Renata Aquino on Wed, 6 Feb 2002 03:18:36 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> the end of porto alegre - view from a window |
Hi Today is the end of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. Only the workers that built the structure for the talks are the journalists are still in the building. Some delegates are at the Healthy Eating Space and some hippies selling Worker`s Party memorabilia. So there`s not much to tell now but remember what this was. I wasn`t on the 1st Forum but it`s hard to imagine anything coming similar to this. There was such an unexplainable air of hope here. On the local aspect, Brazil has been going through pretty tough times. 3 mayors murdered, bad perspectives for the elections, Argentine cacelorazos about to come to us... But still people here were busy with building a better world, learning, exchanging ideas, creating tactics of survival. I'm far from being idealistic about anything but just observing things like these is good enough to bring a bit of hope to the future. For those of you who wanted to know, a bit of what happened here: * Ideologies Chomsky was far the most discussed personality of the Forum. While he criticized the press for not giving too much attention to the 'real news in world' (social problems), all the media had to come here and do something about the forum. As for the rest of the 'thinkers' around here, all had their say and audience to work on. It was nice to see also the environmental protesters much more organised and displaying tactics of discussion highly sophisticated. * Media European media gave much more attention to the forum than Brazilian, mostly because of the Worker's Party media boycott here. Even so, local media had to come and was angry for not being able to call the Forum disorganized or "McDonald's buster" :). Activism was well covered. Social movements are becoming much more aware of ways to attract attention using the media and also building their own channels. A media alternative discussion with Indymedia and Free Software creator R. Stallman, among others, made onto most technology websites. * Coalition of social movements and/or ideologies I guess the best of this Forum was to see that social movements do have ways to come together, build a project together and insist on political measures to enable a better society. This may sound a lot of blablabla but it is important when you're living rough times as L. America currently is and gatherings such as these will make all the difference Well, see you next Forum. Renata Aquino www.hotbits.com.br __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send FREE Valentine eCards with Yahoo! Greetings! http://greetings.yahoo.com # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net