Hi Michel,
1) the internet is multi-lingual and can be used as a counter-force to anglo-saxon language domination (the stress by david de ugarte and lasindias.net <http://lasindias.net> on language-based phyles)
Indeed, the Internet looks multi-lingual. It is in fact said that in a few years, there will be more Chinese language users than English on the Web. But this is the visible language that end-users see. However, HTML, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, etc. down to the assembly language of CPUs and their microcode -- the hardware language inside those CPUs -- all use English mnemonics. (I keep in my library a curious book ISBN 5-8206-0030-4 in Russian, about Unix. Throughout the book are Unix keywords including standard directories and filenames in English.) One has to learn some rudimentary English to master the technology. The technology itself plants the desire to learn the language. (By the way, Schumacher's book was entitled Good Work, not Work as I wrote in my earlier post.)
3) the internet can be a tremendous force for relocalization and re-empowering local communities (see http://delicious.com/mbauwens/P2P-Neighborhoods)
Yes, but all those who are using the Internet for local work are being forced to subsidize global communications. The bias/subsidy for globalization is there all the time, without additional effort, whether a user is aware of it or not, because technology itself masks the fact that long-distance communications actually costs more per unit resource than local communications -- even on the Internet. If Internet charging reflected this distance-dependent costs we would even be more inclined towards local communications than international ones. A long-time ago, I kept asking ISPs, why not charge by distance? The typical answer I got was that it was much harder to implement. Perhaps, as you say, it is "not inherent" in the technology, but it is so deeply embedded that it is as good as built-in. And the flat charging leads to the bias/subsidy I'm pointing out. I agree with you that we can work to overcome these. But the fact that we have to suggests that the design itself contains a built-in bias. This is the reason I'm all for an alternative Internet. But its designers must be very conscious about the biases they are building into the alternative technology. There is actually a mature technology that has the opposite bias (for localization) which is also so embedded in the technology that it forces the use of the local language and the focus on local interactions. This is low-power FM. That LPFM is not more widespread than it should is due mainly to the institutional bias against it, in favor of the Internet. The detailed comparison I made between the Internet and LPFM (the technology for most community radios) can be found here, p.169: http://rverzola.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/infoeconomy-verzola.pdf. Another example of building in a bias: I've been hoping that China would make a DVD player with a built-in burner (for sharing) and browser (for browsing HTML files mirrored on DVD), to encourage copying as well as local swapping of discs, a face-to-face social interaction, in contrast to the impersonal anonymous exchanges on the Internet. Greetings, Roberto
The effects you mention are therefore not inherent to the technology, but to socially dominant usage, which depends on the balance of forces in the wider society
Michel
On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 11:07 PM, Roberto Verzola <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I suppose I am reacting to strongly to this because I find myself struggling with issues regarding determinism. I have - like you and like most sociologists and anthropologists - always made a case for the primacy of the social (should we call this social determinism?), but with the rise of the information age/ the network society/the digital economy this very familiar position started to erode a litte bit. It is an interesting question why /social/ sciences insist so stongly on the primacy of the /social/, or on /social/ determinism. It is like a natural reflex. I wonder if this has something to do with a protection of disciplines. Obviously, if people
I find myself agreeing somewhat with Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, who said we shape our tools and our tools then shape us. He talks of co-evolution of the human and their tools. We might call this "mutual determinism". When he says "shapes us", I presume "us" includes social relations.
E.F.Schumacher (Small is Beautiful) went further and I strongly agree with him too. He wrote (in Work) that when we adopt a technology (shaped by someone else, presumably), we absorb the ideology (mindset, value-system) that comes with it. Schumacher believed that many technologies come embedded with ideologies, and those who think they can import a technology without also importing the ideology that comes with it are mistaken. This is probably more "technologically deterministic" than Engelbart, but I think E.F.Schumacher is correct, for some technologies at least.
In fact, I did an analysis of the Internet, using Schumacher's perpective, and found several embedded mindsets/value-systems that Internet users are *forced* to absorb, often without realizing it. (For the complete piece, see http://www.scu.edu/sts/nexus/summer2005/VerzolaArticle.cfm) Let me just list three:
1. the universal dependence of Internet technology on the English language, down to the microcode inside microprocessors, forces us to learn English. If you learn the Anglo-Saxon tongue, you are bound to acquire the Anglo-Saxon taste. Learn the language, pick up the culture.
2. the automation mindset: to replace people with machines. This might make sense in a country rich in capital (though that's still debatable), but less so in countries rich in labor. When we replaced muscle-work with machines, we became less physically fit, what would happen as we replace mental-work with machines?
3. a built-in bias (in fact, subsidy) for global players and globalization.This is best seen in the Internet cost structure of flat rates regardless of distance. A 1mb file sent to a colleague using the same ISP costs as much as a 1mb file sent to someone at the other side of the globe. Yet the latter uses much more network resources (servers, routers, communication channels, etc.) than the former. So local players are charged higher per unit resource than global players, a subsidy for globalization that is built into the Internet, as designed today.
So, do we reject the technology then? Schumacher's 1970s response was intermediate/appropriate technology. Today, Schumacher remains relevant, through the vocabulary might be different; I would say that we must also get involved in the redesign of the technology. This is why the talk about an alternative Internet on this list interests me a lot.
I would not bind myself a priori to a fixed perpective that "things" determine social relations or that social relations determine "things". I would explore these perspectives on a case-to-case basis, and make use of whatever new and useful insight can come from either (or both).
Greetings,
Roberto
_______________________________________________ Commoning mailing list [email protected] http://lists.wissensallmende.de/mailman/listinfo/commoning