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Yum yum.
Anyway.
Organisation is a very good place to start. You can plan protests ahead of time using the Internet, and probably reach more people than if you were relying on flyposting, stickering etc alone. Of course a lot of those people will be outside the geographical area, or will reach the information while looking for something else, but that's cool because the cost of consuming that information to the creator is tiny once the cost of creating is taken out of the equation. That's the same principle as spam, really - create once, distribute massively. And, of course, people can opt-in.
There's a downside to that, which is that it also makes people much easier to trace. Unless you're very careful, your PC will be full of cookies, which will tie, for example, your google searches to your gmail account, or your Internet usage to your IP address. So, we're in two-edged sword territory - and I don't think an awareness of that prevents celebration. The Internet changes the way we operate, and it also changes the way we can be observed and controlled - that is, it operates in a way that is markedly different from the "real world", but covers many of the same issues.
Interestingly, in particular in light of the race to create a developing-world-friendly computer (the $100 laptop challenge), there's been some thinking that the Internet will come into its own in the developing world primarily when a) data exchange costs scale down and b) 3G phones start getting recycled. Now, that's a fascinating piece of trickledown - suddenly, millions of people are going to get potential access to Internet data services, and be able to carry it around with them. Mobile phone reception is already more reliable and easier to provide in infrastructure terms than wired telephony in much of Africa, and if you can distribute, say, lots of wind-up battery chargers you have a fairly renewable access source. That has tremendous potential to move information around, and to provide a speech-text-image fluidity that would be fantastic for distributed recovery work. I mean, sending video of your mate's arse on a Friday night is good, but sending video of, say, a broken well to an expert three days' travel away could be an actual lifesaver. That maybe can tie into the organisation of protessts in the Philippines using mobile devices - there's a Habermasian element to this, definitely. |
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