IsayUsaySsay

Name   : Miriam Lang
Time   : 16.00-17.00 (Paradiso Hall)
Subject: Final Debate
Date   : Sunday 21 January 1996

I would like to resume a few thoughts in order to maybe include them into the final debate...

I got the impression that there are several separate disourses on this conference that don' t really get connected to each other - which is a pity, because the aim of the conference should be to make the best use of the presence of so many different people from different cultures and countries.

Radio activists from the so-called third world have been invited as well as internet activists - most of them from Europe and the US. The idea was that the technology doesn' t matter - what counts is the tactical use.

Now we got three points of view, as far as I see: - first the internet-fans that believe that this technology offers the possibility for real social changes - second, the scepticicians that say that no technology will ever lead to a social change because that depends on social practises of actors (individuals and communities) - third, the radio people, who partly never had access to the internet and can't even follow the debate because not all of them speak english and they don't get everything translated. For them, for example the people of Latin America, it is not even a question if the internet changes anything because people in their countries don't even have access to telephone, let alone computers. Their problems are more military or financial survival of their media - which doesn't mean they are not interested in discussing the possibilities offered by the new media.

Now all these points of view are not really new and have been discussed several times. Nonetheless, the first group still argues as if it were a mere matter of time until the whole world will be connected to the net. There is a kind of impatience, as if "we" here only had to wait for the still "underdeveloped" countries, and in the meantime we can discuss our best strategies. What if they never get connected in a representative way - for the same reason most of them didn't get telephone and television yet? Because there is no commercial or political interest in connecting them, or in making them visible anyway? Isn't the whole strategy wrong then and we have to revise it - including those people in our discussion?

What would internet democracy look like - assuming it would exist in the way some of us are dreaming about it - if it were only a new hegemonial western democracy, english-spoken and excluding most of the world's population?

For the moment this conference shows exactly why the global-village idea doesn't work: parallel discourses ignore each other, they don't get connected and if they would it would be difficult to understand each other.

I think we should at least try to get into a discussion that overcomes continental and cultural boundaries in the final debate. Do one step further, really listen to the critiques that have been formulated so many times and include them in our further argumentations.

Miriam Lang