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<DIV>Great speech by Anita. Glad someone actually said something for a
change!</DIV>
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<DIV style="font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A title=parminder@itforchange.net
href="mailto:parminder@itforchange.net">parminder</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Thursday, February 28, 2013 8:02 PM</DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=governance@lists.igcaucus.org
href="mailto:governance@lists.igcaucus.org">governance@lists.igcaucus.org</A>
</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> [governance] wsis 10 closing ceremony
speech</DIV></DIV></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV></DIV>
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style="FONT-STYLE: normal; DISPLAY: inline; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri'; COLOR: #000000; FONT-SIZE: small; FONT-WEIGHT: normal; TEXT-DECORATION: none"><FONT
face=Verdana><BR>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></FONT><FONT
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><BR></FONT>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm" class=western><B><FONT
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Statement by Anita Gurumurthy, Executive
Director, IT for Change<A class=sdfootnoteanc href="#sdfootnote1sym"
name=sdfootnote1anc></A> </FONT></B></P><B><FONT
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"></FONT></B>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm" class=western><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" class=western><B><FONT
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">held by UNESCO from 25th to 27th February,
2013</FONT></B></P><FONT face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"></FONT><FONT
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"></FONT>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm" class=western><FONT
face="Helvetica,
Arial, sans-serif"><BR></FONT></P><FONT
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"></FONT>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm" class=western><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" class=western><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" class=western><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" class=western><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" class=western><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>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm" class=western><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>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm" class=western><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 class=western><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 class=western><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 class=western><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 class=western><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 class=western><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 class=western><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 class=western><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" class=western><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" class=western><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" class=western><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" class=western><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" class=western><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 class=western><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 class=western><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 class=western><BR><BR></P>
<DIV id=sdfootnote1>
<P class=sdfootnote-western><A class=sdfootnotesym href="#sdfootnote1anc"
name=sdfootnote1sym>1</A><A
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