Digital Culture Coordinator, Jose Murilo, delegate from the Ministry of Culture of Brazil to the Free Culture Forum in Barcelona, introduces the strategy being implemented in Brazil for creating the new law on intellectual property.
“Free software is a possibility that those kids will reinvent things that need to be reinvented.”
Lula da Silva – Speech at 10.FISL, POA, Jun/2009
Digital culture is a new, emergent term. It has been used in different forms by different sectors, and incorporates different perspectives about the impact of digital technology and networking in society. The Ministry of Culture see, as it’s role, the convening of a collective reflection on these broader perspectives, encouraging the participation of all stakeholders in an innovative process of collaborative construction of public policies for the digital sector.
The cheapening of the personal computer and cellular phone, combined with the rapid development of applications using free software and free services on the network, has promoted a radical democratization of access to new means of production and access to knowledge. The digitization of culture, combined with the global race to connect everything to everyone all the time, turns open networks at this moment in history into something too big, which now requires specific consideration.
A recent debate in the blogosphere about an article in Wired Magazine – “The New Socialism,” by Kevin Kelly – raised the issue of lack of appropriate terms to communicate the ongoing phenomena within the networks. Re-framing the term ’socialism’ to refer to the innovative arrangements for sharing and collaboration typical of a collective connected by the Internet has generated controversy and has been challenged strongly by Lawrence Lessig, the American lawyer known for his activism in the debate over the revision of copyright laws.
Lessig argues that we are facing something entirely new, and that it is not appropriate to reuse terms loaded with former meanings to describe the current situation. His concern seems to be related to the typical American notion that establishes an inverse relationship between individual autonomy and state power — a notion that is also the essence of th classic contest between right and left. However, as Kelly argues, the so called ‘digital socialism’ (’stateless socialism’?!) seems to host both classical libertarians who hate government in general, and the global political movements that are critical of excessive market logic.
Finally, there is a real lack of conceptual characterization for the phenomena encountered in digital culture. Yochai Benkler, reflecting creatively about the possibility of a political theory of the network, sees the emergence of social networks and peer production as an alternative to both the proprietary systems fundamental to the logic of the state and to the market. An innovative new cultural ‘operating system’ would be able to foster both creativity, productivity and freedom, while also satisfying the demands of both individuals and collectives. Benkler speaks of a ‘participatory culture’.
With the arrival of ubiquitous, instant and inexpensive collaboration tools, it is possible to promote opportunities for debate and a collective model where public decentralized coordination can create innovative solutions to the issues presented by the 21st century. The implementation of this technology in the digital network environment, coupled with Benkler’s ‘participatory culture’ concept, creates the possibility of bridging policies that once seemed mutually exclusive, inviting open discussion by opposing interest groups that have specialized in fighting in the trenches.
The Forum for Brazilian Digital Culture
In order to better understand the various parts that make up the mosaic of digital culture, to facilitate the public participation of those concerned with monitoring, and to assist the construction of public policies and regulatory frameworks that will format the sector, the Ministry of Culture is launching the Forum for Brazilian Digital Culture.
The process begins with the launch of the social network ‘culturadigital.br’, and the invitation of experts and networks of cultural activists to register and profile their digital identities and references (their blog, twitter, delicious, youtube, etc…) into the Forum. The environment was built to aggregate people and their socialstreams linked by the tag #culturadigitalbr, thus organizing and documenting their participation in the debate. Live presentational and virtual online events during the second half of 2009 will propel the discussion into the proposed five guiding themes: memory, communication, art, infrastructure and economy.
We have made several interviews with specialists, agency ministers, people from academia and artists, which turned into a book: culturadigital.br. The goal was to collect and provide initial inputs to warm up the debate, which will be consolidated at an international seminar to be held in November. Notably, the process of ‘Brazilian Digital Culture Forum’ will happen in parallel with major debates on regulatory frameworks and public policies that directly affect the landscape of digital culture.
The new draft copyright law which will be presented by the Ministry of Culture for public consultation and the cyber-crime law (Law azeredo) — to be voted on in the House — deals with structural issues for the governance of the digital environment. The national conferences of Culture and Communication coincidentally will also be going on, which makes the second semester of 2009 a special time for proposing, contemplating and debating visions of the future we want for the country.
The coordination of the ‘Brazilian Digital Culture Forum’ now is making available the ‘culturadigital.br’ network environment for all who wish to organize and document free conferences and/or other specific events related to these processes. We believe that the time is right to be motivated toward new ways to develop consensus and build proposals. MINC seeks to introduce into the prospect of digital culture the innovative elements that facilitate and promote greater engagement and more effective participation of interested citizens.
The most creative people are never all together in a single company or government or organization, or country. To open the processes of constructing public policies in the network, and facilitating the collaboration of stakeholders, is almost obvious as an initiative appropriate and necessary at the dawn of this century. Promoting innovation in processes and creating tools for distributed governance can refine democracy and transform society.
This article is foreword to the book ‘CulturaDigital.BR’,
an edition that is part of the process of the
Brazilian Digital Culture Forum
#culturadigitalbr
I’ve been away from this blog, and from about everything else, because of the huge effort to put up the ‘Brazilian Digital Culture Forum’ — culturadigital.br. I will come back later to better explain what’s going on, but for now I will reblog a nice description of what we are doing by Gilberto Jr., a Brazilian blogger who was able to follow the many steps of the Forum’s process until now. [See also the Global Voices report]
The proposition of the Brazilian Digital Culture Forum: open and participatory
The Brazilian Digital Culture Forum has a social network for collaborative production of public policy for contemporary Brazil. This is a web platform that supports a broad spectrum of cultural programs based on the ideas and initiative generated by citizens, which includes face-to-face events and is expected to wrap up in November.
The Brazilian Digital Culture Forum was launched by the Minister of Culture in partnership with the National Network of Education and Research. The object of the Forum is, through these events, to encourage debate about digital culture with activists, business representatives, government institutions and non-governmental organizations. It’s in this context that the social network can work to both accelerate discussion and unify ideas.
Brazil and Italy will meet in a football game next Tuesday. The friendly match is far from having the importance of other disputes in the past, world cup decisions included, but the mood built around the game has set the national blogospheres on fire — see Global Voices.
After weeks of cross-Atlantic brouhaha, some bloggers are starting to wonder how and why the case has gone so far. Is the Brazilian Government’s decision to grant political refugee status to Italian felon Cesare Battisti really worth of such attention?
What elements could be at play to bring forth those remarkable outcomes, such as the minute of silence from the Ministers of European Parliament in a session last week in honor of Battisti’s alleged victims from 30 years ago, or the farewell of an Italian-born media icon in Brazil over the heated national debate on the case, and also Italy’s recall of their Ambassador in Brasilia? The Italian government went as far as threatening to call off the friendly game scheduled to be held on February 10 in London, leading Brazilians to sense a blow out of proportion. Berlusconi is the one to blame.
Gratuitous altercation the one created by the “Battisti case” and the attitude of the buffoon government headed by Silvio Berlusconi. At least I took the time to study the subject before I ventured to write a few lines about it. Most analysts are open about the passion on their analysis and transformed the event into a partisan dispute, or worse, a football match.
Brasil vs Itália – Disolving in the Air
Italy, today, is going through the government of histrionic Berlusconi. He owns the huge Italian TV network, owns newspapers, owns football teams. That is, he is the owner of Italy. And he is clearly fascist, xenophobic, racist.
Berlusconi Hystery and the Brazilian Sovereignity – Blog de Luís Antônio Castagna Maia
Here goes text and slides of my presentation on the A2K Dynamic Coalition panel “Access to Knowledge and Freedom of Expression Policies for the Development of a Global Information Economy”, at the 3rd Edition of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), in Hyderabad, India.
Gilberto Gil
Brazilian Digital Culture
A case of public exercise of culture as a tool for progressive change in the global networked society
Digital Culture is a term that have emerged from the passage of Mr. Gilberto Gil as the head of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. He used to puzzle the media by calling himself a “Hacker Minister”, in the sense of studying the government mechanisms in order to customize it according to the dynamics of the present time.
Cultural Hotspots
His reflections on the radical use of new possibilities brought by the Internet were soon translated into action through the Cultural Hotspots program. The idea of the program was to empower established cultural groups or initiatives with the ability to digitize their content through open source audio and video editing software, and also foster the exchange of this content among the network of hotspots. The program would also encourages the use of alternative licenses like Creative Commons and Copyleft, allowing the remix and the open collaboration on the content with the other hotspots and the whole of society.
Cory Doctorow, our ‘renegade information plumber’, is launching his first collection of essays on ‘everything form copyright and DRM to the layout of phone-keypads, the fallacy of the semantic web, the nature of futurism, the necessity of privacy in a digital world, the reason to love Wikipedia, the miracle of fanfic, and many other subjects’.
As expected from Cory, the new book (Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future) digital versions are available, without charge, at the same time that the print versions are published. He is innovating on reward models, so if you want to donate something you can do so by buying a copy for a librarian or teacher — and teachers and librarians can request a copy for their institution.
The book was designed by typography legend John D Berry, and presents a fine introduction from our good friend John Perry Barlow (photo), which I found provocative enough for me to publish it here.
John Perry Barlow
San Francisco — Seattle — Vancouver — San Francisco
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Perhaps these words appear to you on the pages of a book, a physical object that might be said to have “contained” the thoughts of my friend and co-conspirator Cory Doctorow as they were transported in boxes and trucks all the way from his marvelous mind into yours. If that is so, I will concede that you might be encountering “content.” (Actually, if that’s the case, I’m delighted on Cory’s behalf, since that means that you have also paid him for these thoughts. We still know how to pay creators directly for the works they embed in stuff.)
But the chances are excellent that you’re reading these liquid words as bit-states of light on a computer screen, having taken advantage of his willingness to let you have them in that form for free. In such an instance, what “contains” them? Your hard disk? His? The Internet and all the servers and routers in whose caches the ghosts of their passage might still remain? Your mind? Cory’s?
Brazil got used to being recognized for its Internet savvy and large population of early web-adopters. Nevertheless, or maybe exactly because of that, the country is rapidly becoming a haven for novel and inventive models and tactics of Internet censorship.
A quick search on ‘brazil’ + ‘censorship’ in Global Voices returns a bunch of scary titles posted just in the last 6 months: Dismissal of Brazilian Blogger: Censorship or Just Business? (March 23rd), Bloggers united against Wordpress ban (April 12th), First blog falls victim to electoral law (June 1st), Blogging Against Web-Censorship (June 19th), Bloggers question the 13 new cyber-crimes (July 17th), Electoral censorship at work (July 22nd).
This time, the weird news sprouts from the state of Minas Gerais, where governor Aécio Neves is carefully preparing himself to run as presidential candidate in 2010, when Lula leaves office. In the midst of country-wide municipal elections, the opposing online journal ‘Novo Jornal’ was taken down by state level prosecutors — the Public Ministry — on (refuted) charges of anonymity.
Truth is that the Brazilian Constitution sets up an unusually twisted situation, especially for online speech: free expression of thought is assured in the same paragraph where anonymity is formally forbidden. Still, the seizure of ‘Novo Jornal’ is calling the attention of the blogosphere for the inventive strategy of using state level prosecutors and cybercrime allegations to immediately take down an informative website without the proper legal process. Blogs are also pointing out the fact that the mainstream media has been silent about the case — in what has started to appear as a pattern when it comes to negative coverage on Aécio Neves.
The matrix-like display (picture above) forced upon ‘NovoJornal’s web page sets the tone.
Read the rest of this entry »
Gilberto Gil has left the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. He says that music has called him back.
A quick look at reactions surfacing this week in the headlines of the Brazilian mainstream media tell of a singer-minister who did a passable job in using his social capital to boost the ministry’s actions into international channels. Gil’s assignment was almost passed off as just one more of Lula’s ‘populist tricks’ to hold qualified support for himself.
The seemingly condescending tone of Brazilian media comments and analyses about Gil’s performance as a minister are definitely not a surprise. During his term, the mainstream outlets basically ignored or ridiculed some major international coverage such as 2004 Wired magazine article, telling about Gil’s ahead-of-the-curve awareness of the importance of openness among the principles of the digital revolution.
He was ridiculed, indeed, when during an inauguration class at the University of Sao Paulo (USP) in August 2004 he declared:
“I, Gilberto Gil, Brazilian citizen, world citizen and Minister of Culture of Brazil, develop my work in music, in the ministry and in all the dimensions of my existence under the inspiration of hacker ethics; I am concerned about the issues that my world and my time pose to me, such as the issue of the digital divide, of free software and also the issue of regulation and development of audiovisual content production and distribution, by any media, for any purpose”.
Here I am in Budapest, interesting city, with beautiful people all around speaking a peculiar language. The whole environment exhales history, but the streets are full of young and interesting people who seem well tuned to the beat of the moment. I could sense many similarities with Brazilians.
The Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008, which gathers managers, editors, authors, Lingua sites coordinators, collaborators and other fellow communities that somehow are linked to the Global Voices Online project, is happening here.
As I arrived here, I thought it might be important to mention some aspects of my relationship with GVO — something I’ve never described before. With many simultaneous projects on my plate, it is difficult to properly document the interconnections of what I’ve been developing and implementing, especially when it comes to the “cross-layering” where aspects of one project contribute to other ones.
Del.icio.us – Ecodigital
