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
“If you have an apple and I have an apple, and we exchange these apples, then you
and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea,
and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
210
George Bernard Shaw
“Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human
development. How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects
the way we see the state of the world as it might be; who decides these questions;
and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can be done.”
Yochai Benkler
This article is intended to comprehend the impact of the new technologies
on the human capacity of production, distribution and access to knowledge.
Specially, the access to scientific knowledge and to educational resources,
and the consequent expansion of the citizen's capacities of action,
of investigation, of participation and of the exercise of tolerance in
ever more plural environments, provided that connected. There are two movements
we intend to study: Open access to scientific publications and to open educational
resources and their impact on citizenship and citizenship experience.
Yochai Benkler states that the social change occurred due to the expansion of
the network information environment is deep and structural, and has the potential
of strengthening forms of cultural expression left out of the industrial revolution
(Benkler, 2006, p.1) 1 . In this context, citizens are not subject only to the position of
readers or content observers anymore — the network enables their participation and
redefines the creation locus. The expansion of phenomena such as citizen journalism,
of which the international Global Voices (http://globalvoicesonline.org/) project is
one of the most known examples, evidences such change, as well as the expansion
of projects around free software and e-democracy (http://www.edemocracia.camara.
gov.br/publico/).
The citizen is granted new local, regional and global participation opportunities.
Their possibilities of construction and appropriation of knowledge, adequating
1. From the original: “The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep.
It is structural. It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have
coevolved for almost two centuries.” (Benkler, 2006, 1)