The new information technologies have an infinite capability for the archiving of social practice: the smallest of agencies can now hold detailed archives of its activities and indeed detailed archives of the activities of all relevant others (the reverse panopticon). In a recent paper entitled Calling up culture: information spaces and information flows as the virtual dynamics of inclusion and exclusion by Len Holmes, Steve Little and Margaret Grieco delivered in Cape Town, SA at IFIP 2000, the importance of archiving social practice for emergent identity is discussed. The power of identity takes on new significance in a world of distributed technology, distributed leadership and distributed social definition.
Archiving of social practice is also a political activity and the archiving of local political voice is already strongly visible on the web. In a paper for the 8th Colloquium of the Asia Pacific Region Organisation Studies network, Sydney 2000, Miriam Green, Margaret Grieco and Len Holmes explore aspects of this in respect of the management of transport boycotts.
The links which follow provide a demonstration
of the range of issues which are now being communicated through the immediacy
of new technologies.
| The Montgomery Bus Boycott Combatting unauthorised transport boycotts - South Africa ACTU transport boycott of Fiji War on the Wharfies - an archive
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Historically, campaigns and political activities required a high degree of coordination and administration: through new technology effective campaigns can be pursued with a lesser requirement for continuous and constant coordination. Local protest has enriched reachibility characteristics as a consequence of the new information technologies. The cost of globally distributed but parallel protests being coordinated is greatly reduced through the use of web enabling a higher level of effectiveness. The time dimension of political action and of framing that action has developed a critical significance within the politics afforded by the new technologies:through archiving action can be recontextualised. Agents and agencies which at the point of initiation of political action seemed doomed to loose can readily broadcast their triumph and request of others a more careful reconsideration of prospects for collective action in the future - consider the Liverpool dockers. Within the new time relationships and political relationships of electronic adjacency, the phenomenon of collective memory is heightened. Protests can now be linked across time as well as space. |