Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

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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
Despite those distresses, it is possible to see, on that same unjust and often destructive
scenario, the invention of new creative forms of content production and peer
collaboration, and the release of communication flows that were once silent in the so
called “public sphere,” dominated by mass media and by a culture based on the concept
of ownership (BENKLER, 2006). We should understand the public sphere as “the
media or the socio-spatial places for public interaction” and the “informational and cultural
repository of ideas and projects that feed the public debate” (CASTELLS, 2008).
It is worth noticing how the dismay and the hope, both caused by urban concentrations
and their new technical systems, bring to mind the ambiguous feelings
of Walter Benjamin facing the modernity of nineteenth-century Paris, a city transformed
by the forces of capitalism and consumption. Partially influenced by his
reading of the work of French poet Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin saw in the catastrophe
of modernity reminiscences of a past that pointed to a possibility. According
to the author’s opinion exposed in the second thesis of Theses on the Philosophy of
History, there was (or there still is) a messianic force in the present that has its origins
in the past (BENJAMIN, 1991b).
Benjamin identified in the strength of Baudelaire’s poetry, in the Parisian passages,
in the Universal Expositions, in the flâneur trajectories, or in the act of collecting, a
nostalgia fueled by a desire for redemption, which was placed in a permanent dialectical
relationship with the destructive forces created by modernity. Would this still be
the case today? Would the hope for fairer forms of social relationships, announced by
the various current collaborative networked movements, be the result of reminiscences
that survived to a certain form of predatory, individualist, global capitalism?
Technique, a target of harsh criticism throughout history, has an ambiguous
and paradoxical character — and, concerning the nature of this reflection, one must
always remember that Benjamin was Jewish and was persecuted by the Nazis, who
mastered the use of mass communications. If the new techniques forced the development
of another perception of the world, not rarely with an alienating character,
on the other hand they also released new aspects of reality (BENJAMIN, 1975).
The hope lies precisely on this ambiguity.
According to Benjamin’s view, the task of articulating those oneiric elements of
hope and happiness, amidst technical novelties, with its products and its catastrophes,
would be a function of dialectical thinking, as the “organ for historical awakening”
(BENJAMIN, 1991a). In a less elaborate approach to the subject, one can
say that it is a task for intellectuals and, why not, for public administrators, educa-
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