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
• Extension of the fight against digital exclusion and other historical exclusions
of cultural, economic, territorial and ethnic nature, which harm, in practice,
the exercise of a full citizenship;
• Protection in face of control policies and the activities of the social surveillance
institutions. In other words, protection in face of the exercise of a biopower
potentialized by an institutional use of the ICT;
• Betting on free software, on free knowledge, and on the development of multiple
forms of popular culture, with the goal of consolidating a networked
public sphere.
Many of these aspects have been dealt with in the presentations of this Seminar,
reflected in the articles comprising this volume. I hope my contribution helps highlighting
some relations that allow the exploration of these digital citizenship dimensions.
There are three elements particularly affecting the development of this sphere
of citizenship. First, the relationship between communicational power, as a form of
biopower, and digital citizenship. Second, the concept of the Network as ecosystems
and as procommons (Benkler and Ostrom) as a way of fighting since a social counterpower
up to the referred communicational power. Third, the appropriation of the
communities of interest with manifestations of innovation socialization processes and
creation of peripheral knowledge processes. Let us talk about each of those elements:
Communicational power and digital citizenship
Communicational power must not be considered a mere modulation of the
political and financial power. It is connected to M. Foucault’s concept of biopower,
a power expressed in multiple dimensions, of which politics is only one among
many others. In addition to that, it is a power with deep metaphoric strength, for it
is established as a model to understand social praxis and the macro social processes,
as well as communication relations that are found in a micro social level. It is the
so-called micro physics of power, present in the daily practices, in which power is
expressed in all its forms. Power and knowledge are united therein, where human
practices appear. Technological biopower replaces pre-modern sovereign power.
The knowledge that informatics and telecommunications extend throughout the
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