
Which is why the idea of
being (held) incommunicado - to be in a liminal
state vis-a-vis multiple
regimes of information as well as (human) rights -
serves as our point of
departure.
To explore multiple vectors of what
is often referred to as "ICT and
Development" or the "Digital Divide", it
will not suffice to rehearse the
customary (conceptual and organizational)
idioms of 'knowledge-based
development,' 'stakeholder dialogue', or 'civil
society organization' that,
for better or worse, have become central to both
academic and (grassroots)
political analyses, itself a consequence of the
involvement of inter- and
non-governmental organizations that generate and
reproduce their own
conceptual vocabularies.
To do so requires more
than the creation of a few media-theoretical
neologisms. While we came up
with this project in the context of the 2003
World Summit on the Information
Society (WSIS) and hope to provide a forum
for post-WSIS analysis, we would
like to broaden our focus to include a
number of topics that strike us as
indispensable to any seriously
'postcolonial' approach to the ICT
nexus:
NON-STATES: Statist modes of (conflict) analysis to the contrary,
non-state
actors are key players in any arena of transnational politics, and
questions
of ICT, too, are linked to the multiplication and conflictual
interaction of
nonstates. Aware of the 'official' geopolitics of information
pursued by
states and inter-state organizations, we also want to observe the
agendas
and (structural) transformation of relevant 'nonstates',
including
corporations, foundations, think tanks, NGOs, and other
'grassroots' or
'movement' actors.
EMPIRE: What is striking about some
of the most influential work in
contemporary political philosophy is its odd
disconnect with the culture,
intruments, and practice of media activism.
Appropriating whatever seems
useful to us in such conceptual work, we want to
re-connect and create
across multiple (disciplinary)
divides.
INFRASTRUCTURES: From Open Source Software (OSS) to the
ecopolitical impact
of ICT, we want the rich materiality of ICT to come into
view, both to
disturb cyberlibertarian techno-spiritualisms and to connect to
multiple
issues of conflict, labor, and migration that rarely show up in
standard
discussions of ICT.
Neither a news list nor an exclusive
forum for esoteric reflection, we
encourage the presentism of post-a-lots,
attentiveness to the historical
dimensions of contemporary controversies, and
occasional conceptual
interventions. We envision neither a free-for-all
without any sense of
direction, nor a 'virtual public sphere' with rigid
rules of engagement, but
are hoping to make (and leave) room for encounters
within a (somewhat)
focused multiplicity. Current projects in the areas that
interest us have
some weak spots that need critical attention, and this is
one of the
places/spaces where this could be done - in
common.
RESEARCH: a note on the idea of a research list. What we do not
mean is that
some list members are 'researchers' and get to post whatever
they deem of
general interest, and some are not. That would be a sure way to
create list
orthodoxies right from the start and discourage anyone not used
to a
high-traffic list. Instead, we think of every list member as a
researcher -
just as ict-and-development raises many more issues than those
ususally
taken up by a technocratic expertism, research is by no means
the
prerogative of some media-theoretical elite - and hope that some of
whatever
crosses his or her desk/inbox/mind will find its way onto the list -
and
thus into the list archive. We also want to bring the list archive back
from
its generally passive role as mere record of past exchanges, and
incorporate
it much more actively. Short intro comments on how any one
contribution
relates to the general list agenda are welcome but not necessary
if that is
more or less obvious: we do not discourage the fwding of current
articles
published elsewhere, quite the contrary - a lot of relevant material
is
available on the web only temporarily, and we would like to archive some
of
it for future reference. Which means that we will have to develop a
better
search engine for the list archive than the one provided by the
standard
mailman software, as well as a few open-edit research tools on the
site
itself, which will go live in a few months. Needless to say, this is
a
work-in-progress, but we are curious about the possibility of expanding
the
functionality of this list beyond the usual and hope that the criteria
for
its usefulness will be articulated - and changed - by list members to end
up
with the kind of research tool they, too, have been looking for but
that
does not yet exist.
'incommunicado' does not start from scratch.
It is first of all the
follow-up to the Solaris list, founded late 2001 by
Geert Lovink and Michael
Gurstein. At some stage Solaris ran into server
trouble and from the
beginning has been plagued by spam problems. Also the
quest for a critique
of 'ICT & Development' seemed to be too narrow, too
premature. With
'incommunicado' we hope to continue and extend the Solaris
debates. The same
can be said of the now defunct generation_online list that
discussed Michael
Hardt and Toni Negri's _Empire_ .
'incommunicado' is
co-founded by Geert Lovink ([log in to unmask]), media
theorist and internet
critic, based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Soenke
Zehle ([log in to unmask]),
a media researcher based in Saarbruecken, Germany.
'incommunicado' is a
polylingual space: submissions in english, french,
german, and spanish are
welcome.
Please forward this invitation to whoever you think might,
would, or should
be interested in joining 'incommunicado'.
Clemencia Rodriguez
OURMedia