<div dir="ltr">Thanks Parminder for sharing this,<div><br></div><div>I was listening to her dynamic speech and it was very well received</div><div>one at the closing from the audience.</div><div><br></div><div>izumi</div><div>
<br><div><br></div></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2013/2/28 parminder <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:parminder@itforchange.net" target="_blank">parminder@itforchange.net</a>></span><br>
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pl find enclosed, and also below, the speech delivered by my
colleague Anita Gurumurthy as a closing ceremony civil society
speaker. <br>
<br>
parminder <br>
<br>
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<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"><b><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Statement by Anita
Gurumurthy, Executive Director, IT for Change<a name="13d200afa8157a12_sdfootnote1anc" href="#13d200afa8157a12_sdfootnote1sym"></a> </font></b></p>
<b><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font></b>
<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"><b><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">at the closing ceremony of
WSIS plus 10 review </font></b></p>
<b><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font></b>
<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"><b><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">held by UNESCO from 25th
to 27th February, 2013</font></b></p>
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<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"><font face="Helvetica,
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<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"><font face="Helvetica,
Arial, sans-serif">Dear fellow-citizens of the world;</font></p>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font>
<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"><font face="Helvetica,
Arial, sans-serif">On the occasion of this initial meeting in
the WSIS+10 review process. I would like to take us back in time
to the decade of the 90s and the particular sentiments at the
turn of the millennium that framed the World Summit on the
Information Society. In the late 90s, the power of the digital
revolution was seen as heralding a new hope for addressing long
standing challenges in development. At the same time, world
leaders were also concerned that the digital divide at
international and national levels could lead to shaping a new
class of those who have access to ICTs and those who do not. As
we stand at this milestone of the WSIS plus 10 review, we have
the responsibility to go back to this concern. The Internet – as
the future social paradigm – is already yet another axis shaping
exclusion and power.</font></p>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font>
<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"><font face="Helvetica,
Arial, sans-serif">The WSIS Declaration of Principles titled
'Building the Information Society: a global challenge in the new
Millennium' avers in its preamble that no one should be excluded
from the benefits the information society offers. It notes –
with conviction interlaced with caution that - 'under favourable
conditions', these technologies (that is, ICTs) can be a
powerful instrument, increasing productivity, generating
economic growth, job creation and employability and improving
the quality of life of all. </font></p>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font>
<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"><font face="Helvetica,
Arial, sans-serif">This is the moment of reckoning – for all of
us – to ask if we stand at the threshold of a new positive
future for all and if indeed, the global and national governance
and policy architectures of the new techno-social paradigm have
created the 'favourable conditions' for the good life that
seemed plausible in 2003.</font></p>
<ul>
<li>
<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">The economic crisis of
the recent years, in the developed world, is a serious
indictment of the macro economic pathways of neo-liberal
growth and its policies. Recent research in Europe suggests
that serious attention needs to be paid to the inequality in
work - wages, working conditions and social cohesion - and
its microeconomic implications.</font></p>
</li>
<li>
<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Even in Latin America,
despite relative economic stability and reduction in poverty
in many countries, a recent research by the UN says that the
richest 20% of the population on average earn 20 times more
than the poorest 20%. There is a considerable job deficit
and a large labour informality affecting mainly the young
and women. Colombia, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Bolivia,
the Dominican Republic, Argentina and Guatemala have all
seen an increase in inequality in the past decade.</font></p>
</li>
<li>
<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">The Asian giants China
and India, often touted as rising economic powers, face huge
challenges in socio-economic equity – the consuming middle
class may but be a smokescreen that hides the livelihoods
crisis for the majority.</font></p>
</li>
</ul>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><br>
All this has happened in the same decade that the Internet ought
to have been been equalising social and economic opportunity. We
need to sit back and reflect,what went wrong?Why did the
Internet, and the Information Society phenomenon not do what it
was supposed to do? This is the principal question that the WSIS
review process must answer. </font></p>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">If the
good life is also about democratic transitions, then the
miracles of technology may certainly be counted as harbingers of
deep change in the past decade. Authoritarian states have had to
come to terms with the power of interconnection in the network
age. The Occupy Movement gave new hope to social movements. Yet,
new configurations of power in mainstream spaces have more or
less seen the political elite make way for a new class of
economic elite – information society democracy remains as
exclusionary as its predecessors. Perhaps more, with little
place for women and others in the margins, and oblivious of new
forms of violence and misogyny in the open and ostensibly
emancipatory corridors of the virtual world. </font></p>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Those
of us committed to build a people-centred, inclusive and
development oriented information society have to come to terms
with and interrogate the roots of these crises – the
unfavourable conditions that seem to have jettisoned the
equalising propensities of the Internet. </font></p>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">The
crisis today for the information society agenda is two fold – it
is economic and it is cultural. The neo-liberal juggernaut has –
at an unstoppable speed – usurped the power of connectedness. As
some cyber enthusiasts continue to sing peons to the power of
the supposedly decentralised, non-hierarchical and inclusive
Net, the human predicament in real terms is far from this
idealised picture. Today, a handful of colossal corporate
mega-giants rule private empires - the top 10 Web sites
accounted for 31 percent of US page views in 2001, 40 percent in
2006, and about 75 percent in 2010...” </font></p>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Centralization
is the name of the game – the most powerful weapon in
neo-liberalism's arsenal. Consider Google: when it comes to user
data, today Google runs a much more centralized operation than
five years ago where individual searches, youtube video
histories, and calendars combine to generate individualised and
targeted ads. The Internet market place atomises the
consumer-user, coopting her persona as a commodity in a logic
that may not be self evident to Internet enthusiasts unwilling
to see the realpolitik.</font></p>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">The
cultural crisis is deeper. What the architects of the WSIS
documents perhaps underestimated is the way the information
society would precipitate a normative crisis. As the Internet
market place broadens its horizons, we see the individuals,
communities and nations, fragmented by increasing self interest.
The seamless geographies of the connected world are images of
the Internet's economic paradigm – where membership for
marginalised individuals, social groups and nations is a simple
binary - assimilation or decimation. The talk of diversity and
multiligualism notwithstanding, there is much less we can aspire
today out of the promise of the networks society for
collaboration and horizontalism than seemed plausible ten years
ago. We need to pause and ask – are our normative frameworks –
infoethics and info-civic imaginaries – adequate to ensure that
every person, the last woman, can be a global citizen in the
interconnected global world. </font></p>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">What we
are witness to instead of a reflection around the basics of
democracy in the interconnected world, are anxieties of nations
states that make ancient tribal chieftans seem like impeccable
upholders of freedoms and the rule of law</font></p>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font>
<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"><font face="Helvetica,
Arial, sans-serif">The various international summits of the UN,
Rio-Earth Summit in 1992 , Cairo in 1994 on population,
Copenhagen in 1995 on social development, Beijing in 1996 for
women – pursued problems confronting humanity with the resolve
to find progressive solutions. Today these have contributed to
the broadbasing and democratisation of civil society engagement.
There are some lessons here for civil society in the information
society space.</font></p>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font>
<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"><font face="Helvetica,
Arial, sans-serif">Also, as we move towards the WSIS + 10
review, we need to be cognizant of the competing demands of the
Millennium Development Goals Review (Post 2015 Development
Agenda), the processes to set the post-Rio+20 Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs), and the 20-year review of the
International Conference on Population and Development
(ICPD+20). These overlapping inter-governmental processes are
bound to render the ideals of the WSIS declaration obscure
unless we are able to pitch for a review that can offer
analytical and pragmatic segways for the other UN reviews. </font></p>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font>
<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"><font face="Helvetica,
Arial, sans-serif">The WSIS plus 10 review is a historic
opportunity therefore to review the state of democracy – and I
qualify, the state of global democracy. Here – we have two tasks</font></p>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font>
<ol>
<li>
<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Re-interpreting human
rights, equality and sustainability in the information
society. This is a dialogue that must inform the other UN
reviews and discussions on the crises of food, fuel, finance
and climate change, poverty and deprivation, inequality and
insecurity, and violence against women.</font></p>
</li>
</ol>
<ol start="2">
<li>
<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">The second task is to
explore the favourable conditions that can make the Internet
an equaliser. As a global public good, the policy issues
pertaining to the Internet are simultaneously global and
national. Discussing the global policy issues around the
Internet should be a principal aim of the WSIS plus 10
review process. </font></p>
</li>
</ol>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">We
stand at cross-roads. The promise of community has never been
greater in theory, but the risk to the collective never higher
in the brazen pursuit of economic self interest and
aggrandizement of power. For civil society the modus operandi of
organising is clear. We need to ask how best we can sieze and
use the decentralising possibilities of the network age to craft
new forms of organisation; how we can define the core issues
that reflect honestly our analysis of the crises. The WSIS plus
10 review process must indeed take a leaf out of Jo Freeman's
essay - 'The tyranny of structurelessness'. Let not the ideals
of democracy in multistakeholderism be reduced to shadowboxing –
where emerging hierarchies are denied and those that wield power
escape with no accountability.</font></p>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Multistakeholderism
is a framework and means of engagement, it is not a means of
legitimization. Legitimization comes from people, from work with
and among people. We need to use this occasion of the WSIS plus
10 review to go back to the the touchstone of legitimacy –
engage with people and communities to find out the conditions of
their material reality and what seems to lie ahead in the
information society. From here we need to build our perspectives
and then come to multistakeholder spaces and fight and fight
hard for those who cannot be present here.</font></p>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> </font>
<p><br>
<br>
</p>
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<br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br> >> Izumi Aizu <<<br>Institute for InfoSocionomics, Tama University, Tokyo<br>Institute for HyperNetwork Society, Oita, <br>
Japan<br><a href="http://www.anr.org" target="_blank">www.anr.org</a><br>
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