A new Eldorado, or a ticket to the First World?
By: Nelly Lejter
[email protected]
Published online by Cybersociology Magazine: Issue Three
http://www.socio.demon.co.uk/magazine/magazine.html
Ariadna's thread
The thread that links the speculations, reflections and analyses that the
reader will find in this text is a question for which there is no answer
in this "Venezuelan province" of cyberspace: can the Internet
stimulate political participation among Venezuelans? Can this libertarian
world, this anarchy, this infinite possibility of communication, become
a means of conceiving new forms of becoming something we are not today but
in an eventual, crowded and modular way? Will being citizens of the Internet
mean we have finally become citizens of our own country? I call my readers
to go across these questions. I do not intend to find answers and definitive
truths, but to learn together, thinking collectively, to ask the correct
questions. Let this hypertext be infinite and become a starting point for
Venezuela and for the society we want and deserve.
From another planet
Among the magazines I know, there is one that is the most distant, literally
at light years from the reality we live day to day in Venezuela and Latin
America. It is a magazine that writes about worlds unknown to us and that
we can touch only obliquely. Paradoxically, this is a magazine that speaks
about a subject that looks like the most universal and global of all: the
Internet. It is Wired
magazine. In its printed issue of September
1997, for instance, it says, in an article by Kevin Kelly: "The only
factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention".
A world of abundance? This does not look like anything similar to
what we live in Venezuela, especially if we think in global terms. Kelly
goes on: "We are connecting all to all. [·] In a Network Economy,
value is derived from plentitude, just as a fax machine's value increases
in ubiquity". It is obviously quite possible that computers will eventually
become as common in our households as telephones and TV sets. But we cannot
ignore that in Venezuela and Latin American countries we are far from that
goal and that we are in fact lagging behind in it, as we do in almost everything
else.
The access to the Internet and its benefits is largely a consequence of our access to other resources of what are generally considered signs of development. It is not surprising that countries with the biggest number of connections to the Internet, of WWW pages, of telephone lines for every 1000 inhabitants, are obviously those with a higher standard of living and higher indices of human development.
The reader will surely tell me that the number of Internet users also increases in Venezuela and Latin America, and that in fact its growth is impressive. I suggest, for the sake of argument, to accept the premise that the access to information is not or will eventually cease to be a problem. Let us imagine that the problems of infrastructure are solved at least for an acceptable portion of the people of the country or the continent. Let us, for a moment, leave aside the question of whether this will be the "simple" result of the invisible hand of the market, that is, that it is enough to sit down and wait until it eventually happens. According to the principle of ceteris paribus, let us return to Kelly and his plentitude versus human attention, in regard to the content carried by the Internet. Kelly implies that in the light of the abundance of, for instance, of WWW pages, the user's attention becomes scarce. Hence, suppliers of information who want to capture attention must make a special effort, to make the content and presentation of their WWW sites as attractive as possible. A related idea is that every page or site added to the Web, for example, adds an exponential value to the Internet in general and to my Internet tools in particular. The ubiquity of material resources (infrastructure of communications) and the abundance of information (WWW pages) are sources of collective and individual wealth.
In principle, the idea of the ubiquity of the Internet looks convincing. Take books, for example: before Gutenberg they were confined to an elite of elites. Once the massive production of the quiet signs becomes possible, the information acquires an unimaginable power of circulation. But the biggest expression of accessibility to information comes not from the printed word but from the digital word. Thanks to the Internet we must not print one single page to read the entire Don Quixote. But a question arises immediately: is the availability of information a sufficient condition for it to be read, digested, assimilated by its likely receivers and creators? Does the existence of, say, 100 million WWW pages, with endless texts, means that on-line human beings are actually reading more than when they had to go to the book store or the library?
There is no automatic relationship between access to the information and reading ability, much less analytical ability. Those who read over the Internet do not read because of the Internet. In contrast, the Internet does not eliminate or necessarily diminish the propensity to read. Nor does Internet automatically nourish it. If that were the case people would be reading much more today than years ago, given the accessibility to printed books. When books could be easily bought in Venezuela, how many books were sold? How much did Venezuelans read? It is not a problem of availability: after all books from Argentine, Mexican or Spanish publishers were found at ridiculous prices. Whether people did or did not read, it was because of factors other than accessibility. Of course, it is possible that the revolutionary power of the Internet in this field is still nascent. Hopefully this text I write today will soon cease to be valid; hopefully the Internet will stimulate not only reading, but rigorous and deep analysis and critical thinking as well.
How many Web pages are there about Venezuela? We have quite a few things on the Internet. We have the country's main newspapers on-line, and some not so important as well. We have sites of entertainment, opinion, analysis, culture, health and nutrition, tourism, economics. The universities are there too. With little glory -- their sites have much to be improved. Very few schools have their own WWW pages , and it would be interesting to find out to what extent the Internet is being used as a resource in our schools, as a search engine, for example. La BitBlioteca ( http://www.analitica.com/bitblio/bitblio.htm ), for instance, has a section of texts intended for high school use. It can be helpful to thousands of Venezuelan students -- provided they have access to the Internet at home or at their educational institutions.
The reader might ask: Well, why must we focus on the Venezuelan pages if I can go almost to any corner in the World (the world having WWW pages, that is? After all we are in full globalization process, in the global village, interconnecting everybody to everybody. Furthermore, regions and nations are losing their validity and importance as long as the possibility of communicating with other cultures, other societies, other worlds become practically boundless. What is the sense of speaking in regional terms about the content of the Internet if it is universal by definition?
But is it that universal? Are its social and cultural
implications universal? Are not we turning globalization into a fetish?
After all, Wired
magazine is an example of how the effect of
the Internet in a society can be very local and not universal at all --
not to mention that the culture of the Internet is in fact elitist in the
United States themselves. Considering interaction, and not only hitting
different pages, globality can paradoxically give more relevance to the
regional and local.
Of course I can exchange messages about any imaginable subject in the cyberspace.
Thi
s miracle notwithstanding, and in spite of the marvelous world of oceanic
information, there is an area of our individual and collective lives where
regions keep their relevance, no matter how many hours we spend navigating
through European and North American sites. It is a complex space in our
lives where public and private spheres are interdependent and where the
problem of content, together with the infrastructure, is essential. It is
a space where no matter how we dream it, we cannot yet be "world citizens,"
nor can we be just "netizens": the political sphere.
Postpoliticos, antipoliticos, indifferent?
During my years in the United States to prepare a Ph.D. degree, I found
a tool that completely changed my life. It is Atarraya ( http://www.mit/edu/listas/atarraya ), a mailing list that connected
Venezuelans and friends everywhere in the world: Australia, Brazil, Canada,
Finland, France, Germany, Holland, Japan, Peru, Portugal, Spain, Sweden,
the United States, etc. Most of its participants, at the time, were graduate
students, with a few undergrads participating in the Galileo program of
Fundayacucho, a state-funded organization for the support of students abroad.
There were many others who had migrated to other countries and resided
permanently
outside Venezuela.
Those who participated in that network, and those who had a certain affinity with Venezuela (it has never been restricted to Venezuelan-born persons), enjoyed and suffered all the liberties of cyberspace. It is a horizontal world, totally unrestrained because it is an unmoderated mailing list where freedom of speech is passionately and ferociously defended. People of all ages, sexual orientations, political postures, religious beliefs, professions, speak, argue and share their writings. Those who have pretended to exert some authority in Atarraya have met the challenge of its users, who have never feared authority, at least in the exchanges that occur within it. It is a world that sometimes resembles the one described by Jon Katz in his article "The Birth of a Digital Nation," ( http://www.wired.com/wired/5.04/netizen/ff_netizen.html ) published by Wired magazine in April 1997.
According to Katz, "[t]he Digital Nation constitutes a new social class. Its citizens are young, educated, affluent. (·)The members of the Digital Nation are not representative of the population as a whole: they are richer, better educated, and dispropor tionately white. They have disposable income and available time. Their educations are often unconventional and continuous, and they have almost unhindered access to much of the world's information." Are these netizens similar to the netizens who log on from Venezuela? We must assume that that is the case, including the whiteness, in spite of our multiracial culture. I am afraid, though, that the similarities to Katz's revolutionary world stop here, as I will show below.
Further in his text, Katz claims that "Like it or not, however, this Digital Nation possesses all the traits of groups that, throughout history, have eventually taken power. It has the education, the affluence, and the privilege that will create a political force that ultimately must be reckoned with." Katz comments the emergence, in this new Digital Nation, of postpolitics, considered as a new form of doing politics which transcends the traditional references of right/left, conservative/liberal, Republican/Democrat. According to Katz we are looking at the emergence of a new paradigm that takes the best of all the present ideopolitic paradigms. It is no less than a new rationality that sooner than later will eradicate today's social and political institutions.
Well! Here we are again, light years from what happens in what I dare to call , inversely paraphrasing Roberto Hernandez Montoya in his hypertext A Brief Theory of the Internet ( http://www.analitica.com/bitblio/rhernand/theory.htm#Province ), the "Venezuelan province" of the Internet. The mailing lists of Venezuelans in which I have participated accommodate very little of those paradigms of doing (or not doing) politics. I perceive no new political tendencies, no new paradigms. There is no postpolitics, even incipient. There is in any case a simulacrum of the antipolitics that characterizes a good portion of the "illustrated" public opinion in Venezuela: an almost total lack of trust, not only in the present politicians, but in the democratic system and even in democracy as a concept. I am of course talking about the participation of, so to speak, the average "netizen," whose contributions seem to constitute a sample of antipolitics rather than a new phenomenon or paradigm.
The problem is that antipolitical discourse and
practice bear the risk, even by default, of carrying with them the seed
of totalitarianism, or at least indifference to it. And from indifference
to acquiescence there is a small step; it would be sad to follow that path
by mere inertia.
It is of course true that Atarraya or the other electronic mailing lists
have never been the only alternative for a direct interaction between netizens
that have in common their links with Venezuela. There are BBSs too, which
had their boom between 1993 and 1994. They are now facing the challenge
if surviving in the WWW world (for more information on the history of BBSs
in Venezuela, see http://www.ssebbs.com/queesunbbs.html
). There are moreover some WWW pages that stimulate
interaction with their visitors, as for instance, the Ruedo pol'tico ( http://www.analitica.com/ruedo.htm ) in Venezuela Anal'tica
( http://www.
analitica.com ), the forum on public services
at the site of the Electricidad de Caracas ( http://www.edc-ven.com/foro/index.html
), and the political surveys of Webmedia Forum
( http://www.webmediaven.com/forum ). There are some even that could be called "non-conventional
sites," or "alternative sites," where appear contents that
are not "fit to print," as The New York Times says, for
political reasons or for reasons of another nature (see examples of these
sites in Tierra Buena ( http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/1786/ ), Alcarav_n ( http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/1786/a-index.htm ), Compromiso Pro Espacios
Libres ( http://www.cpel.org.ve/ ), which incidentally show
the long way we still have to go).
Moreover, all those who have interacted in the virtual world have realized a fact: in most cases the exchanges reinforce one's points of view; at the end of the exchange, everyone is more convinced than before that his or her position is still correct beyond doubt. I see no "new rationality," as Katz suggests, even though he admits that this new rationality does not exist yet in the Internet: "[t]oday, the idea that the Net offers a new sort of rationalism is a stretch. Newsgroups, Web sites, and online public discussions are disorganized. And along with online freedom comes its ugly offspring: the confrontation, misinformation, and insult that characterize many public forums on the Internet. The only exceptions are sometimes the moderated forums, where the freedom of expression (an absolute and non-negotiable value for many netizens) can be restricted."
At this point the reader might say: Does this mean,
then, that the Internet offers no hope as a tool for information, for the
serious discussion of subjects of general interest, to influence the decisions
of public affairs? Of course it does. The Internet offers tools that might
in fact revolutionize much of what we know, somewhat derisively, as "politics."
We understand though that for the time being it is only a possibility, a
promise; perhaps even an utopia.
The promise
All this must be get feedback from the many similar experiences that take
place everywhere in the world. We can compare the social platform of Clinton
with those of Argentine's Carlos Menem or Irene S_ez in the Caracas neighborhood
of Chacao. We can add ideas, elements, projects, criticisms, doubts. We
can build a country tailored according to our needs and realities.
The Internet as a new technology permits the anticipation of some changes in the way politics is exercised. It is still a relatively insignificant force, but its exponential growth, much faster than that of other technologies like television, suggests that in a historically immediate time a new and very different political context might emerge. The present political systems demand the centralization of decision making, postponing sine die the democratic promise of the citizens' responsible participation, forced to delegate (and abdicate) their right to concur in the affairs affecting th em. With the Internet what Pierre Levy calls "immanence" might happen: a new paradigm of regulation of human groups, thanks to this new era of technological (r)evolution.
Regulation of human groups*
| Organicity | Transcendence | Immanence |
| The members of a group organize after the mutual knowledge of their identities and their acts. | The members of a traditional group are organized by category, unified by leaders and institutions generated by a bureaucracy or fused by enthusiasm. | A big self-organized community is a molecular group. Using all the resources of fine technology, it assesses human richness quality by quality. |
It is collective intelligence, as Levy describes
elsewhere in the same book:
"Collective intelligence has nothing
to do with crowd idiocy. Panics, collective enthusiasm, etc., are the effect
of the epidemic propagation of affects and representations among masses
of isolated individuals. People in a panicked or enthusiastic crowd do not
think together. They communicate, of course, but in the minimal sense of
the passive and immediate transmission of simple messages, of violent feelings
and automatic behavior. The global effect of individual actions is out of
the control of the individuals who integrate the crowd. Perhaps we might
be constrained to think that the passage through a transcendence (hierarchy,
authority, representatives, tradition, etc.) is the only means of making
the collective less erratic than an atomized crowd. But it is not true.
The technical and organizational elements may become visible for all the
collective dynamics,
allowing everyone find their place in it, modify it
and evaluate it in full knowledge. Intelligent communities are radically
opposed to the incoherence and brutal immediacy of crowd movements, without
coercing the community into a rigid structure" (ibid.,
p.87).
Can you imagine something like this in Venezuela? But not so fast: we are
not yet there. We are not even near; not even on the way. After the initial
enthusiasm inspired by these ideas (or projections?), we cannot ignore the
little detail of how we will go from the present situation to that scenario
of full participation and direct democracy. I want to emphasize that access
to infrastructure is not enough. As in the examples mentioned above, the
access or the concrete possibility of participation are not sufficient in
themselves for effective participation to take place. According to Mark
S. Bonchek (From Broadcast to Netcast: the Internet and the Flow of Political
Participation, at http://institute.strategosnet.com/msb/
) the Internet can in fact contribute to increase
participation... of those, that is, who already participate or have the
propensity to do so.
Another detail that must not be ignored is how
those in power in the
present political and economic structures will react.
According to Lorenzo Lara Carrero ( mailto:[email protected] ; Technology of Information
and Social and Organizational Democratization, presented at the International
Forum of Communal Communication in July 1994), a bigger spread of technology
brings an enrichment of information and communication. This process causes
decision making and communication to become more horizontal and as a consequence
more democratic. The main obstacle is, according to Lara, "the disposition
of sharing power among those who have it, with new employees and associates."
Lara's analysis, that can be applied to particular organizations as much
as to society in general, touches a sensitive point in the eventual qualitative
and quantitative increment of political participation of Venezuelans thanks
to the Internet. Lara is not too optimistic in the foreseeable future, when
he observes that the variable "disposition to share power among those
who have it" is an enormous loop of negative feedback that "limits
the tendency to open are make organizations more horizontal." Obviously,
though, it is not a static or rigid variable. As long as those in power
find themselves in a highly competitive market, as in the "polls market,"
it is
possible that they will support new methods of participation that
allow them to seek the support of potential voters.
The doubt
This leads us to an even more complex question: can the Internet attract
to discussion and political decision those who are today indifferent or
alienated citizens? The only answer is: We do not know. Bonchek finishes
his work (his doctoral dissertation at Harvard) with an idea that I subscribe
with both preoccupation and enthusiasm: "[t]he answer, I predict, has
far more to do with educating people than networking computers." I must emphasize that Bonchek
limits his observations to the United States, where, by the way, the problem
of apathy is also present. In Venezuela there is not only apathy but apparently
democracy as a concept is losing the sympathy and identification of citizens.
Hence the preoccupation: If we did not participate before the Internet,
will we do it now? If we did not feel and still do not feel real participants
in politics and society, if we only participate incoherently in culture,
will we identify with the digital world? Will we use the Internet as an
infinite possibility of communication and participation? Or will we transform
it in a new Eldorado, that is, a vain, illusory, unattainable, even ridiculous
goal, notwithstanding how much faith we put in it at the begin
ning? Will
turning on the computer be the same as turning on the TV set? Will it become
a repository of local Kitsch or will we transform it in a real forum for
creation, imagination, freedom and responsibility?
We do not know. It is a question with no answer
as yet in the more advanced countries with more access to the Internet and
the production of WWW sites and exchange forums. In our case, the problem
is more complex because in Venezuela there are problems of access and content,
context, indifference and antipolitics, on the one hand, and on the other,
the urgent need of participation and full citizenship. It does not entirely
depend on us, but those who are reading this page, those who have the illustration
and the access that allows them at least to arrive here, must go further
still. We all have a role to play in the dilemma of transforming our Venezuelan
province of the Internet in a new Eldorado or in a ticket to the "first
world". A first world that is still being invented (even though we
have the resources to do it), and that has not yet arrived even to what
we have come to know as the First World.
Nelly Lejter ([email protected] is author, with Roberto Hernendez
Montoya, of Latin America: An Impractical
Handbook ..He lives and works in Venezuela.