Social Movements on the Net
Osvaldo León, Sally Burch, Eduardo Tamayo
ALAI, september 2001
http://alainet.org/publica/msred/

Introduction

“Another world is possible”: this is the watchword that is reverberating with increasing resonance throughout the world, among the diverse social sectors and citizens who refuse to fit into the one-track project that the dominating logic of neoliberal globalization is attempting to expand across the planet.

There is no “other way out,” an unperturbed neoliberal discourse sustained, until the magic spell was broken asunder by the demonstrations of protest witnessed in Seattle in December 1999, on the occasion of the Conference of Ministers convened by the World Trade Organization (WTO), not because they were a first, but because of their symbolic impact.

In effect, since then we have seen a new phase of social reactivation whose agenda includes global issues and stakeholders who are seeking to break out of the isolation of their specific struggles. Thus began a unique process among social forces of the most diverse nature, that are converging around a common agreement that the fate of humanity must not be subject to the dictatorship of the market. It is intolerable – they argue – for social and geographic inequities and imbalances to continue to grow, resulting in an ever greater concentration of wealth and a sharp increase in poverty;¹ and this, despite the fact that never before has humanity had such an abundance of scientific and material resources for finding lasting solutions to the scourges it has suffered.

It is, no doubt, an incipient but dynamic process, whose novelty resides in its bringing together very distinct social groups and networks with divergent individual histories, organizational practices, orientations and platforms. That is, it is fuelled but also confronted by the challenge to decipher diversity and pluralism. In this sense, it is a process that has benefited from the organizational and propositional contributions of new social movements, be they feminist, ecological, indigenous, human rights, etc., seeking precisely to conjugate those democratic attributes with a holistic world view that is critical of the very meaning of modernity and western civilization.

In other words, it questions this project of civilization – with its ever-present promise of a prosperous, abundant future in full liberty – based on a reading of the global world that not only upholds the practical impossibility of universalizing such a proposal (it being unsustainable), but also alerts us to the resulting risks to the future of the planet itself, caused by the forces it unleashes, be they nuclear explosions or ecological collapse.

The bet on “another possible world,” framed within this critical perspective, could not be limited to gathering the growing uneasiness into coordinated protests, and so it soon took on the pressing task of formulating alternatives. This is precisely why it brought together social entities and movements at the World Social Forum (WSF) held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January 2001 to reflect on and share experiences. Eventually, this event became a catalyst for these new social energies, and a decision was made to turn it into “an on-going process of search for and construction of alternatives.”

In this search, the social re-appropriation of all scientific and technological progress – an historical heritage of humanity that has been confiscated by the large corporations – takes on special importance, so that they may contribute fully to collective wellbeing.

Foremost among recent technological developments are the new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) that have multiplied and enormously accelerated our ability to communicate, access information, develop and share knowledge, with serious implications for social cohabitation.

At this point in time, no further evidence is needed to establish the link between ICTs and globalization. Actually, the media coverage that gave this term its fame began by associating it with the compression of time and space that was made possible by ICTs. This is what enables us, among other things, to communicate in real time from any point on the planet. This image, furthermore, is carefully cultivated to preserve it in time, since it is clearly the best ticket for "selling" globalization, at least in comparison to anything its financial side has to offer.

“Internet for everyone” is a fashionable lyric that has lately been on the lips of rulers and politicians, especially during elections, to the beat of a promotional discourse that presents it as a panacea that will heal even our battered, increasingly alien democracies. Through this lens, it would be up to ICTs, sooner than later, to fulfill the democratic ideal of universal access to knowledge, and the achievement of societies based on transparency, tolerance, and the protection of citizen liberties. To make it happen, all you have to do is to populate the world with computers and connections to the Network of networks.

From another viewpoint, though, it is argued that these technologies can also be used to impose hegemonies that would tend to drown out small communities and weak countries, benefiting the elite and deepening current relations of domination and inequality.

Doubtless both possibilities exist, as do many others because, as is the case with any technology, what benefit is gained from ICTs and by whom will depend mostly on how it is developed and implemented, due to the correlation of forces in play.

Presently, those who have rushed ahead to fill these spaces and impose the rules of the game are business companies, particularly large transnationals in the fields of telecommunications, information technology, entertainment and the media. Under their influence, the logic of profitability tends to take precedence over any other consideration.

If we fail to open up the democratic playing field, and this predominantly business current is imposed in ICTs, there is evidence – gathered by diverse studies – that in our divided societies marked by social inequalities, the trend will be towards further exclusion of the more vulnerable sectors, which are precisely the ones that are also at the margin of information and communication circuits.

Faced with this reality, social networks and movements stand out as a counterweight, inasmuch as their entry on this new scene is marked by participatory criteria, which is part and parcel of the democratizing role they play. And to this extent they empower individual and organizational abilities to speak out, form alliances, negotiate, or resist, in order to coordinate legitimate social appropriation of such technologies.

“Unity in Diversity” is a premise that is spreading among the social forces of Latin America as part of their organizational redefinition, particularly in terms of connecting convergent processes. Under this tonic, over the past years the region has been the scene of a proliferation of networks and coordination initiatives that, on a national and international plane, bring together organizations that represent diverse grass-roots sectors (peasants, indigenous people, women, people of African descent, popular urban communities and youth, among others), with a view to deepening their impact on public policies in various spheres.

Within this framework, such initiatives have identified the need to appropriate communications instruments, and have found in ICTs – primarily the Internet – a very valuable tool for intercommunicating, coordinating and disseminating their actions and proposals.

Through this experience, social movements are considering the importance of taking ownership of such resources, particularly the Internet, which means not only being users, but also deepening their understanding of the logic behind them, in order to benefit fully from them. But it is also becoming evident that they have a role to play in defending the people’s interests with regard to the orientation of ICT development and deployment, which would imply not only influencing the respective decision-making bodies, but even re-conceptualizing the dominant discourse and taking on the task of challenging meanings and values.

It was from this perspective that the Web Community of Social Movements (WCSM) was born in late 1999, as an initiative promoted by diverse social coordinating bodies around the continent,² for the purpose of developing a collective strategy of intervention in the Internet, based on a concrete experience: implementation of the “Unity in Diversity” portal on the Web, to give social movements greater presence there. This means creating a common space where each coordinating body preserves its own autonomy, thus making it possible to counteract the isolation and dispersal of sites, while bringing together a critical mass of information on social issues.

Since the participation of social organizations in information processes is not limited to physical connections nor to simple access to the mass of information available, the exchanges organized within this initiative also took up the following topics: how they can best organize the reception and selection of information and appropriate it as useful knowledge; how to define strategies for intervening in this medium; what added value they can add to the global cumulus of knowledge, as social protagonists with a wealth of knowledge and experience; and, in a broader sense, to ponder on the importance of including the right to communicate and to access new technologies in the platforms and struggles of social movements. This meant, among other things, intervening in the conceptual debate, since the important thing is to open doors onto that other “possible world” that is ever more necessary.

The struggle for values

As has occurred with each technical innovation seen in the field of communications, the deployment of ICTs has gone hand in hand with a flurry of messianic, deterministic discourse anticipating social consequences as if they were inevitable. In general, this rhetoric explains little but promotes much, seeking to establish a virtual monopoly on standards and uses.

Now the novelty resides in the strength with which this discourse has spread to all levels, establishing platitudes that are repeated ad infinitum. Thus, the new social environment developing with the presence of ICTs is not only due to their accelerated physical deployment, but also to the broad discursive dissemination that advertises them, making them an every-day topic and part of the collective imaginaries. The fascination they generate and the echo they have had in the media world, generally in spectacular terms, are thus seen as important factors driving this process.

When speaking of the discourse advertising these technologies, we refer to what is conveyed not only by professionals in that field, but also by those carrying out research to produce an understanding of their social influence. We know that each has different goals, procedures, criteria, and standards, but it appears that we are witness to a certain degree of convergence at this level.

Technological determinism considers technology an independent variable that is the primary cause of social change. That is, it establishes a cause-effect relationship between technology and social change. This perspective leads to “apparatus-centered” studies that generally end up assigning certain properties and values to the object of study, which it probably does not have. Thus, with the rapid technological changes seen over the past decades, the forms of this discourse have changed accordingly.

In effect, as Robins and Webster (1999: 1-3/66) outline, toward the end of the 70’s, when the silicone chip cleared the way for new technologies, there was talk of a “microelectronics revolution,” but as soon as the capacity of these technologies to process and store information was highlighted, we heard about the “IT revolution.” Similarly, attention centered on the impact these technologies have on work and the labor situation, which among other things gave way to the suggestion of possibly creating a “leisure society.”

Throughout the 80’s, as interest turned towards the communications functions of these new technologies, the formula was broadened as the “revolution in ... both information and communications technologies.” Thus, concern started to center on the economic and political significance of the “information and knowledge society” – which in the debate appeared as a variable of “post-industrial society” – and the need to strike a balance between the imperative of economic competitiveness and the questions of social justice and public culture.

In the early the 90’s, attention turned towards the Internet and its projections, above all business-related, with its central reference point being the US project of building an “information superhighway” deriving formulations like one global “Network society” and, subsequently, the “cyber-revolution” and “virtual society.” With this turn of events, the agenda became essentially pragmatic, as the issue became the development of information resources and skills needed to compete on the world’s markets. But this did not stop a new strand of idealism that promotes cultural appropriation of the technological agenda: a “technoculture” that foresees possibilities for emancipation in “cyberspace” and “virtual reality.”

In this process, it is clear that the emphasis has switched, as the initial political-economic outlook has swung towards a cultural one, each contributing pertinent points that become diluted in the end when they attempt to overrate the role of the new technologies in social processes. In any case, they have contributed to consolidating the contemporary “communications ideology,” as a system of representation organized around communications technologies, identified as the axis of social dynamics and organization.

This is a discourse where technological factors will condense, as pointed out by Sierra Caballero (1999: 7), “the old, ancestral myths of the ideology of progress, concentrating visions of a world that is effectively integrated by science and technology, to the point that the eulogists of a new technological civilization put all their hopes for social change and development in the transformational power of these new technologies. The contents of all social revolutions are thus subsumed by the mobilizing power of all things technical. New technologies are what will radically change the world of work, study, culture, leisure, and even the forms that science and knowledge take on. The technological mystification of this end of millenium intends to exhaust, as a consequence, the meaning and reference of all things social in the instrumentalist function of new information technologies, irrespective of the social relations underlying their production, use and commercial circulation.”³

In an attempt to overcome linear cause-effect approaches, Croteau and Hoynes (2000: 310) propose taking into account that "Technologies do not simply appear on the scene, fully developed and ready to be implemented, nor do the technical properties of emerging technologies predetermine their use. People must use new technologies, and in capitalist societies this use usually must be profitable. Media technologies, therefore, are embedded in ongoing social processes, and, as a result, their development and application are neither fixed nor fully predictable. Technological development is the result of several interacting variables: the capacities of new machines, the priorities of owners and investors, the cultural practices and traditions that the new technologies confront, the uses of potentially competing machines, and the specific ways people actually talk about and use the new technologies. To understand the social significance of media technology, then, we should pay attention to the social forces that shape their development and adoption.”

This being the case, it is clear that the possibility of social forces formulating alternatives means not only opening up collective perspectives and practices, but also reformulating concepts, including analytical approaches.

With such considerations in mind, this book is written as part of the project of the Web Community of Social Movements (WCSM). The first part explores the growing debate regarding the Internet, seeking to locate more precisely what is at stake in this environment, its possibilities and limitations, its challenges, its dynamics and organizational effects, particularly in terms of flows and networks; in a word, its current status, as a prerequisite to thinking of strategies. The second part presents a survey of how the social organizations involved in the WCSM are incorporating Internet into their practice, looking at utilization and benefits, motivations and perceptions, as well as implications at the social-organizational and communications level. (O.L.)

Notes: