Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

eng
c i t i z e n s h i p a n d d i g i t a l n e t w o r k s
here are the possibilities of being used for the consolidation of the public sphere,
democracy and local development. They must necessarily articulate civil society (in
organized groups or not), market and government; they are the ICT being thought
for the reinvention of the town and its social relationships, in a way in which the
concept of URBEtic incorporates the human and material dimensions of the current
technical period.
The scenario for the reinvention of political participation is highly promising.
The rise of “ubiquitous computing” and of the “Internet of things” (WEISER and
BROWN, 1996), with less intrusive interfaces, opens unimaginable possibilities of
increasing communication flows. However, the dream announced by technological
advances will be insufficient if the necessary political decisions are not taken (BEN-
KLER, 2006). So it is, above all, an ethical question.
The municipal government, in partnership with the market and with civil society
organizations, can be the major catalyst for urban communication flows. Its action
may be directed to three fundamental and indissociable dimensions: the human
being in the first place, but also the connections and the content.
The conditions of human communicability depend on all the other social conditions
of survival. This is not the proper space to extend the discussion over the obvious
need for health, employment, education and other basic issues. However, in the
particular case of an urban communicational environment based on distributed digital
communication networks, it is worth highlighting the need for technical and critical
training of citizens from an early age, so that they are able to act in this environment.
Thinking of training citizens involves promoting critical awareness about the
limits, the possibilities, the risks, and the opportunities that come for those who
participate on the network communicational flows. More than that, it is necessary to
feed the desire for citizens’ participation in urban communicational processes, which
are vital for democratic life and for the construction of the city. Being critical to the
media and knowing how to use it may not be enough to cheer the local communication.
Thus, thinking of the human being at the communicational process is going
beyond training them for a more critical use of computers and the Internet; it is also
convincing the human being of the need to participate (RHEINGOLD, 2008).
The radical choice for communication in the city is also based on ensuring access
to media, particularly to computers and to broadband Internet connections.
However, the solutions are more complicated than simply distributing computers
and providing access. Some principles established by the Brazilian Internet Steer-
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