[eccr] incommunicado - a research list on civil society,ICT and post-development

>incommunicado
>a research list on civil society, ICT and post-development
><http://www.incommunicado.info>
>
>Dear All,
>
>We would like to invite you to join 'incommunicado', a new electronic
>mailinglist that focuses on the spread and reappropriation of ICT across the
>'Global South'.
>
>In the politics of communication and information, many have come to call for
>'rights' rather than 'freedoms'. Questions regarding access and
>accountability might indeed require the use of the idiom of (human) rights,
>but we also wonder what it means when a politics of rights comes to serve as
>the ultimate horizon of any politics whatsoever. Which is why the idea of
>being (held) incommunicado - to be in a liminal state vis-a-vis multiple
>regimes of information as well as (human) rights - serves as our point of
>departure.
>
>To explore multiple vectors of what is often referred to as "ICT and
>Development" or the "Digital Divide", it will not suffice to rehearse the
>customary (conceptual and organizational) idioms of 'knowledge-based
>development,' 'stakeholder dialogue', or 'civil society organization' that,
>for better or worse, have become central to both academic and (grassroots)
>political analyses, itself a consequence of the involvement of inter- and
>non-governmental organizations that generate and reproduce their own
>conceptual vocabularies.
>
>To do so requires more than the creation of a few media-theoretical
>neologisms. While we came up with this project in the context of the 2003
>World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and hope to provide a forum
>for post-WSIS analysis, we would like to broaden our focus to include a
>number of topics that strike us as indispensable to any seriously
>'postcolonial' approach to the ICT nexus:
>
>NON-STATES: Statist modes of (conflict) analysis to the contrary, non-state
>actors are key players in any arena of transnational politics, and questions
>of ICT, too, are linked to the multiplication and conflictual interaction of
>nonstates. Aware of the 'official' geopolitics of information pursued by
>states and inter-state organizations, we also want to observe the agendas
>and (structural) transformation of relevant 'nonstates', including
>corporations, foundations, think tanks, NGOs, and other 'grassroots' or
>'movement' actors.
>
>EMPIRE: What is striking about some of the most influential work in
>contemporary political philosophy is its odd disconnect with the culture,
>intruments, and practice of media activism. Appropriating whatever seems
>useful to us in such conceptual work, we want to re-connect and create
>across multiple (disciplinary) divides.
>
>INFRASTRUCTURES: From Open Source Software (OSS) to the ecopolitical impact
>of ICT, we want the rich materiality of ICT to come into view, both to
>disturb cyberlibertarian techno-spiritualisms and to connect to multiple
>issues of conflict, labor, and migration that rarely show up in standard
>discussions of ICT.
>
>Neither a news list nor an exclusive forum for esoteric reflection, we
>encourage the presentism of post-a-lots, attentiveness to the historical
>dimensions of contemporary controversies, and occasional conceptual
>interventions. We envision neither a free-for-all without any sense of
>direction, nor a 'virtual public sphere' with rigid rules of engagement, but
>are hoping to make (and leave) room for encounters within a (somewhat)
>focused multiplicity. Current projects in the areas that interest us have
>some weak spots that need critical attention, and this is one of the
>places/spaces where this could be done - in common.
>
>RESEARCH: a note on the idea of a research list. What we do not mean is that
>some list members are 'researchers' and get to post whatever they deem of
>general interest, and some are not. That would be a sure way to create list
>orthodoxies right from the start and discourage anyone not used to a
>high-traffic list. Instead, we think of every list member as a researcher -
>just as ict-and-development raises many more issues than those ususally
>taken up by a technocratic expertism, research is by no means the
>prerogative of some media-theoretical elite - and hope that some of whatever
>crosses his or her desk/inbox/mind will find its way onto the list - and
>thus into the list archive. We also want to bring the list archive back from
>its generally passive role as mere record of past exchanges, and incorporate
>it much more actively. Short intro comments on how any one contribution
>relates to the general list agenda are welcome but not necessary if that is
>more or less obvious: we do not discourage the fwding of current articles
>published elsewhere, quite the contrary - a lot of relevant material is
>available on the web only temporarily, and we would like to archive some of
>it for future reference. Which means that we will have to develop a better
>search engine for the list archive than the one provided by the standard
>mailman software, as well as a few open-edit research tools on the site
>itself, which will go live in a few months. Needless to say, this is a
>work-in-progress, but we are curious about the possibility of expanding the
>functionality of this list beyond the usual and hope that the criteria for
>its usefulness will be articulated - and changed - by list members to end up
>with the kind of research tool they, too, have been looking for but that
>does not yet exist.
>
>'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.
>
>Please forward this invitation to whoever you think might, would, or should
>be interested in joining 'incommunicado'.

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Carpentier Nico (Phd)
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Katholieke Universiteit Brussel - Catholic University of Brussels
Vrijheidslaan 17 - B-1081 Brussel - Belgium
T: ++ 32 (0)2-412.42.78
F: ++ 32 (0)2/412.42.00
Office: 4/0/18
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Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University of Brussels
Centre for Media Sociology (CeMeSO)
Pleinlaan 2 - B-1050 Brussels - Belgium
T: ++ 32 (0)2-629.18.30
F: ++ 32 (0)2-629.28.61
Office: C0.05
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E-mail: (Nico.Carpentier /at/ kubrussel.ac.be)
Web: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
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