Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2000 12:51:15 -0400
From: Susana FINQUELIEVICH <[email protected]>

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS A NON-EDITED AUTOMATIC TRANSLATION FROM SPANISH

Citizens, to the Net!

The social bonds in the cyberspace

Susana Finquelievich

(Coordinator)

Pablo Baumann, Mariano Blejman, Ezequiel Fejler, Susana Finquelievich, Hilda Herzer, Alejandra Jara, Graciela Kisilevsky, Rainer Randolph, Scott Robinson, Ester Schiavo, Douglas Schuler, Artur Serra, Raúl Trejo Delarbre, Raquel Turrubiates

Index

Introduction: Electronic nets, social cables, Susana Finquelievich

Part 1: The current city: technological nets and social nets

Chapter I: The mutations of the urban thing: of the net of cities to the " city-net ", Rainer Randolph

Chapter II: Internet and urban life: when the cyberspace and the street are supplemented, Raúl Trejo Delarbre.

Chapter III: The citizens of the Society of the Information: between the gentlemen of the air and the native town, Ester Schiavo

Part 2: The transformations of the local governments

Chapter IV: Social uses of ICT: Local governments and Civic Participation, Pablo Baumann

Chapter V: The computer science in the local governments, Perception and real uses, Hilda Herzer and Graciela Kisilevsky.

Chapter VI: Telecentros in Mexico: Challenges and possibilities, Scott S. Robinson

.

Part 3: The renovation of the community organizations

Chapter VII: Of the neighborhood coffee to the electronic nets. The virtual communities as social actors in the cities, Susana Finquelievich

Chapter VIII: New communities and new community nets. Construír new institutions to face the new challenges, Douglas Schuler

Chapter IX: The civic nets: A technology of the society of the information. Lessons of the project European EPITHELIUM, Artur Serra.

Chapter X: Community nets in the cyberspace: the case of the Argentina, Alejandra Jara

Chapter XI: Toward the civic connection. The case of the city of Austin, Texas, USA. Graciela Kisilevsky.

Part 4: Electronic bonds

XII chapter: The virtual communities in Argentina: life and passion., Ezequiel Fejler

XIII chapter: Chat, chat.... You predict cybernetic and global communication, Raquel Turrubiates.

XIV chapter: Universe Mail, Mariano Blejman

The authors

Introduction

Electronic nets, social cables

Susana Finquelievich

The never so much closely attacked far.

César Vallejo

The society of the nets

December 31 1999. The population is awaiting the new millennium. The previous expectation to the festivities cohabits with a vague uneasiness for the threat of the Y2K, the virus of the millennium", that small flaw in the computer programs that he/she can make collapse the systems. But it doesn't seem to have danger: in the developed countries, the big corporations have invested fortunes to make sure the good operation of their computers. The first place in arriving January 1, on the planet, is the Republic of the Islands Marshall, near it Lines her International of Date amid the ocean. The television cameras that transmit for the world from their capital, Majuro, registers the artificial fires that the festejos begins first, then a massive blackout of electricity and an airplane that he/she smashes against the dark landing hint. Starting from there, the media doesn't stop to transmit disasters around the world. Different cities in Siberia, Russia, China, Japan, Australia, Europe, Brazil, Mexico, and finally United States suffers massive blackouts, fires, it lacks of water, of telephone, of communications in general. The technical nets collapse. The airplanes fall as flies, the underground transports are paralyzed, the trains collide. Inevitably, the bank systems crumble and the financial bags go mad. Everything is accompanied it of mutinies, murders, suicides and formations of religious fanatics' hordes. The virus of the millennium has begun to act.

The central countries had, certainly, taken their cautions with regard to their computer systems, but I didn't seize all the outlying countries. The old chips infected in insignificant systems goes infecting to the rest in their respective countries, and then, by means of the nets electronic managers, financial, political, university students, social, to the other countries, until the chaos appropriates of the planet. The cities go back to a medieval state in question of hours. They only survive the rural areas, non tecnologizadas.

"Y2K. Effect 2000", the novel of science-fiction of the North American Mark Joseph that relates this apocalypse, can be debatable from the literary point of view and until technological, but it points out an evidence: any country, any city, no neighborhood is isolated. The technological and economic systems, besides the politicians and social, they integrate that that Manuel Castells calls the society of the nets". The Spanish sociologist, pioneer of the analysis of the society informacional, refers like one of his main characteristics to the logic of the nets that appropriates"... of each system or group of relationships, using the new technologies of information. The morphology of the net seems to be very adapted to the growing complexity of the interactions, and to the impredecibles development paradigms that emerge of the creative power of these interactions". And he adds: "This configuration topológica, the net, now it can be implemented materially, in all type of processes and organizations, through the accessible computer technologies. Without them, the logic of nets would be too difficult of implementing. And however, this logic is necessary to structure the inestructurado, while the flexibility is preserved, since the inestructurado is the force that lidera the innovation in the human activities".

These nets are, for the time being, mainly urban. In the society of the information that is our circumstance, the city, production locus and diffusion of technological innovations and structural node of this new society, it is also the new predominant scenario of the computer nets. These determine in her new production forms and distribution (examples like the teletrabajo, telecompra, telebanking, is only at the present time the tiny visible part), new habits and ways of life, affective relationships, forms of administration of infrastructures and services, civic administration, formation of organizations participativas, of virtual communities, in innovative ways of association and of use of the urban space. These transformations, for the time being seemingly invisible, they rebound increasingly in the urban form and in the social organization. The city no longer integrates only different nets: It is, in turn, a group of nets. We inhabit the city-net, and our lives lapse entangled in multiple groups of interactions.

Do you come here often?

" Do you come here often"? is a sentence that is not only listened by way of introduction in bars, disks or clubs. At the moment it is part of the folklore of the cyberspace, in their different variants: " Participás in this or that list / forum / virtual community""? active Sos or lurker""? did I Find in Internet a community that is organized to revitalize the green spaces, and is it in my city""! do you Stick to the mail against the Neo-Nazi congress""? did you Dress the last session in the place web of the Legislature"?. Internet, the electronic mail, are they the impalpable scenario of a great part of the current social exchanges, from the new forms of community organization until the loving encounters, from the electronic trade until the efforts of the governments to adapt to the requirements of the Society of the Information.

This book gathers authors' of diverse nationalities original articles and academic disciplines, united by a common passion: the study of the social and political relationships, the personal and community nets that are believed and they develop in the virtual space generated by the communication mediatizada by computers, but that with their to work they transform the real space (as much the physique as the social one) of the cities that we inhabit. Many of those that we write in this book have in fact known each other in electronic forums or navigating for the Net, before crossing continents and seas, of to be personally in front of coffees and beers and to knot friendships and durable labor associations. Others share physical spaces, we live in the same city and we are periodically in present meetings, but to newspaper we exchange mails in those that we send and we receive information, we discuss and we generate new ideas. We are, in summary, inhabitants of two juxtaposed worlds: the present one, with the wealth that you/they can give the encounters only face to face, and the virtual one that contributes the i-limitations of the asincronicidad and the metaespacialidad, this last one facilitated by the to-geographical sense and deslocalizado of the electronic nets. We act inevitably in several nets: those that study, those that we live in our cotidianidad. The electronic nets sustain this way the social cables, and vice versa.

The community electronic nets

The community electronic nets, or civic nets supported by ICT (Technologies of Information and Communication), I object fundamental of this book, they are so much a new type of urban experience that is implementing in growing form, in the countries but industrialized as in the peripherals. They consist, basically, in on-line computer systems that enlarge the reach and the potentialities of the existent community organizations and they collaborate to the creation of new organizations. These systems are conceived to promote and to stimulate the communication, the cooperation, the participation and the exchange of information, experiences, goods and services between the citizens and the public and private actors of a community (NGO, government institutions and private companies), while simultaneously they open the local community to the communication in net with the global community.

The technologies of information and communication (ICT) they are used in these cases to support to the community organizations in their efforts toward the social and economic development of their population-objective. This, in turn, gives place to that that the Anglo-Saxon Community denominates Informatics, community computer science (IC): a technological strategy that joins the efforts in pro of a community economic and social development with the emergent opportunities in areas like the electronic trade, the telecentros and civic nets, the electronic democracy and the on-line public participation, besides communities centered around the self-help, the mental health, cultural, environmental activities and others. The IC, in synthesis, consists on the study from the applications of ICT to the actions of the community organizations for the achievement of its social, economic, political or cultural objectives.

For it is fundamental to consider the accessibility from the population to the ICT. Gurstein (1999) it identifies seven access levels: gobernabilidad / political, education / social facilitation, suppliers of computer services and Internet, contents / services, software tools, instruments, and transmission facilities. In these levels they are included the technical access (phone connections and computers), economic access (the use costs and maintenance of these systems), social access (cultural, educational and social barriers that limit the use of the systems) and physical access (for the individuals with physical difficulties. It is also interesting to consider how to administer and to locate the institution or organization through which the population has access to the IC. Deepening a little more in the question, we find that it is important to debate how to organize the technological context (institutional, organizational, educational, etc.) with the objective of optimizing the uses of the technology and the potentialities that it presents. It is also necessary to consider of what way the opportunities of public access to the ICT are related with non technological services and other organizational structures; of what way for example, the access and use of the community technological centers or telecentros could incorporate to urban equipment. But also, it is necessary to develop the investigation on the society of the information to understand that the processes of tecnologización of the cities don't happen innocently, neither for chance, neither they are lacking sense, but rather on the contrary, they support and they materialize a system of life, a structure socieconómica, a form of understanding the virtual world, as well as the verbal language makes it in the real life. The technology is not an isolated entity with own force, but rather it is developed in a social mark that contains it and that at the same time this contains in a dialectical and eternal interrelation. For these reasons, he/she would be necessary to understand and to analyze which those aspects are, laws, programs, use forms and political to develop to provide to the nets characteristic democratizantes and socializantes of the information, so that they don't work merely as elements of power but also of contrapoder. The accessibility to the Net will be accompanied for political of learning and of development of knowledge, tendientes to modify the intent of privatization of the net somehow, on the part of the corporations, and to introduce in her own contents.

The unavoidable query is: Are the community electronic nets, equally effective in the central countries and in the peripherals? Can the insert of these communities in global nets of communication mean improvements in its quality of life? Can it originate new entrance sources, access to improvements in the sectors of the education and the health or an increment in the quality of the urban administration? In synthesis the global nets of communication are useful for the positive transformation of the local physical and social space? And the most important thing: How is able to a community to appropriate of these technologies, and to use them to elevate their quality of life?

This book tries to provide some answers through the investigations and its authors' reflections. Our interest when gathering the works is to study these processes as they take place, to apply the conclusions to the transformation of the cities and the optimization of the quality of urban life, beginning with the municipal administration and the civic participation. In times in that Internet produces a differential contribution, in the sense that it acts as factor of creation of communities, it is indispensable to think of these processes, before the processes think us.

Presentations.

The book is organized in four fundamental parts. The first one, The current city. Technological nets and social nets", refers to the new urban conceptions, the city informacional that like Castells outlines"... it is not a form, but a process, a process characterized by the structural dominance of the space of the flows." In her, Rainer Randolph meditates on the scenario of the city-net that rises on a double it structures: a physical-material structure of their built atmosphere and of their circuits and flows, and another less visible structure (partly also physical-material) that allows the flows informacionales and of communications that open the inhabitant the access to another world. On the other hand, Raúl Trejo Delarbre communicates us its thoughts it has more than enough Internet, as long as half specific and intensely urban. For the Mexican thinker,"... the nets of information, in their extension, disorder and disparity, resemble each other to the freeways and avenues of anyone of the contemporary megalópolis. As in them, in the Internet there are areas of lights and other, of shades. Direct routes and abrupt shortcuts exist; reflection spaces and many more than amusement. The same as in the arteries of our big cities, in the net of nets we can find -o to suffer - surprising and other, predictable encounters; we run the risk of suffering spoils and the possibility of finding delights and retributions. The social inequality that is particularly contrasting in the cities, is part of the realities that you traslucen to the net of nets". Ester Schiavo contributes a third point of view: it is interrogated on the cybernetic citizenship. The certain thing, does the author outline, is you/he/she that the citizen is no longer defined only to belong to a city or State like subject of political rights, and for otraparte, the diffusion of the technologies of the society of the information (TSI) does it outline new queries to this debate, the citizens of the society of the information (IF) are they a new category of citizens of the world? Are they only it those connected ones to the telematic nets, or is it possible to think that these technologies will allow to improve the conditions of all the inhabitants' of the planet citizenship?

The second part of the book, The transformations of the local governments", it presents works about the attitudes of the municipal governments in front of the incorporation of ICT, so much in their internal operation as in the interaction with the citizens. Pablo Baumann contributes a case study in the city of Buenos Aires, in the one that eencara the topic from two fronts; the first one raises experiences gestated starting from the own local governments, tendientes to achieve a presence in the cyberspace for means that you/they go from the creation of web sites to the conception of more ambitious projects; the second front analyzes the carried out experiences or to be carried out for the civil society and its community organizations. The chapter of Hilda Herzer and Graciela Kisilevsky develops a similar topic from a different optics: the authors travel the historical period up to 1998 in the Legislature of the City of Buenos Aires, to go into in the intents of generating new forms of organization of the Legislature, using ICT, and studying the limitations that emerged. Scott Robinson takes us to Mexico, where it analyzes the telecentros, public spaces where any person can consult Internet, besides communicating via electronic mail with who wants. According to the author A telecentro in a commitment to offer information and a training in the handling of the same one, but there of mercantile interests. A national and international net of telecentros is the logical annex to the public libraries in our time, and it is a proposal to attenuate the dividing one digital that now marks the condition poscolonial". Robinson analyzes the attitude of the Mexican local governments about this new urban equipment.

The third part, The renovation of the community organizations is the most populated one. It is specifically dedicated to the study of community electronic nets in Argentina, Europe and United States. Deliberately, we have chosen case studies to integrate it, since in spite of the urgency of building a theoretical body on the social effects of the computer revolution, and fundamentally on the community nets sustained by computers, we believe that you cannot elaborate a theory only based on the intellectual speculations, or extrapolating classic authors' theories on new topics. On the contrary, it is necessary to build and to accumulate a critical mass of case studies, because of her the reflections can be extracted that will go building dialécticamente the bases of a theory.

In this section, Susana Finquelievich contributes a theoretical mark on the community electronic nets and the virtual, proportionate communities the conceptual tools that will be used in the following chapters, and contrasting the reflections of several authors and his own, based on recent investigations and in course. Douglas Schuler, an unavoidable classic in this topic, outlines that before the computers occupied the center of the scenario, the term community net was a sociological concept that described the pattern of communications and relationships in the community. For this author, the new community nets based on the computer science are a recent innovation, directed to help to revitalize, to reinforce and to expand the existent community nets, based on people, in the same way in that the previous civic innovations have helped historically to the communities. Artur Serra, from Barcelona, it describes the project EPITHELIUM (1996-1998) that consisted in principle in developing a telematic platform for the fight against the social exclusion. It was one of the few projects in the area of urban and rural topics of the IV it Programs European Marco related with one of the distinctive objectives of the European strategy: the creation of a society of the information open to all the citizens without exclusion, but there of the development of a mere infrastructure of information. The result has been non point to create a telematic platform, but developing and potenciar a so much group of new organizations of district, as of city, as European that allow to materialize what we understand for societies of information."

The fourth and last part, electronic Bonds, it is in fact dedicated to the social relationships that are knitted in the Net, without community objectives mediate in these. Ezequiel Fejler analyzes the virtual communities in Argentina, from 1984 at 1999; the author differentiates three stages: the communities born in the BBS (Bulletin Board System or Systems of electronic Bulletins); the communities born in the mail lists that continue effective today in day like one in the developed ways in exchange through the Net; and those born in the places Web of commercial communities that are profiled like one of the possible futures of the cyberspace. Raquel Turrubiates Calcáneo is consecrated to the new communication form in the cyberspace: the Chats, towns of unknown cibernautas in their majority, where the conversations lose their ephemeral sense, since they can be conserved. The rooms of Chat, the Mexican author sustains, they are the places lúdicos where the internautas finds socialization spaces for the new culture of the nascent society of the information. To conclude, Mariano Blejman takes an atypical focus on the ICT: the electronic mail as instrument of formation of tactical subvertoras. The author argues that these you potenciarán as there are a bigger knowledge of the technological means and a better education. "Recently then adult will be the possibility to counteract the attacks to the privacy, represented in many cases by the virus invasion and worms, and in others for readings indeseadas of electronic mail, traffic of e-mail bills, control of attitudes, ideological persecution and robbery of data. The current technology began the deprivation of the real space, in function of the real time; everything happens too quick, everywhere and at the same time. The electronic mail is one of the material and ideological supports so that it happens it", it sustains.

Among other many things, the transition to a society of the information implies new conceptions of the space and of the time, of the social knots, of the work and the consumption, in the ways of governing and in the ways of participating in those governments or of exercising a social control on them. Everything constitutes it gradually nets of nets. Of the nets of cities we evolve toward the city-net, and of there, to a world that doesn't become more reduced, but yes inextricably complex, in which the local actions rebound at global level and vice versa. This book seeks, with all its limitations, to help to the understanding of this new society.

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Last modified: 29/03/2000