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
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro that transnational communication would shape a “virtualimagined
transnational society,” a much stronger segment of belonging to the world
than simply to the imagined national community.
What becomes increasingly evident is that if communication in distributed digital
networks does not dissolve the sociocultural differences in cyber space, it relocates, in
a new scenario, the old and complex debate between universalism and relativism. To
what point can we have a transmission network without its information flows, its messages
and its sharing technologies being nationally controlled? Can a national culture
having a series of vetoes to certain behaviors take its restrictions into cyber space? Can
such restrictions, maintained by tradition, put the basic freedoms of speech and interaction
at stake? But, what would justify the regulation, from liberal values?
The whole speech of the information society, in the informational age and of a
society in network is based on western global practices that bear values bound to the
liberal doctrine, the idea that the government’s political power must respect the individual
rights: Private property, free economic initiative and the fundamental freedoms,
among them, freedom of speech, of association and of press. But not all national
cultures and political hegemonies accept or interpret such political values in the same
manner. Thus, the communicative practices in distributed networks, without control
centers, are challenged, once they can bear content and conversations unapproved and
deemed malefic by a culture or a political majority of a national society.
The tension between the flow of information without national blocks or filters
and the legislative regulation carried out in each country is amplified by the interest
of large corporations seeking to limit the communicational practices and the technological
creations, once they believe that the distributed digital networks can fulminate
their business models based on the acceptance of intellectual property consolidated
in the industrial world. Apparently, while China blocks the Internet for
reasons that are more political than economical, the French parliament approved,
in 2009, president Sarkozy’s proposal of disconnecting those who share files that
violate copyrights, called the Hadopi Law.
However, the national Internet non-regulation is defined as something that ensures
the supremacy of the market relations. Dominique Wolton wrote that “there
is no freedom of communication without regulations, i.e., without a protection
of such freedom. As a matter of fact, the heralds of the deregulation are favorable
to a regulation: That of market, that is, that of economic relations, of the laws of
the jungle” (2003, 122). From the notion that freedom is not natural, but a social
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