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Below you will find listinfo about the 'incommunicado' list, an electronic mailinglist that focuses on the spread, reappropriation, and reinvention of ICT across the 'Global South'. For more information please visit the corresponding site at http://incommunicado.info.
Dear All,
We would like to invite you to join 'incommunicado', an electronic mailinglist that focuses on the spread, reappropriation, and reinvention of ICT across the so-called 'Global South', exploring the shift toward south-south alliances and a new global info-politics.
'incommunicado' is a research network that surveys the current state of 'info-development', most recently known by its catchy acronym 'ICT4D'. Not too long ago, most computer networks and ICT expertise were located in the North, and info-development seemed to be a rather technical matter of knowledge and technology transfer from North to South. While still popular, the assumption of a 'digital divide' that follows this familiar cartography of development has turned out to be too simple. Instead, a more complex map of actors, networked in a global info-politics, is emerging.
Different actors continue to promote different - and competing - visions of 'info-development'. Emerging info-economies like Brazil, China, and India form south-south alliances that challenge our sense of what 'development' is all about. New grassroot efforts are calling into question the entire regime of intellectual property rights (IPR) and access restrictions on which commercial info-development is based. Commons- or open-source-oriented organizations across the world are more likely to receive support from southern than from northern states, and these coalitions are already challenging northern states on their self-serving commitment to IPR and their dominance of key info-political organizations.
Actors no longer follow the simple schema of state, market, or civil society, but engage in cross-sectoral alliances. Following the crisis of older top-down approaches to development, corporations and aid donors are increasingly bypassing states and international agencies to work directly with smaller non-governmental actors. While national and international development agencies now have to defend their activity against their neoliberal critics, info-NGOs participating in public-private partnerships and info-capitalist ventures suddenly find themselves in the midst of a heated controversy over their new role as junior partner of states and corporations.
Long considered a marginal policy field dominated by technology experts, info-development is embroiled in a full-fledged info-politics, negotiated in terms of corporate accountability, state transformation, and the role of an international civil society in the creation of a new world information order.
Launched in 2004, 'incommunicado' does not start from scratch. It is first of all the follow-up to the Solaris list, founded late 2001 by Geert Lovink and Michael Gurstein. At some stage Solaris ran into server trouble and from the beginning has been plagued by spam problems. Also the quest for a critique of 'ICT & Development' seemed to be too narrow, too premature. With 'incommunicado' we hope to continue and extend the Solaris debates. The same can be said of the now defunct generation_online list that discussed Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's _Empire_ .
'incommunicado' is co-founded by Geert Lovink (geert_at_xs4all.nl), media theorist and internet critic, based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Soenke Zehle (s.zehle_at_kein.org), a media researcher based in Saarbruecken, Germany.
'incommunicado' is a polylingual space: submissions in english, french, german, and spanish are welcome.
To see the collection of prior postings to the list,
visit the incom-l
Archives.
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