Ronda Hauben on 4 Dec 2000 17:15:13 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] First anniversary EU NGO Citizen's Agenda Conference - Dec 3,4,5 1999 |
[This is an email I sent to Amy Goodman at WBAI at Democracy Now about an the first anniversary of an important event that in Finland last year. I am in the process of writing up a version of the talk I gave in Finland. If anyone is interested in a copy, let me know and I'll send a copy.] >From: <ronda@panix.com> >To: mail@democracynow.org >Subject: Email for Amy Goodman about 1st anniversary citizen2000 conference Dear Amy or others at Democracy Now (WBAI) It seems important to not get into the interparty (oneparty) squabbles that are now dominating the election talk and leaving the people out and the real issues of the campaign out. The real issue that is underlying the whole crisis in the American government right now is that the current party processes and practices leave out the American people. A government needs connections with its citizens to be able to function and both the Democracy and Republican parties have increasingly seen the corporations as their citizens, not the American people. That is the basis of the current constitutional crisis in the US, rather than whether some candidate got their votes counted or not counted. Most of the American people didn't vote for either of these two candidates and for good reason. Democracy is not the result of voting for candidates chosen by a process that leaves most of the citizens out. And that leaves them out after the election as well. Today, September 4 is an anniversary of an important event that broke through this narrow framing of issues of what democracy means. It is the anniversary of a European Union conference in Tampere, Finland last year (September 3, 4, 5, 1999) on the subject of how can citizens have more of a voice in the decisions made by governments. This conference was called Citizen Agenda 2000 NGO Forum and the program is online at http://www.citizen2000.net It was a conference held by the NGO's of the European Union. I was invited to participate in a seminar about potential of the Internet to make increased citizenship participation in government decisions possible. This seminar (Civic Participation, Virtual Democracy and the Net) is described in http://www.citizen2000.net/E2.html The speakers at the seminar presented a varied set of experiences of research in trying to determine the potential of the Internet. My talk was on "Is the Internet a Laboratory for Democracy? The vision of the Netizens versus the E-commerce Agenda. A number of interesting problems were raised at the seminar including the need for all citizens to have access to the Internet if it is to make it possible for citizens to have more say in the decisions of government. And the problem of government representatives who claim that because they are elected they don't have to listen to citizens and their concerns, but can choose to listen to whomever they wish (i.e. corporate interests). An important point raised during the talks was that it is critical for citizens to make a record of their efforts to participate in government processes and decisions, and to document the fact that their input is not being considered as a means to change the situation. In my talk I spoke about the issue of the US government privatizing first the backbone to the US portion of the Internet, and now trying to privatize essential functions of the Internet's infrastructure. And that it is crucial that citizens know of these activities and continue the challenge that is being raised about them. The conference in Finland followed directly after the protests in Seattle and some of the NGO's had sent representatives to the protests and then to the conference. The conference was in an important way a clear statement of what the protests in Seattle and Washington and Prague and at the Democratic and Republican Conventions in the US have been about. The vision of the socio-technical pioneers who began the research which has resulted in the Internet was of a network that would make it possible for citizens to participate in the decisions of its development. The concept of citizen and of netizen are important concepts for our times and the conference in Finland one year ago has helped to rekindle the vision of the pioneers of the Internet for increased human-to-human communication faciliated by the developing computer network. Ronda Hauben co-author "Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet" published by IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997 and online at http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook ronda@panix.com (212)787-9361 _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold