DTS Historical Perspective
From Humanisteurope.org Wiki
The development of communication and information technologies is most of all a worldwide phenomenon, but we can say that it tore into the politics of Europe with the strategy of Lisbon in 1998. The European Community has seen in NICT both an unavoidable work environment and a potential for growth and international competitiveness to be exploited immediately. In a perspective basically turned towards the maintain of the “employability” of the population, the search for profit and economic competition with the rest of the world, strategic directions have been defined in order to develop competency, infrastructures, access, innovations, modernization and synergies. This was also the case in the rest of the world, as it could be seen with the growth and the explosion of the speculation on Internet based companies.
This period was marked by the usual concentration of big companies, the convergence between access offers (Internet, movies etc.) and content offers (the so-called “cultural products”), or between the different channels of diffusion (Internet, television, phone, radio). The standardization of programs (cultural products) gained speed and was perfected by the big companies, plundering, skimming and stifling cultural diversity.
Far away from mass media, a movement has developed based on the free diffusion of information and works, building a large panel of softwares and documents of free distribution, and elucidating both the moral and technological superiority of the collaborative model over the competitive model. Gaining thus its rights of existence by hard struggle.
At the same time, we more and more have the legitimate aspiration that new technologies be used in the service of democracy in terms of transparency and control of the institutions, facilitating citizen participation and the multiplication of votes, taking into account disabled people or putting technology at the disposal of all and in the service of all. And it is true that European and national institutions have started numerous programs in order to develop on-line administrative services, electronic twinning (cities), remote teaching, resource-sharing...
In parallel, violent attacks were carried out against fundamental human rights, both on personal freedoms (telecommunications monitoring, delegating police and justice powers to the Internet access providers, intrusion in the personal computers) and on collective ones (privatization of culture and of infrastructures, generalization of the concept of “royalty”, patents on the ideas). Attacks have been carried out either directly by going beyond statute law, or by attempts to change the right (European or national), the origins of which can be found in the agreements negotiated at the WTO as well as in the law-and-order policies or the lobbies of multinationals.
On the level of social practices and citizen engagement, Internet did open the way to new forms of militancy, accelerating exchanges, multiplying contacts, finally offering a media by which a significant and increasing share of the population can express itself. This new state of affairs disrupts the old established order in which the word belonged to the rich and the powerful ones, and to the weakest only the ears.
However, there was a time when the voice of the people already seemed to emancipate thanks to the radio and televised waves, but was muzzled by the legislative apparatus; and this new media is confronted with the same attempts at take-over.
