COMMUNITIES AND CIVIL PORTALS: �WHAT FOR?

THINKING ABOUT INTERNET FROM A SOCIAL POINT OF VIEW

Rub�n Araya Tagle[1]

1. Introduction.

During the last years the World Wide Web has experimented an explosive growth, to a great extend as a consequence of the influence from de commercial sector, and to a lesser one from efforts made by governmental entities, academic institutions, and from civil society organizations and networks in order to take advantage of the opportunities and benefits that this new medium may offer to them. Within this context, it has not been unusual the turning up and development of a multiplicity of experiences that get installed on the web as portals and online services oriented towards what may be called the �social� or �civic� world. Many of these initiatives have emerged within the framework of educational policies and Estate modernization, some others have been fostered by international or multilateral organisms, non for profit foundations and agencies for cooperation within the context of different projects and programs, while others have been the end result of the work made by civil society organizations looking forward to articulate their networks y to coordinate heir actions around common grounds.

2. �Why asking for portals and virtual civil communities?

Portals and virtual communities, as we know them today, constitute entities of recent appearance on the web. In fact, before the commercial boom of Internet portals were practically limited to news pages by the ISPs, catalogues and search engines that served as integrating fields for the available information on the web, whereas the virtual communities developed themselves mainly as flows in communication networks with a high degree of segmentation and differentiation through newsgroups and interest groups. However, with the progressive increment in users and available information, and mostly as a result of the expansion of commercial services on the web, portals have been proliferating and diversifying adopting several communicating and service models, as well as integrating also some linking elements the previously were appropriate to online communities. The turning popular of this new concept of portals as infocommunicational organizers oriented to create virtual communities has had a great influence on the dominant discourses and actions within the named �civil Internet�[2]. In fact, analogous to what has happened with the initiatives that promote the universal access, where communitarian infocenters and telecenters are often conceived as standard instruments, civil portals have occupy a preponderant place on the discourses and actions that try to respond to what many have considered the second key problem to solve after connectivity: the �lack of public social infoestructure�.

Nevertheless, the great enthusiasm brought back by these instruments, impregnated with a some technological determinism, that often mixes up the technological characteristics with its possible uses and implementations, looks as if forgets that behind computers and telecommunication systems are actual actors and power structures and social exclusion. Is in this context that from the civil society have emerged critical views that question certain aspects of the conception and design that some of these tools, expressing the need to subordinate any consideration about their pertinence and relevance to a previous analysis about the results, effects and social impact that may be obtained from them, as well as their requirements, conditionals and assumptions under which it is considered feasible, viable and desirable.

Thus, the question about communities and civic portals appears framed within a discussion more global about the meaning of the initiatives and public policies where they are inserted, which leads to rise questions such as: �What are the needs or purposes that these social or civil portals are supposed to contribute or might contribute to? �How do they might turn into useful tools to support actions and infocommunicational actual processes at the civil level? �How and in what conditions do they might help in improving the digital inclusion and thus to contribute to social development and strengthening democracy?

3. �Informational divide or the right to information and communication?

In order to set up these questions in a field of public policy analysis, it helps to take a more general view on the public social infoestructure and the ways that that can be seen as subject of policies, considering both principles and actions involved in it. To do so we adopt as angular stone the premises of the so called �social vision of Internet� [3], in which it is questioned the concept of digital divide stating that at the roots of the problem of technological exclusion lie the social, economic, political and cultural divides present within and between societies. In particular, we want to look deeply into the concept of �digital inclusion�[4] at the level referred to the use and social empowerment of the information and communication media.

Looking into the mail experiences and debates related to this subject, we found that like it occurs around definitions of digital divide, it is possible to distinguish here a couple of streams or main views[5]:

- A dominant view that considers that, once the issue of access is overcome, the main challenge that remains to solve is what can be called the informational divide, which shows itself as a deficit in the development of the social infoestructure of public character. Hence, its priority is centered around promoting the development and production of contents, services and applications social and culturally relevant for the population, having as ruling guideline the �universalization of the access to public information and to civil services�, with emphasis on the more vulnerable or excluded sectors of society. The assumption behind this approach is that, once the public social infoestructure is set in place, the conditions will be given allowing people to equitably make use of the advantages and benefits derived from the access to Internet, improving their possibilities of accessing education, information and knowledge, incrementing their labor and economic opportunities, and facilitating their participation into the public affaires of their communities.

- An alternative view that states that behind the informational divide exists a structural state of dependency and subordination whose social, economic, political and cultural causes are the same that the ones that originate the digital divide. This situation manifests itself as social inequalities at the level of ability to access, to use and the empowerment of the information and communication media, which in turn produces that the development of the IT in general become hegemonized by the interests and perspectives of the dominant groups that concentrate its property and control.

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Hence the priority should be to stimulate the participative, universal, democratic access and inclusive to the information and to the communication technologies and media, having as a ruling guideline the �universalization of the rights to information and communication� [6], with emphasis on the protection and enlargement of public domain. Under this approach it is assumed that the informational divide most be tackled together with the other divides that hinder access, use and equitable and solidary social empowerment of these technologies and media, in order to brake this vicious circle.

By contrasting both approaches it makes it manifest that, although the universalization of public information and of civic services be a relevant aspect to make it possible for the public social infoestructure to respond at needs, interests, ambitions and expectations of society as a whole, it is not a matter of a principle in itself but only a medium.

In addition it results evident that the mere availability of contents and services �to� the people is not and it can not be enough to produce significant transformations over the inequality status related to the social empowerment of the media and the information and communication technologies, therefore the approach of developing the social infoestructure �top down�, as it is currently defined, at the end only reproduces the informational divide, and does not guarantee its democratic, participative, inclusive and universal character.

Taking off from this difference at the level of the problem and the enunciated principles, these approaches follow different paths when proposing actions to tackle them:

- To the dominant vision the principal actions to undertake are related with the development of electronic services addressed to citizens from organisms and institutions that administer, manage and supply information and/or public services (governmental entities, public services, academic and educational institutions and private sector with some public orientation). In addition, it is also suggested the need to carry out actions of educational community aimed at facilitating the access and massive use of contents and available services by people, as well as promoting the development of portals and other digital media with local content and services letting the telecenters, infocenters and other initiatives of communitarian infocommunication to have a basic social infoestructure in agreement with the needs and interests of their communities.

- From the perspective of the alternative vision, these actions are not and cannot be enough to solve the root problems. Thus, while in the dominant vision the media and information and communication technologies are conceived as resources for the people be able to access information and public services, assuming roles as receptors, beneficiaries, customers or consumers, on the other hand in the alternative vision it is assumed that in order that these instruments to enable empowerment and human development, it is required that them could be handled by those who use them. Hence the efforts should be oriented to provide the conditions in order that the different people, groups and communities may actively participate the management and control of the information and communication technologies, media and resources, assuming roles as broadcasters, producers and developers, both individually and collectively. For that it is needed to delineate more comprehensive strategies for intervention that, in addition to minding for providing contents and universal electronic services, embody a broad set of actions, among which stand out:

- Strengthening of public domain through the creation of global collective goods that guarantee the universal access to information and communication.

- Fostering non-for profit networks and electronic collectives that assure the production and open, plural and diverse flow of public information and relevant y contents for human development.

- Promoting participative initiatives �from� and �towards� the community that include the traditional and innovative use of communication and tools for information management, especially at a local level.

- Educative and training actions that enable the overcoming of technical, cultural and linguistic barriers for the use and social empowerment of information and communication technologies and media, and to contribute to develop new technological imaginaries and social capabilities from identities and local, regional and national cultural perspectives.

- Promoting the development of alternative, open and free information and communication technologies, in order to store and integrate technological know-how and communicational practices from the diverse communities and groups, with emphasis on the communitarian level.

In this approach it is also assumed as a priority need the active participation in these actions, both at executing them as well as its design and evaluation, by diverse actors that from de dominant vision play a role somewhat secondary or subordinated, like civil society organizations, local governments, micromedia, and communitarian radios, telecenters and infocenters, academic and educational sectors and non for profit private sector, among others.

4. Portals and virtual communities for a civilian Internet.

Even if the subject of the instruments, modalities and methodologies had not been explicitly developed within the precedent discussion to undertake policies related to the social infoestructure, the aspects that have been referred to are enough to clarify as to retake the original question about the portals and civil communities, and to provide some interpretative hints about its meaning and potential role from the social vision about Internet.

There are many different definitions and descriptions about what portals and virtual communities are, the majority of which focus themselves enunciating and typifying the content and services offered to their users. The more theoretical approximations often emphasize the new dimensions of usage and interactions being possible due to the technology applied, stressing aspects such as de media and service integration as a result of information digitalizing, the ability to select information and personalization enabled by information processing, remote interactivity and time and space globalization facilitated by electronic networks, among others. However, what the majority of these definitions leave behind is that portals and virtual communities actually existent are electronic means of social intermediation that, beyond the theoretical potentialities of technology, have been intentionally designed and modeled as applications to certain purposes. That means that they are not neutrals nor transparent, since their conceptions imply different organizational models and social integration, which define role structures, rules and control mechanisms, which in turn frame and link several weaves of social relationships among social players of the real world. From this it is concluded that the approach and the options that implicit or explicitly adopted to understand and to organize the social spaces were these tools are applied, will have deep implications and consequences both on the conception and development of the technological devices and their know-how and associated imaginaries, as well as the results, effects and social impacts that can be obtained from them, demarcating the usefulness that they might have related to specific policies or strategies.[7].

The prevalent approach of commercial portals have a close relationship with the liberal paradigm and the market logic, emphasizing the implementation of business models from as individualistic conception about what is social (the audiences as multitude of atomized individuals), an approach that privilege the quantitative over the qualitative (attracting the maximum possible audience), with a strong rationalistic bias (segmenting, differentiating and identifying the users with specific contents and services) and an instrumentalist vision of the action (retaining and making the users loyal giving them something in exchange).

Many communities and portals that approach aspects related to social development and public interest have look forward to make it explicit their differentiation related to the previous approach, proposing the notion of a �civilian Internet�, as an alternative space to the �commercial Internet�. On this line we find both state experiences and the wide spectrum of the civil society, in addition to the great amount of small projects and initiatives at the communitarian level. However, the plurality of models and the very polysemy of the term �citizenship� make it difficult to find out elements and common meanings among them. In the face of it, it can be question: What concepts, values and practices about �the social� and/or �the civil� are implied in them? �How are built and organized the functional and power structures on their models of management? �What capability of affecting has their different participants over the information and the very media and technologies used? In the majority of portals of the state sector predominate the assistance and universalistic approaches, centered on the supply of electronic public services to the citizens and, to a lesser scale, on aspects such as the provision of public information aimed at the transparence and accountability, and the generation of closed channels of individual communication between citizens and the government[8]. These models often emphasize the notion of e-government above e-citizenship or e-democracy, blending modalities of internal organization based on the creation of intergovernmental networks (the Network- Estate), with traditional and bureaucratic modalities of relating to users based on hierarchical
structures and centralized schemes of the control and communication. This approach shares with the commercial portals the adoption of am individualistic conception of people more as customers than as citizens, which determines a �provider-user�. On the other hand, within the civil society there are a great variety of experiences about portals, communities and networks that have developed some alternative models, where it is stressed the uses for building practice communities, to create alternative mediatic channels and to organize political campaigns, among others[9].

The approaches used have been diverse, but in general they have as common denominator the use of a cooperative logic, which aims to generate structures more horizontal and decentralized and distributed schemes of communication and control, with collective and flexible modalities of relationship that combine interdependency with autonomy of each one of their parts.

Where to place the sphere of �the civilian�? Undoubtedly the time period in which we all live is signed by the ever increasing politic-economic globalization and socio-cultural fragmentation, it is not possible to continue defining citizenship exclusively in relation to the concepts of Estate and nation, nor could it be reduced to the formal sphere of the rights, duties, regulations, procedures and social benefits. ��

As currently configured, the civil sphere encompasses every space and dimension where the public agenda are built and decisions about public issues are made, intersecting the local, national, regional and global stages, and implying at several levels every actual social player from different sectors that plays in this dominion (state sector, private sector, civil society).

From this approximation, we can define in generic terms the portals and civil virtual communities as collective virtual spaces socially enabled in order to take part in the public spheres. The aim of these spaces would be to contribute to the generation of social and/or political effects in the real world, so a central aspect is that who participate in it be actual citizens and social players with interests and relationships in it, in order that their virtual interactions might traduce themselves into agreements, practices and actions on non virtual spaces.

According to this definition, not every portal and virtual community affiliated to the so-called �civilian Internet� is properly speaking �civilian�. And there are also many others that would be included within this category, even though from a traditional approach to the public sphere they seem to come closer to the private because they tackle needs and interests of minorities and subgroups. The key element for distinction is found at the social connectivity that these media promote and/or enabled through their management models, understood as the collective articulating capacity and that of intervention over actual realities.

Under this definition, and from a social vision about Internet, portals and civilian virtual communities are profiled as tools with a great strategic value to promote the development of a democratic, participative, inclusive and universal public social infoestructure, as long as they might contribute to coordinate actions and to articulate social conversations that respond to the needs, expectations, interests and aspirations of the different people, players, groups and communities at different levels and spheres of the public space.

Nevertheless, if that is to be possible it would be needed that the promotion and development of these civilian virtual spaces constitutes in itself as a priority aspect of policies for development of the public social infoestructure, and that it be approached from a perspective that take in account the needs to advance both towards social and technological empowerment and the strengthening of social rights to information and communication.

On the other hand, the civilian spaces and infocommunication media need to have resources and regulatory frameworks available that respect and preserve their autonomy and independence from governments and commercial corporations. In this sense, an important responsibility that belongs to estates is to guarantee the public access to these technologies and media assigning them and status of universal common goods.

Burt the development of the civilian Internet will not be possible within the stated terms unless the citizens also have the capabilities of access and control over significant technical resources. In this matter, the possibility to access, manage and administer quality services and applications and to the empowerment of open and free technical standards, constitute aspects of particular importance.

Daily we listen to lectures in which the ICT and Internet are often introduced to us as self-valued objects that are transforming our lives, thus hiding a great deal of the creative capability and the right to intervene that we human beings have on the historic self construction of this technology. In this paper have been exposed synoptically some reflections that propose an alternative look and that point out to a focus change about the principles and orientations of the public policies about Internet and citizenship. In addition this perspective leads us to abandon the seeing of portals and civilian virtual communities as artifacts belonging to the digital world inviting us to understand them in its condition of social builders to the actual world, so that we could be in charge of their use and benefit as useful tools for the task of transforming among us all our societies building a better world, not only it constitutes a possibility for the future, but our responsibility for the present.

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[1] Social Investigator, Software Developer and Multimedia Director. Executive Coordinator of civilian portals sociedadcivil.cl, ong.cl y conectividadsocial.cl, Project Director of collaborative �Interacci�n Virtual�, Researcher and faculty at the Universidad Bolivariana de Chile.

[2] In general terms, by �civilian Internet� we mean the set of uses and social empowerment of Internet aimed at intervene on public matters of societies, at the local, national, regional and global levels.

[3] The "social vision of Internet" constitutes an alternative approach developed collectively by several investigators and activists from Latin America and the Caribbean, framed within a process of reflection about the subject of the digital divide, information society and the social impact of Internet. This alternative states that for ICT and Internet be able to contribute to social development and to reduce the other social divides it is required to simultaneously advance towards both the equitable access and to the aimed-use and social empowerment of these technologies, and not only by increasing connectivity. See �Trabajando la Internet con una visi�n social� (�Working the Internet with a social vision�), collective document of the Virtual Community MISTICA for the OLISTICA project, http://funredes.org/mistica/castellano/ciberoteca/tematica/esp_doc_olist2.html.

[4] The �digital inclusion� promotes the use and social empowerment of the digital technologies in order to tackle the needs of communities, and to promote the public policy making, the creation of appropriate knowledge and contents, and strengthening people capabilities. This way, the digital inclusion contributes to improve the economic, social, political and personal conditions of the vast majority, particularly of the poorest and marginalized sectors of society. Op. Cit. in �Telecentros� �Para qu�? Lecciones sobre Telecentros Comunitarios en Am�rica Latina y el Caribe� (�Telecenters...What for? Lessons about Communitarian Telecenters in Latin Ameica and the Caribbean�). Ricardo G�mez, Karin Delgadillo, Klaus Stoll, 2003. Pan Am�ricas - Fundaci�n Chasquinet - IDRC. http://tele-centros.org/tcparaque.

[5] This analysis adopts and expands the thesis proposed in: Mart�nez Juliana, �Visi�n social de la Internet y pol�ticas p�blicas: Ideas para debatir estrategias de incidencia desde la sociedad civil� (�Social vision of the Internet and public policies: Ideas for debating strategies for interventions from civil society�), Fundaci�n Acceso, Agosto 2000, http://www.idrc.ca/pan/panlacjulaant.PDF.

[6] This perspective is being outlined and debated within the framework of the �Campa�a por los Derechos de Comunicaci�n en la Sociedad de la Informaci�n� (Campaign for the Communication Rights in the Information Society�) (CRIS). Their web site can be found at http://www.crisinfo.org.

[7] Many experiences that have not obtained the expected results, have just made the mistake of transplanting human activities to the digital world without considering the complex relationship existing between the social world and the virtual space, pretending to a great extent to subordinate the former to the later. Similarly, the discussions �and many time confusions- commonly posed about what ought to be or not to be incorporated into portals of a social or civilian character, have to do generally with an overestimate of these artifacts as if they would be �carriers� of social relationships, forgetting that they are just a medium to stimulate them.

[8] An analysis on this theme can be found in: "El Papel del Ciudadano y de las OSC en el e-Gobierno: Un estudio de gobierno electr�nico en ocho pa�ses de Am�rica Latina y el Caribe" (�The role of the Citizen and the CSO on the e-government: An study on electronic government in eight Latin America and the Caribbean countries�). K. Reilly - Ra�l Echeverr�a. APC, 2003.

[9] A formal description of some of these experiences can be found in: "Comprender los portales de la sociedad civil: contenidos en l�nea y modelos comunitarios para el sector de OSC" (�Understanding the portals of civil society: online contents and communitarian models for the CSO sector�), M. Surman. APC, 2002.