The Digital Civilizations Interviews

PISTES

• »Ar ling ling ba (2008)» – the Olympic hopes of a transformed Peking and the promise of finding work have been confirmed
• The»timely» move from a model of (very rapid) economic catch-up to a model in which human rights and environmental concerns are being taken into consideration.
• Strengthened by their histories and knowledge of capitalism, governments are managing to avoid the pitfalls of capitalist logic pushed to the extreme – Abolition of the death penalty.
• Growth and support of new technologies.
• Articulation of reason, techno-scientific progress, and human values such as integrity and clairvoyance that are associated with the pressure of civil society that has been “boosted” by modern means of communication.
• China is rediscovering, respecting and valuing its cultural heritage by massively “exporting” ideas, concepts, etc.
• Digital media, and even more so, the Internet are key players in this development.
• The Internet is ceasing to be an object of censorship, it is very highly trafficked, and is become the vehicle of much hope. Skills that were developed for illegal P2P film and music exchange are now being applied to the media and other more “serious” subjects.
• Peer to peer (not to say piracy) networking supplemented with universal Internet access (even in the most remote villages) are increasing the amount of information available about the world and access to pedagogical content at a speed that would be otherwise impossible.
• The Internet has also become an authorized instrument of collective mobilisation, the very compost of a real “civil society”. «Sharism» is good for your life (Isaac Mao).
• Via Web 2.0, the Internet enables new practices of self-expression in relationship to other people. This can generally be witnessed in China in new applications like QQ (chat) and blogs where the younger generation can still quite “freely” deploy multiple identities and create developed social networks (guanxi) away from the usually monitored sites.