All knowledge is traversed by social construction and mediation. Research agendas, together with the basic methods and epistemologies that shape knowledge regarding society and nature, are as a rule conditioned by the potential awareness and historical development of productive forces. Yet, in some cases, these conditioning factors are relative, as can be observed for instance in communicology. Two illustrative examples of this logic are the Internet galaxy and technopolitics . Although despite living in the era of intelligent multitudes, studies in this regard are still rather thin on the ground.
Scientific project funding policies that sideline studies based on a critical vision of the social appropriation and use of digital networks, from the point of view of their impact on processes of social empowerment and change, set a research agenda that is paradoxically unproductive or, at the very least, lacking in sociological imagination. This is especially the case when rethinking the mediations that those using the digital ecosystem experience nowadays, at a moment when, as in the case of Latin America, many political experiences and processes are taking place.
However, there is a memory of the practices and a theory and research responsive to those experiences of cultural subversion and resistance which, in due course, would fuel the paradigm of the philosophy of liberation. To give just one example from a critical historical approach, it is worth recalling the dialogue and innovation that Latin America experienced throughout the 1960s and 1970s with alternative communication, which recognizes the diversity of voices and actors, gives voice to the normally voiceless and, thanks to its praxeological vision, respects mediation as a constituted and constituent process of popular cultures. The inspiration of new perspectives and productive knowhow on the leading edge of knowledge regarding the appropriation and use of new technologies for local development, fostered by the pioneers in Latin American communication research, articulatedâin line with the demands of subaltern collectives and ancestral wisdom in the development of communitarian and democratic forms of inserting cultural representation systems and devicesâtransformation processes that nowadays, of course, have persisted in the contemporary forms of intervention and social revitalization of the so-called âtechnopoliticsâ . Although the aim of this introduction is not to offer a history of participatory communication that illustrates and gives meaning to modern-day cyberactivism, it is nonetheless worth noting the importance that heterodox and creative interpretations, which endeavored to follow other paths and courses denied, by omission or will to power, by communication as domination, have had in Latin America.
From this viewpoint, community communication is the autonomous field of production that articulates voices for an emancipatory purpose as a counter-hegemonic opportunity for social change, in resistance to the antagonistic critique based on group or collective organization, unity and empowerment. By the same token, technopolitics should be understoodâin the logical framework of this bookâas a transformative and decentralizing mediation grounded in the democracy of the code as a pooled construction of possible reality on the basis of digital culture and collective co-creation.
Understanding Technopolitical Ecologies : Main Perspectives and Key Lessons
The digital revolution has modified and redesigned conceptually the conventional media system by shaping new forms of production and organization of information mediation. The mutations that introduce the âInternet galaxyâ into the new social morphology are particularly visible in the perturbations and interruptions of social activity which affect culture. These reticular and centrifugal transformations of the new cultural ecology go a long way to enabling the political subject of post-modernity to permeate reality itself, customize the world, appropriate possible and real worlds of interaction with his or her imagination, and design new rationales of local participation and development.
The basis of participatory democracy harnessing new information technologies now recognizes the existence of a new information ecosystem that articulates what Oskar Negt calls the âoppositional public spaceâ (Negt 2007). In the new media culture, the communication process has broken free from the time/space coordinates described by Descartes at the dawn of modernity, with broadened forms of experience that transcend the local horizon of events. Furthermore, the spatialization of time in the Web anticipates a new conceptualization of the âlocalâ. In this regard, Castells talks about a new spatial logic based on information flows versus the logic of social organization rooted in the history of immediate localities and territories. The new model of urban development, the space of immaterial flows of the organization of social practices, disassociates the experience of the physical space by making both virtual simultaneousness and fragmented timeless space possible. Such transformations become particularly evident in, and have an especially strong impact on, urban planning and particularly citizen participation and political deliberation.
The cyberspace introduces new habits and relationships as regards the conventional forms of social ties, in addition to modern practices and symbolic representations. As EchevarrĂa has rightly pointed out, although the technical issues relating to the access to information on the Internet, as well as to its circulation and safe and rapid transmission, are important, reflecting on the Web as a new civic space is a far more pressing matter. The shaping of a new telepolis is, in this respect, the main challenge that the communication research agenda should meet. The breach of internal and external limits of cities and territories, the integration and confusion of the public and private spheres, traditionally conceived individually in discourse and in modern political communication, not only promotes new cultural trends of organization and human sociality, but also the creation of a new space of identity and political participation through different electronic forms of interaction and information exchange.
The culture of surfing, of communication crisis, of migrations and hybrid and decentralized cultural mediations, both polyvalent and diverse, has transgressed the cultural laws of proxemics, of territory and frontiers, of the ways of identifying the self and the other, of the cosmopolitan and of the local, to establish gradually, and once and for all, a transversal and constructive logicâautonomous, if you willâof the production of cultural differences. And this transgression has come about in terms of a new form of space/time organization of experience, of feeling and of meaning, which has necessarily taken interculturalityânamely, acknowledgement of the other, of otherness as identityâand the assumption of a culture of dialogue as its guiding principles. This involves, of course, an unprecedented cultural shift that highlights collective memory. Nowadays, the Web is becoming the space or environment/memory of popular culture. But, as HĂ©ctor Schmucler cautioned, the escape velocity poses a problem between memory and communication insofar as they are characterized by contrasting elements: instantaneousness, simultaneousness and on the brink, the timelessness of communication versus the duration, persistence and slowness of memory.
To dwell upon the contribution made by NTIC to memory and democracy requires, first and foremost, modifying analytic strategies, questioning research methods and techniques, integrating disciplines and study prospects, and shifting the perspective in a productive and ecological sense. The complex contexts of cyberspace and technological networks call for reflexive critical research and a new theoretical framework capable of describing and understanding the technical conditions of the post-modern electronic world through an endogenous and generative approach to the complex technoworld of the new media, since only a second-order observation will allow us to design new mediation processes.
In this context, more than a play on words, the metaphor of the web describes an imaginary process that attempts to convert social actors into dream weavers, architects of the material, symbolic and sociopolitical processes of the city. Hence the relevance, as has already been reasoned, of deploying a generative research culture that contributes to develop collective appropriation processes of communication technologies and knowledge, thus broadening information culture by means of a dialogic, emancipating and productive communication conception of cyberculture.
Along these lines, the media activism propounded by the new technopolitics with cyberspace culture shares a complex idea of communication, according to which the scope of telematic networks, the promotion of autonomous intervention groups and the design of community projects on the basis of the language of links constitute the pillars of productive cooperation of the new social contract, as well as a platform for constructing democratic local communication by multiplying three distinctive strategies of alternative communication: firstly, a collective and liberating reflection on communication practices; secondly, a dialogic culture of consensus-building; and lastly recognizing multiplicity and difference.
Conceived as a strategic dimension for rebuilding cities and revitalizing citizenship and governability, the application of new technologies to the participatory democracy implicit in the processes of collective mobilization and action of contemporary technopolitics opens up new spaces of coexistence. These are created by social networks in city neighborhoods and districts in order to define a new framework of social relations which, from an ecological perspective, makes an oppositional public space possible as a complex participatory context pluralistically built in recognition of the multiples voices and actors comprising it. This would make it possible to recover the word, the communication practices established by the citizens themselves, so as to define a new development model based on their self-assurance to express their opinions, put forward proposals and reach agreements; in short, to transform their participation in political life through a commitment to the community and social harmony. According to this philosophy, the innovation and social creativity policies relating to the new media underscore the relevance of participatory action research as a program of autonomous projects in which communication is directly and transversally linked to local development in all its phases, endeavoring at all times to identify the possibilities for co-determination, for outreach and social change and for defining and stating the desire for a policy of self-governance, of autonomy in the global network. This can be seen in the Mexican, Brazilian and Colombian practices and processes presented in this book.
In Latin America, the processes of cultural hybridization and of reorganizing the symbolic universe, the product of a market whose globalizing progression is relentless, has generated out of necessity new forms of establishing cultural identities by fragmenting group discourses in the intersection between the massive, the cultured, and the popular. Hence, the need to understand the meaning of that space, or world of life, in which new social movements perceive that there is a need to take action against forms of social control deriving from an exacerbated technological rationalization, above all taking into account that cultural identity is a crucial factor for understanding and cognitively controlling the environment.
In this sense, participatory communication in mobilization processes can, on the one hand, help social movements to build identity and generate differences and symbolic integration. On the other, dialogically speaking, technopolitics can also enable networks to generate shared dialogues and meaning between competing groups, since in this theoretical framework social movements assume the configuration of the area, or social network, in which a collective identity is built, negotiated or recomposed. Accordingly, the new social movements can be defined as networks for shaping meaning, generators of public spaces of management, of presentation and recognition, and as self-made movements whose âsignificant practices are imbued with affective values and can be expressed regardless of the formal structure of societyâ (RamĂrez 1996, p. 33).
In Latin America, the technopolitics of social movements strives to guarantee the democratization of the social media in order to create a space where subjects can exercise their rights and obligations, instead of reward system between transmitters and audiences based on commercial logic. Here, to participate means placing the main actors in the communication circuit on an equal footing. Communication is understood as the real relationship established between two or more people, by virtue of which one involves the other or both participate together. Communication presupposes participation , joint possession, sharing with the other, making subjects a stakeholder in something. As Redondo points out, âCommunication cannot be defined without resorting to the concept of participation which implies extending something to another, all of which forms an integral part of communication. At the risk of sounding idealistic, the term âparticipationâ expresses a synthesis of unity and duality in the communication processâ (Redondo 1999, p. 185).
If alternative communication can be defined in relation to the appropriation and use of the conventional media, whose perspective is subordinating and counter-hegemonic, rather than alternative communication in its restrictive sense, here it would be more appropriate to talk about an alternative to communication. From this perspective, the democratization process of communication that technopolitics proposes in the region would, to paraphrase Alfaro, be committed to a new model of articulation sustained by the capacity for dialogue, negotiation and exchange, creating and legitimizing public spaces of shared social and community interests for broadening and discussing new development horizons.
True enough, achieving a greater organizational potential would directly lead neither to development nor to social transformations in favor of a better territorial balance. However, the self-organization of social movements in networks, the construction of institutions open to the community fabric and, lastly, placing communication and culture at the service of local promotion and development, are independent aspects that establish, as a priori conditions, the possibilities of political, economic and cultural autonomy at this level and which perceive new cultural and subjective conditions in contemporary politics.
The development and consolidation of social movements represent, as a matter of fact, an expansion of the citizenryâs personal and collective autonomy, transcending the delegation of objectives and functions in favor of a participatory appropriation of public spaces from the experienced to the conceived. This is achieved, without subordinating one level to another, by means of dialectic integration in a higher level of social awareness and responsibility of the joint activities that local institutions pursue in the community setting.
The rejection of rigid hierarchies and the defense of direct democracy within small, decentralized groups is in fact the essence and peculiarity of technopolitics and the process of collective mobilization as networks submerged in daily life. The defining characteristic of the functioning of social movements is precisely their reticular articulation, since as a result of cross-links at all levels the activities of each group and different collectives develop jointly sharing similar objectives, given the late-capitalist requirement of transversality. In this respect, social movements can be considered as a âcross-linking of networksâ, similar to a spring-like object with multiple free-flowing and ambiguous frontiers, open to change and the personal participation of subjects in the definition of knowledge for action and collective functioning with other social groups. In a way, any social movement is an internal and informal participatory research-action mesh or network supported by the culture of the group and the social promotion of its members as the main social change-makers. Thus, social movements foster awareness-raising in order to discover their own possibilities and resources collectively, on the basis of virtual tools, spaces and rationales of enunciation that make hyper-developed technology possible.
With technopolitics , human groups and collectives can exchange experiences and compare discourses and targets for action. Yet it is possible that collective experience and knowledge transfer never actually occurs between them. As Ardoino remarks, the whole question is to know whether the imaginary that praxis produces conjointly in and with networks can lead to a ritual innovation of change and to the transformation of individual and collective imaginaries through intervention, since access to the analysis of relations of production makes the social nuances of domination more understandableâintellectually speakingâalthough this does not guarantee in advance the transformation of the context analyzed or the inter-group dialogue in pursuit of consensus. In this regard, it should be noted that, historically, the experiences of alternative or transformational communication have been formally and ideologi...