IsayUsaySsay

Name   : Addie Schulte
Time   : 10.30 - 12.30 
Subject: Reality check. 
Date   : Saturday 20 January 1996

Marleen Stikker (Society for Old and New Media, moderator): This is a reality check. like this whole conference is a reality check. What is new media? What is democracy?

Bob Horwitz (Soros Foundation): George Soros is a great fan of the Internet, even if he does not how to type. He did send an e-mail message, once. I do not believe it is the golden tool. Bulletin boards are really needed.

Katja Diefenbach (journalist): Radio, the copymachine, the camcorder all promised greater democracy. At the one hand we have more acces to data, on the other there is a backlash of reactionary ideologies.

Steven Lenos (Agora): Internet is the second best medium to empower individuals. We do not know what the best medium is.

Rena Tangens (Zerberus): The Internet is not as broad and anarchistic is as it is supposed to be. There are machines in America that can control. It is important to keep autonomous networks. We have no rich parents or big companies behind us. That is why we ask a small charge.

Kees Schalken (researcher at the Catholic Universit Brabant): Internet does have a big potential , but there is also a big tension with the way politics works.

Nina Meilof (Beurs TV, Digital City): We tried to bring local politicians online, but they felt lost in this big city.

Horwitz: Karl Popper's The open society and its enemies was a transforming expericence for Soros. His aim is to create openness. Actually, we started to work with Internet to cut the costs of faxing to and from Eastern Europe. Now there is a complete Internetprogram, giving acces to underserved groups, which yields high results. We build the infrastructure only where the local infrastructure can not support the network.

Rena Tangens: The structure of the Zerberus network is democratic. It is designed to be a chaotic system, not to support a new hierarchy, rising from the new technology. The sysop can not read your e-mail, even not by accident.

Horwitz: The right to an Internetaddress does not exist. That has yet to be established.

Rena Tangens: There is a move to colonise nations by communications standards.

Steven Lenos: I would like to evaluate the myths versus the practice. Did the new media bring radifcal social chnage? No. Is there a pushbutton democracy? Also not. Is Big Brother controlling the lives of the digital citizens? No. But there a lot of experiments going on.

Horwitz: The format of a webpage is like an advertisment brochure.

Katja Diefenbach: The question whether new media lead to greater democracy is ridiculous. Democracy is social practice. There is a lot of technological determinism. Democracy is an ideological term of the West. The Internet has some very nice conditions. It brings the promise of enlightment. But there are a lot of white points on the map, where people do not have acces. Language has a hierarchical structure.

Marleen Stikker: Thank you for making it complicated.

Addie Schulte