Hi Andy,
About Iraq and telecentres you write:
<<If there were 1,000 telecentres in Iraq that did nothing but provide
people email access and an outlet for online gaming, I'd have to agree
with you. But when done well, telecenters are epicenters of hope and
human potential -- places within the community where people can rally
together for educational, economic, cultural and civic development. And
when all members of a nation are given equal opportunity to improve the
quality of life of their families, some of these other divides, I hope,
would lessen over time.>>
I, too, hope the current cultural and shooting wars in Iraq would lessen if
telecentres were freely available. However: as realists, don't we have to
look at the possibility that those divides would widen ?
Perhaps the terrors and the terrorism of our time means that we have to
balance of our views of "community." Against the picture of "community" as a
place where people share a common culture and aspirations, we need the
counterview of a community as the site of all of the divides, all of the
culture wars of our time. In Iraq, for example, many communities contain
Shiites and Sunnis, and it is not immediately clear to me that telecenters
put there by Americans or international agencies would enhance the
possibilities of peace between them.
As an enthusiast for telecenters, I spend much time working in other
countries to make them possible. Yet I share Manuel Castells' view on the
ambiguities inherent in the world wide spread of information technology. In
his THE INTERNET GALAXY Castells, a Colombian by birth, says this
"Unless we act on a broader development strategy we could find ourselves in
the situation I found myself on landing in Bogotá...I care very much about
Colombia, so I was eager to see any small sign of light at the end of its
tunnel of violence. Yet, it turned out that, confronted with the flight from
Bogotá of the upper middle class, barricaded in its suburban gated
communities, extortionists and kidnappers had resorted to the Internet to
distribute their threats by the hundreds through electronic mailing lists;
then had proceeded to selective kidnappings to enforce their threats, so
casing in on their Internet-based, mass-produced extortion business. In
other words, some sectors of Colombian society were appropriating the
Internet for their own purposes, their criminal practices , rooted in a
context of social injustice, political corruption, drug economy, and civil
war."
We can generalize this phenomenon, Andy. In any community the forces of
darkness can "appropriate the the Internet for their own purposes."
Like you, Andy, I am a believer. What I want to keep in mind is John
Gardner's discussion of two kinds of people who create problems for a cause:
"unloving critics" and "uncritical lovers."
I want to be a "loving critic."
Cheers, Andy.
Steve Eskow
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