1996

Ribeiro Gustavo Lins

Cybercultural Politics. Political Activism

http://www.unb.br/ics/dan/Serie212empdf.pdf

Globalization, the information era and non-governmental organizations are highlycomplex, much debated topics that may be considered as causes and results of many changes in political, social, cultural and economic contemporary life. I want to explore the entwinement of these issues to shed light on the emergence of another dimension of political and cultural life, the emergence of the virtual-imagined transnational community that can be better understood through an analysis of cybercultural politics. My aim is to advance the existence of two powerful political dimensions: witnessing at distance and activism at distance. I locate my own discussion within a growing literature on global citizenship and planetary civil society; and on the impact of new technologies of communications on the formation of new subjectivities, collectivities, social, economic and institutional needs, ideologies, utopias and dystopias, flows of people, goods and information2. Though this approach cannot be circumscribed to a given region of the world, most of my examples are marked by a Latin American perspective.