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[new] need to communicate (Avg. Score: none / Raters: 0) (#2)
by Aileen on Sun Oct 5th, 2003 at 07:30:33 PM EURODISCORDIA TIME
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Recently I have noticed some changes in the neighborhood where I live, and reading this makes me wonder how the idea of freedom may or may not be related to those changes.

Along the main road that carries far too many cars into the city, where the traffic situation makes it almost impossible for most businesses to survive, long empty shops have recently been converted into makeshift "centers", sparsely furnished with rickety chairs and a few ugly metal tables, offering telephone, fax and Internet services in signs hand-written onto the large window fronts. There are several of these centers along this street, and when I walk past there are always people gathered there. This neighborhood has an unusually diverse population, for various reasons, but most people in this area come from "somewhere else", many of them from different countries all over the world. It doesn't seem unlikely that many of the people found gathering in these new centers have a need to communicate with other people not physically within reach.

This is not a political project - not as far as I know, but I don't understand any of the languages I hear being spoken by people going in and out. I see no sign of artists or activists here, just small business enterprises supplying something for which there is obviously a demand.

Yesterday evening I had a long conversation with a woman, who has never had any contact with the Internet, no interest in learning to use it. She has no motivation to do so. She is quite content in the little town in Austria, where she has lived all her life, all her relatives and friends easily within driving, if not walking distance, information about local concerns readily available - enough to satisfy her in any case. She has no ties to the country that her mother left as a child, she feels no need to communicate with people who are somewhere else.

How does freedom of movement and freedom of communication relate to a need to communicate? There are many different reasons why people end up "somewhere else". Because of the neighborhood where I live, but most of all because I have two children who have always connected with other children that speak different languages (as well as identifying me as a foreigner in public, because they don't speak German with me, no matter where we are), I have heard so many different stories about how different people (especially women with children) have ended up here in Austria. "Freedom of movement" doesn't seem quite adequate to me in many cases. And I am not quite sure what "freedom of communication" could mean in this context, but I think the concept of freedom has to be broad enough to allow for different kinds of needs and different possibilites for meeting those needs. Trying to define categories, whether of a "digital divide" or "classes", seems less important to me than understanding - but understanding both respectfully and critically - which real needs real people have, in order to find possibilities for meeting them.

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