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
possibilities of storage of their personal files and with the ease of one sole password
enabling access to a multiplicity of relationship networks. The cyberlivings have, in
the digital networks, more power of communication, of relationship, and influence
potential. The more they participate in the network, the more they contribute for
the definition of standards, more data on their interests and their behaviors is disseminated,
the more controlled it is.
Finally, it is necessary to be careful not to naturalize the technologies and its
protocols. Does the distributed nature of network communication demand control
protocols? Is that a law like the law of gravity? Is it effectively impossible to think of
transformation of the cybernetic nature of network communication? Would it not
be possible to think of protocols an in communication rules ensuring communicative
nomadism? We can suppose that interactive communication can exist without
the need of localization in space, but only in cyberspace, of the communicating
machines. But the solution is not technical, it is ethical and political. The communicational
thinking hegemony in our societies has built the creed that full anonymity
would have a disintegrating role. Thus, the new biopolitics enter the digital
networks to protect the teenagers’ “behavioral health”, the safety of our children,
also seeking to articulate the contention of the religious fanatics that can, at any moment,
convert into terrorists. It takes place in a control situation, wherein diagrams
of the old surveillance have not disappeared and are always called to operate the
politics “in defense of the species”.
Hobbesian moment and ambivalences
Currently, we are not simply livings, but cyberlivings, for our sociability is increasingly
going through digital networks of communication and control. Our lives
are increasingly depending upon passwords and our communicational standard is
kept in databases of large corporations. We are controlled without being forced and
oppressively submitted to the controls. We adhere to that and are happy for their
existence. We even pay for them.
These procedures of subjection to cybernetic communication are probable expressions
of a control society which Deleuze referred to. In the same manner, we live
an ambivalent moment that extrapolates control. In it, fight against terrorism is the
keyword, in the United States, to terrorize and justify the actions of the Government
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