Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

eng
c i t i z e n s h i p a n d d i g i t a l n e t w o r k s
centralized) state control of concessions and funding.
The oligopolistic media speaks of “freedom” and “public opinion,” but is frightened
in face of its increasing inability to continue forming and disciplining opinions.
At the same time, it speaks of market and efficiency, but it only thinks of
recovering control of the state, on which it depends entirely.
The state-based and anti-democratic dimension of the oligopolistic media is
not related to the formal status of its property; it has to do with the relationship of
subordination that puts the sphere of communications under the production forces’
organization logic. The media, under the fordist model of central, nationalist, development-focused
peripheral economies, was a unit of reproduction and legitimation
of the social relations of production.
It had a precise role: to legitimate the industrialist project and its embedded
forms of discipline and exploitation. That media worked and still works in a hierarchical
manner, producing hegemony from a center. Even when it published a
critical discourse, that content remained structurally anti-democratic. The counterhegemonic
media is, in this sense, specular to the hegemonic one.
The rights in dispute were materially those produced within and from the relationship
and the conflict between capital and labor, that is, the wage relation. There was no mention
of Human Rights, but of labor rights: citizenship was recognized not on an “identity
card,” but on the “working papers,” especially when they were signed. In this sense, having
rights coincided with having a job, and the struggle for rights ended up being a struggle
for full employment and for the economic growth rates that would provide it.
Contemporary capitalism implicates a double displacement of this model. On the
one hand, working is not anymore necessarily linked to having a job, and this implies on
its increasing fragmentation, as on the reduction of labor rights with weakening of unions,
dismantling of social protection, and amplification of informality and precarious work.
On the other hand, the only way capitalism can organize production and continue
fragmenting the wage relationship — that is, mobilizing work directly in outsourcing
networks — is to resort to new information and communication technologies, in an
immediately productive way, in order to structure production inside circulation itself.
Suddenly, communications encounter a new central position: their role is not
anymore restricted to the reproduction and legitimation of the exploitation relations
that are typical of the production process, because all the relations of production
depend on communication.
At the same time, the integrated networks of production and circulation cross
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