May 9, 2002
Internet conference includes Amazon villager
When residents of one Amazon jungle village get ready to harvest yucca root, they stop by a grass hut to log onto the Internet and check out market prices 250 miles away in Lima.
Village resident Mino-Eusebio Castro will tell a UW audience on May 16 how his indigenous community is using the Web in this and other ways to shape its future.
His 3:30 p.m. talk will be part of a four-day international conference on the social implications of communications and computing technology, “Shaping the Network Society: Patterns for Participation, Action and Change.”
The gathering mixes computer professionals and academics with activists in such emerging topics as building wireless communities, designing value-sensitive software, boosting information literacy and closing the digital divide.
“We’re reaching into today’s critical issues,” said conference organizer Doug Schuler. “Can communications systems help humankind deal with its pressing issues, or are they merely diversions?”
Schuler, an Evergreen State College faculty member, helped found the first such conference in 1987. It has grown into an annual event sponsored by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and the National Communications Association.
UW professors making presentations will include:
- Batya Friedman, professor at The Information School and Alan Borning, professor of computer science, on value-sensitive designs such as an Internet browser that enables users to easily control the “cookies” left by Web sites.
- David Silver, an assistant professor of communications, on expanding cyberculture studies to a variety of disciplines.
- Lance Bennett, professor of political science and communications, on the creation and use of transnational networks by global activists.
UW scholars will be joined by other thinkers and activists. Clarence “Larry” Irving, President Clinton’s undersecretary of commerce, will discuss what he calls the current administration’s abdication of its job in promoting equal access to the Internet. Saskia Sassen, sociology professor at the University of Chicago and London School of Economics and author of the forthcoming book, Denationalization: Economy and Polity in a Global Digital Age, will speak about the new politics of places on global networks. Stevan Harnad, professor of cognitive science at the University of Southampton in England, will discuss his proposal for the free dissemination of the 2 million peer-reviewed scholarly research articles that are published each year.
But likely to draw special interest will be Castro, who is leading his Ashaninka indigenous community of Peru — a people moving from an oral to a written culture and lacking such modern infrastructure as running water — toward using communications technologies in a beneficial way.
“Often, we are easy prey to technology, and become dependent on it,” Castro said. “Our challenge should be to appropriate this technology and make it ours.”
With an Internet connection through high-powered radio supplied by a nonprofit group, Castro’s village was able to discover and make use of a Peruvian law that guarantees funding of schools for indigenous communities in their own language. Villagers also use the Internet to help sell their produce and to communicate with fellow Ashaninka communities on the Brazilian side of the border — and ultimately share and preserve social, cultural and linguistic traditions.
Castro’s presentation will be in Spanish, with English translation. The conference Web site, with detailed schedules, is http://cpsr.org/conferences/diac02.
