update - article

english / deutsch

UNPLUGGED Symposium: Plug-In I: Who is unplugged?

A key question in assessing globalization is the hierarchy of ways of looking at things. Whose standards establish the preconditions for getting connected? Which new borders are emerging? Plug-In I of the UNPLUGGED Symposium (Sunday, Sept. 8, 10.30 to 13.30) will focus on these aspects of 'globalization'.

Aminata Traoré (Mali),one of the most prominent African opponents of globalization, will deal with the question of whether highly touted information and communication technologies really do provide the right answers to bringing Africa out of its isolation. Is it the ICTs which will 'plug in' Africa? But just like the other roads on which we have embarked, the information highways are strewn with traps and pitfalls for our debt-ridden and dependant states, and only freely accessible to those with the right levels of education and income. Yet the financial resources which would open up the information highways to Africa have been confiscated. At the UN conference on Financing for Development, held in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002, the very same industrialised nations which are urging us to dive head first into the information society once again gave us to understand that access to the funding which our continent needs so desperately remains subject to the condition of our states subscribing 100% to the dogma of the market. The exorbitant social cost of this diktat, which discredits and destabilises the governments of the South, is glossed over with incantations on the fight against poverty.

For Saskia Sassen from the University of Chicago, the experience of the global is partial. It is not an all-encompassing umbrella. The multiple processes that constitute it inhabit and shape specific, rather than universal, structurations of the economic, the political, the cultural, the subjective. In so doing, new spatialities and temporalities are produced, co-existing yet distinct from the master temporality and spatiality of the 'national.' In the interplay of their difference, strategic openings have emerged.

Futurist Jeremy Rifkin sees in the market economy one of the most venerable institution of the modern age. Nation states have been established to protect its workings and wars have been fought to secure its blessings. Now, this pillar of contemporary social life is beginning to crumble. The new threat to its existence, however, is neither external nor ideological, but rather technological and entrepreneurial. Software, telecommunications, the Internet and B2B commerce are coming together to create a rival new economic system that is as different from market capitalism as the latter is dissimilar from mercantilism. In the new era, markets give way to networks, property rights become secondary to access rights, and the commodification and exchange of goods becomes less important than the commodification of human

1 comment(s)
Re: UNPLUGGED Symposium: Plug-In I: Who is unplugged? (Andrea di Varmo / 2002/9/10 12:33:54 AM)