IX. Limitantes y críticas al ciberactivismo

Los medios de comunicación son indispensables en los  procesos de transformación, pero no son garantía por sí mismos de un cambio. Es necesario que la gente tenga  necesidad de cambiar y que, al mismo tiempo, tenga a  su disposición el lenguaje, las ideas y los medios materiales para transformar su vida. Es necesario señalar algunos limitantes y críticas al ciberactivismo que pueden revelar aspectos no previstos de su naturaleza.  

Limitantes del ciberactivismo

El primer limitante del ciberactivismo es la capacidad de cada individuo de ejercerlo exitosamente y con responsabilidad, es decir, el grado de apropiación de las posibilidades de colaboración con otras personas o instituciones a través de la internet. El ciberactivismo, entonces, depende tanto de una base material, como de una instrucción previa que facilite el uso y aprovechamiento. Los recursos como computadores y conexiones, los conocimientos de sistemas de información digital, las redes de colaboradores que son capaces de reconocerse en los otros y la voluntad de trabajo, la voluntad de acción, son variables-limites del ciberactivismo. La voluntad es indispensable, sin un motivo no hay activismo posible. La variación de recursos materiales e intelectuales en nuestro país modificará nuestras posibilidades de desarrollo. Si revisamos las tasas de acceso de la población colombiana a internet, encontraremos que la distribución del servicio, de acuerdo a los ingresos, son profundamente inequitativos (Ver "Masificación...":

- Estratos 5 y 6: 83 por ciento 

- Estrato 4 : 56 por ciento 

- Estrato 3: 26 por ciento 

- Estrato 2: 8 por ciento 

- Estrato 1: 2 por ciento

Rafael Ordúz, director de la Corporación Colombia Digital, afirma, en un artículo publicado en el portal Razón Pública, un imperativo simple: Masificación de internet: una necesidad para Colombia. "En países de notables brechas de ingreso y de enormes disparidades regionales, como Colombia, el acceso a internet a velocidades razonables sería un factor altamente redistributivo". Esperamos una transformación real de las condiciones de acceso a internet, sin embargo, hay que tener en cuenta que la innovación social está directamente relacionada a los sistemas de educación, investigación y divulgación. Mientras el sistema educativo colombiano no se piense como un sistema integral desde la primera infancia hasta la madurez, las brechas sociales seguirán siendo un impedimento para un efectivo desarrollo humano. 

Un segundo limitante del ciberactivismo es la garantía de la libertad e independencia de la internet. En nuestro país hemos dado un paso hacia atrás. Este año hubo numerosas campañas de usuarios que se manifestaron en contra de la aprobación en el congreso nacional de la famosa Ley 201 de 2012, lamentablemente esas protestas (que no fueron llevadas a las calles, ni tuvieron mayor efecto legal) fueron inútiles. En un marco mayor de regularización de la internet, y en la urgencia de firmar el tratado de libre comercio con los Estados Unidos, Colombia se inscribió en una reacción política, a favor de las corporaciones de medios, que se adueñó de un bien común. La internet aumenta de valor en tanto más y más personas participen. Parcelar el acceso a contenidos es también impedir la circulación de ideas y la reinvención colectiva. 

Quiero citar algunos apartes de un artículo titulado "La revolución cultural del procomún" que apareció, como ventana de resistencia en la red, el 28 de diciembre de 2011, a tres días de la aprobación en España de la ley Sinde: "Bibliotecas virtuales, elepés, películas, festivales... proyectos y obras de arte que son de todos y de nadie. Al menos eso es lo que propugna la doctrina del procomún, una teoría sobre la que desde hace años se reflexiona en los llamados laboratorios de cultura digital (entre otros el Medialab-Prado en Madrid, el CCCB Lab y Platoniq , en Barcelona,ColaBoraBora , en Bilbao, o el museo Reina Sofía ). Los frutos de esa reflexión son ya tangibles. Frutos como Bookcamping , Fundación Robo , Traficantes de Sueños , el festival Zemos98 ... El concepto de procomún, además, explica buena parte de las actitudes del 15-M y de las acciones de protesta contra la llamada ley Sinde."

[...]

"Para que a alguien creativo se le ocurra algo ha tenido que leer un montón de cosas, participar en seminarios, visitar exposiciones... hay una atmósfera cultural que es el fundamento para que pueda generarse la creatividad. Además se necesita una infraestructura: bibliotecas, transportes, canales de acceso... Hay una dimensión en la creación que es procomunal: por eso es absurdo es que alguien al que se le ocurre algo le den la propiedad en exclusiva por ni se sabe cuántos años y que la pueda transmitir a sus hijos", afirma Lafuente. Este investigador del Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales del CSIC reconoce que les han colgado las etiquetas de anarquistas, comunistas..."

En una visita reciente a la UN, en el marco del XII coloquio internacional de geocrítica, el profesor brasileño Hindemburgo Pires declaró "Hay que democratizar la internet [...] “Este control afecta a una amplia gama de asuntos relativos a la soberanía, seguridad, infraestructura, economía, geopolítica, educación, ciudadanía, a la intimidad, la democracia y el imperialismo digital, entre otros. Pues la red es utilizada para estas acciones”, expresó. Y añadió: “la internet dejó de ser una propiedad de este Estados Unidos. Ahora es de la sociedad”.

Si podemos ser conscientes de las fuentes que alimentan nuestra experiencia política y cultural, entonces qué dicen esas fuentes de nosotros? Desde que la internet opera en Colombia, cómo han cambiado las formas de establecer contacto y colaboración entre ciudadanos? la transformación de diálogos y dinámicas culturales en la era digital y de internet cómo afecta al ejercicio de la crítica cultural en Colombia ? Cómo se forman nuevas consciencias políticas en Colombia, contribuye una internet libre a ello?  Si el clientelismo y la corrupción dominan las jerarquías administrativas y las posiciones de poder, no es justo y necesario organizar resistencia civil?

El caso del senador Merlano puede servir para

 medir los alcances del ciberactivismo en nuestro país. 

Renunciará Merlano por la presión de los twiteros? 

En Egipto, a pesar de la voluntad de sus ciudadanos, el cambio real todavía no llega. 
No hay Twitter que alcance.

Críticas al ciberactivismo

Este año ha sido muy importante el reconocimiento de campañas de ciberactivismo como #Kony2012 promovida por la organización estadounidense Invisible Children. El documental realizado por Jason Russell se convirtió en un video viral superando los cien millones de visitas en menos de dos semanas. 

El crecimiento  de la capacidad de organizaciones de activistas como Invisible Children para divulgar un mensaje no implica necesariamente que moverá la participación de personas reales o que las condiciones denunciadas cambiarán automáticamente por la trasmisión de un mensaje u opinión. Acabo de encontrar un meme muy ácido que aborda este problema:

Los memes, al igual que los videos virales, tienen
un efecto inmediato en el espectador pero pasajero ante los temas y problemas que abordan.

En la condición efímera de memes y virales no terminan los problemas de la campaña #Kony2012. Las críticas más profundas al pequeño documental de Russell afirman que "la cuestión es mucho más compleja que decir que se trata de los crímenes de un solo hombre. Otros adujeron que la campaña tenía tintes colonialistas... [es] contraproducente creer que el mundo exterior tiene todas las respuestas. ¿Se trata de colonialismo o de algo mucho más moderno: la idea, equivocada, de que la generación de las redes sociales tienen la oportunidad de cambiar el mundo haciendo click con el mouse?" (Kate Dailey, BBC. 12 de marzo de 2012).

A continuación, comparto un par de artículos de la BBC sobre el fenómeno extraordinario de activismo por internet. Destaco de ellos un tono más bien incrédulo sobre los efectos reales de esta campaña.



¿Es #Kony2012 un punto de inflexión del activismo en internet?

"Una campaña en las redes sociales para echar luz sobre el criminal de guerra Joseph Kony despertó críticas por la forma en que se desarrolló. ¿Acaso utilizar Facebook y Twitter para promover cambios no tiene sentido o es la extensión natural de nuestros hábitos de utilizar redes sociales?"

Kony2012, las dificultades de hacer realidad el deseo de millones

"De la campaña Kony 2012 se pueden decir muchas cosas, pero es prácticamente imposible negarle que ha sido un éxito en el mundo virtual. El documental de media hora sobre el guerrillero ugandés Joseph Kony, con más de 76 millones de reproducciones, es ya uno de los videos más vistos de la historia de YouTube."

Buscando el término "ciberactivism" en el buscador de Google, una de las primeros resultados me interesó porque era redactada por un miembro del Staff de la revista The New Yorker: Malcom Glandwell. El texto de Gladwell se titula "Small Change. Why the revolution will not be tweeted". Cambio pequeño. Porqué la revolución no será twiteada.  

Social media can’t provide what social change has always required. Los medios sociales no pueden proveer lo que el cambio social siempre ha requerido.

Habían escuchado esta canción? "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", de Gill Scott Heron. Les invito a escucharla: 

Transcribo a continuación un par de páginas del artículo de Gladwell:

The New Yorker
Reporting & Essays

Annals of Innovation
Small Change
Why the revolution will not be tweeted.
by Malcolm Gladwell October 4, 2010


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell#ixzz1vWmHPucp

At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.

“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.

“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.

The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.

By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.

Four A&T College students sit in seats designated for white people at the racially segregated Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, NC, in 1960. (Greensboro News & Record photo by Jack Moebes. . More about the photograph)

By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.

The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,” Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change. “You are the best hope for us all,” James K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook, Glassman said, “give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation.”

These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution, not least because the protests—as Anne Applebaum suggested in the Washington Post—may well have been a bit of stagecraft cooked up by the government. (In a country paranoid about Romanian revanchism, the protesters flew a Romanian flag over the Parliament building.) In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model. As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.

Greensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where racial insubordination was routinely met with violence. The four students who first sat down at the lunch counter were terrified. “I suppose if anyone had come up behind me and yelled ‘Boo,’ I think I would have fallen off my seat,” one of them said later. On the first day, the store manager notified the police chief, who immediately sent two officers to the store. On the third day, a gang of white toughs showed up at the lunch counter and stood ostentatiously behind the protesters, ominously muttering epithets such as “burr-head nigger.” A local Ku Klux Klan leader made an appearance. On Saturday, as tensions grew, someone called in a bomb threat, and the entire store had to be evacuated.

The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, another of the sentinel campaigns of the civil-rights movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters, and raise civil-rights awareness in the Deep South. “No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an automobile and certainly not at night,” they were instructed. Within days of arriving in Mississippi, three volunteers—Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped and killed, and, during the rest of the summer, thirty-seven black churches were set on fire and dozens of safe houses were bombed; volunteers were beaten, shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup trucks full of armed men. A quarter of those in the program dropped out. Activism that challenges the status quo—that attacks deeply rooted problems—is not for the faint of heart.

What makes people capable of this kind of activism? The Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam compared the Freedom Summer dropouts with the participants who stayed, and discovered that the key difference wasn’t, as might be expected, ideological fervor. “All of the applicants—participants and withdrawals alike—emerge as highly committed, articulate supporters of the goals and values of the summer program,” he concluded. What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement. All the volunteers were required to provide a list of personal contacts—the people they wanted kept apprised of their activities—and participants were far more likely than dropouts to have close friends who were also going to Mississippi. High-risk activism, McAdam concluded, is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.

This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement in East Germany consisted of several hundred groups, each with roughly a dozen members. Each group was in limited contact with the others: at the time, only thirteen per cent of East Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the state. And the primary determinant of who showed up was “critical friends”—the more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the protest.
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Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell#ixzz1vWmHPucp