On 22/03/11 18:42, Fernando Cassia wrote: > On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 2:12 PM, Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Fernando, was your life so bad before you had these? Maybe you're >> young and don't remember the era before such devices and technologies >> were invented, but it's unclear that their introduction have improved >> the quality of our lives significantly. > > Well, I´m a tech journo, so I couldn´t work without it. > In fact, I´d have no market to write about. So I guess I´m a bit biased. > > But now seriously, it certainly improved and widened my world view, > made me more tolerant of other people´s views, put myself in touch > with people from around the Globe, and improved my education. The > amount of reading and writing I do nowadays on a daily basis would > have been impossible in a books+paper+snail mail world.
Infotech always does that - from St. Augustine's accounts of Ambrose's revolutionary practice of silent reading to movable type - but it also affords better central control and command. For instance, The notion of global solidarity, or an anarchistic union of peasant, poor and working classes, has also been explored by Benedict Anderson (2005). He traces the origins of global solidarity – and the imaginary of the current global social movement of movements for globalisation from below - through anti-colonial fiction and non-fiction literature and correspondence between key figures in particularly the struggle for independence in the Philippines in the 19th Century. Anderson shows how this anti-colonial imagination not insignificantly was shaped by experiences in the “mother countries” and the association with the “transnational libraries” or “la république mondiale des lettres” (ibid: 28). The anti-colonial imagination emerged by weaving contemporary narratives from avant-garde literature with sensibilities, tactics and strategies formed by anarchist movements into a revolutionary consciousness with a global perspective. A melting pot in the undergrowth of the global village. The global dimension to this emerging revolutionary global force from below - thrown together in factories, ships and colonies - took obvious inspiration from the realisation that the majority of all people around the world were subjected to the power of the few in very similar ways: it was realised that this was not just a question of race. Indeed, the suffering of the peasants and working classes in the mother countries were in many cases even worse than that suffered by the colonial subjects, thus giving shape to global networks of resistance from below: “My dear fellow, I have myself gone to see an iron foundry, I spent five hours there, and believe me, no matter how hardhearted a person may be, the spectacle that I witnessed there made the deepest impression upon me. Despite all the evil that the friars commit over there, our compatriots are fortunate compared to this misery and death. There was a workshop there for grinding up sand and coal, which, converted into the finest dust by the action of the milling machine, swirled up in huge black clouds, and the whole room seemed swathed in smoke. Everything there was filled with dust, and the ten or twelve workers busy shovelling the coal and sand into the machine looked just like corpses” (Josè Rizal, 1891, in Anderson 2005: 106). And the networked computer's greatest impact, literally, has so far been Wal-Mart. Pardon the word play. m -- http://commoning.wordpress.com "...I thought we were an autonomous collective..." _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
