[governance] wsis 10 closing ceremony speech
Izumi AIZU
iza at anr.org
Thu Feb 28 04:16:51 EST 2013
Thanks Parminder for sharing this,
I was listening to her dynamic speech and it was very well received
one at the closing from the audience.
izumi
2013/2/28 parminder <parminder at itforchange.net>
>
> pl find enclosed, and also below, the speech delivered by my colleague
> Anita Gurumurthy as a closing ceremony civil society speaker.
>
> parminder
>
>
> *Statement by Anita Gurumurthy, Executive Director, IT for Change<#13d200afa8157a12_sdfootnote1sym>
> *
> * *
>
> *at the closing ceremony of WSIS plus 10 review *
> * *
>
> *held by UNESCO from 25th to 27th February, 2013*
>
>
> Dear fellow-citizens of the world;
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> -
>
> 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.
> -
>
> 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.
> -
>
> 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.
>
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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...”
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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
>
> 1.
>
> 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.
>
>
> 1.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> 1 <#13d200afa8157a12_sdfootnote1anc>Www.ITforChange.net
>
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--
>> Izumi Aizu <<
Institute for InfoSocionomics, Tama University, Tokyo
Institute for HyperNetwork Society, Oita,
Japan
www.anr.org
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