Re: <nettime> e-LITISM (UK and beyond)

[Susanna Paasonen <suspaa@utu.fi>]

Hi,

I'm jumping on this discussion a little late, but reading it I felt
increasingly uncomfortable - not just beacuse of the tacky term
"e-litism", but rather because of some rather simplified views of "us" and
"privilidge". 

There is no simple answer as to how using the net makes you priviledged: 
does visiting porn pages increase democracy? Or gaming online? Or putting
your weddings snaps up on your homepage? The uses of the net are bound ot
be multiple, and I really do not think that net usage per se decreases
inequality. Surely there are possibilities for all kinds of activism
onlone, but by whom are they used? Do the people who take their own
"guerrilla" attitude as a norm merely project it onto the millions of
other users?

Second thing relates to access... there has been some use of TV analogies,
but they really should show that there is no such thing as free access to
a medium. Public broadcast TV is not for free, but one is made to pay
annually for viewing, and those not paying are harrassed by officials,
fined, and here in Finland also deprived of their TV sets. Commercial TV
in the US model is *not* for free either, but one sees masses of ads in
return for the viewing pleasures, as one does in those *free* net service
deals.  Perhaps this is so wide-spread a practice there accross the
Atlantic, that it has become invisible, but at least me it strikes as
something quite different from free access. 

Stefan Wray posed the question "If its true that over half of adults in
the U.S. have Internet access, then are those people in an elite group?"
I'd say yes: looking at the people without access in the US, one could
make all kinds of observations about ethnicity and equality, since at
least in earlier surveys have pointed to the over-representation of white
americans online. But this is not really what bothered me in the question.
Rather it was the scope of the question, which reveals certain
presuppositions concerning nationality and democrary. Let me make myself
clear on this: Net usage and access in the US, or Finland for that matter,
can not really be separated from e-commerce, but not from national(istic)
information society agendas either. These agendas for wiring up nations so
that they can be better represented in e-commerce and IT development are
about national interests, and, like Wray's question, nationally specific.

(How naïve should I be to believe that the fact that Finland is a nation
filled with wired institutions, all kinds of IT agendas, mobile phones,
and competing with Sweden on having the largest percentage of populations
online in the world, as evidence of the global tendency of "e-democracy"? 
This is a national project tied to corporate interests (Nokia) -- it's
about nations competing for their places in the "new world order".) 

As Korinna Patelis pointed out, there is life beyond the picket fense, and
it might be good to pay attention to one's own location in the webs of
priviledge, before making generalising one's own experiences as something
shared by "all". Those of us with access are definitely an elite, and it
is no accident *we* tend to be people from the industrialized countries
like the US, the EU, Australia, or South-East Asia. The point is hardly
that if someone in Africa has no phone, we shold not use it either! To
simplifya bit: the point is that one should be aware of the limits and
context-specificity of one's own arguments, and also of the ways in which
assumptions concerning the "futureland of e-happiness" brought by the Net
are cut by the same econo-geographic inclusions and exclusions and --
interestingly enough in a situation discussed as globalization -- by
national interests. 

This understanding of the limitations of "we" is often forgotten. Perhaps
it is tied to the all-american tendency to take US as us. 


Susanna
---------------------------------------------------
Susanna Paasonen	
tutkija / research associate
Elokuva- ja televisiotiede / Cinema and TV Studies 
FIN-20014 University of Turku, Finland
email: suspaa@utu.fi
tel. +358-2-333 5694 (työ/office) +358-50 523 1350 (gsm/mobile)

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