Globalisation and Media: Making Feminist Sense

by Susanna George

This paper was presented during the “Women and Globalisation” event organised by the Women’s Movement Caucus of India during the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India in January 2004.

I have been asked to examine Globalisation and Media in ways that will help us make connections between these two phenomena and how these affect women’s lives. I am glad that this conversation is happening in the context of the World Social Forum, because I strongly believe in this confluence of ideas and ideals, and see it as one of the best spaces for looking at the convergence of issues that appear at first glance disconnected.

I am even gladder that we are a gathering of feminists and activist women, since women are some of the best at finding connections between seemingly disparate issues. We do this out of necessity and for our physical and emotional survival, because for all of us in our different spheres of life, we often have to point out to those around us the insidious and entrenched nature of patriarchy in every institution and facet of our societies and lives.

The same is true of work in media, information and communications. Feminists working in this field have long had to point out sexist, racist, elitist and homophobic manifestations within news and reportage that are purportedly balanced and neutral. As media and communications structures and systems become increasingly corporatised and globalised, we take on the challenge of scrutinising their inter-linkages, and trying to show up, in sharp relief, the face of our common enemies—patriarchy, corporate hegemonies, ascendant rightwing ideological regimes, and the U.S. empire in its fullest meaning.

In order to do this, we need to do the following:

Firstly, we need to explore new frontiers in Media that take into account its rapidly evolving state. When we speak of Media, we can no longer speak of newspapers, television and radio alone. The links between media corporations and new technologies such as the Internet and the IT industry need to be fully understood. We also need to see the connection in the ways that corporate media works hand in glove with the state, and corporate and military regimes, not just to provide the infrastructure for normalising and rationalising these powers, but also, in so doing, strengthening its own power.

Secondly, we need to look for the Devil in the Details. Today, if we want to find out what is really happening in the world, we have to look in every page of a newspaper. The connections are in the business pages, the special pages on the IT industry, in the advertisements, in the sports and health pages, and perhaps most pertinently, in the culture and lifestyle supplements. We need to read into the meaning behind the messages because otherwise, we will miss the inter-linkages that are both potent and dangerous.

Globalised Media as a Weapon of Mass Deception
We all place high value on truth-telling in our societies yet today, we have some of the most profound forms of lying taking place through the mouths of our governments, through the astigmatic minds of our politicians and religious leaders, through almost all corporately owned newspapers, television and radio stations, through advertising, through the fashion and cosmetic industries.

Some people will readily acknowledge that they are being lied to, and that they are being told, whether subtly or crudely, to uphold certain viewpoints of the state of the world, specific consumption patterns, and certain lifestyles and beliefs about ourselves and others. Even so, the resistance to such lying and manipulation of facts is shockingly low, given the most dramatic impact that it has on all other aspects of our anti-globalisation and anti-imperialist struggles.

Advertisers spend billions of dollars in research to examine the subtleties of human consumption patterns, while sexist imagery and cultural symbols are a goldmine of copy for advertisers. Women, teenagers, gays and lesbians, and even pre-adolescent have been turned into markets for “niche advertising.” The heightening of a sense of inadequacy, fear and want in post-colonial societies is a vital part of creating markets for a wide range of products. Even the so-called natural health food and herbal products industries get a tremendous boost from the paranoia and complete confusion created by the health columns of newspapers and magazines. So also with the cosmetics, slimming and beauty industries that thrive on the aggravation of the sense of sexual and physical inadequacy in both women and men. There are countless examples, sadly, of how we appear to have little resistance to the forces that seek to turn us into mindless consumers. Women in particular, but not exclusively, have subjected themselves to the most gruesome and painful forms of beautifying, evidence of the extent of our falling for their lies.

The horrors of last year’s war in Iraq were delivered to our homes in video-game-style detail. “Embedded Journalism” reached new heights as cameras were placed on the noses of fighter planes, and we could follow the path of the bomb as it careened toward the hideous maiming, burning and death it would inflict. The media coverage was a crucial part of the “Shock and Awe” campaign of Bush in Iraq. It is no wonder that the three major global media channels that covered the war, CNN, BBC and the Fox Network, were owned by transnational media corporations representing the interests of the Allied forces.

Today, Globalised Media is turning into a Weapon of Mass Deception—an instrument to deceive and lie to hundreds of millions in one go.

As media institutions are merged into transnational media and IT industry players, megalomaniacal corporations are created, their sole interest being to amass the greatest number of consumers at the lowest cost, thereby posting the largest profit. A one-size-fits-all formula has become the trend in the creation of cultural content in the so-called “entertainment” industry.

Perhaps the most insidious of deceptions is the overwhelming sense of “choice” and “freedom” that people experience today in the age of 100-channel cable TV stations and the multifarious possibilities and options on the Internet. When scrutinised for content in terms of diversity of opinion, ideals, values, cultures, and the voices of those at the margins of society, one will soon realise that it is one of limited choice. A pre-selection has already taken place to meet the expectations of advertisers, the state, global markets and the status quo.

In this age of the Empire, those of us who stand in opposition to Empire building and all forms of fascist and fundamentalist expansion need to understand the intricate relationship of globalised media and information and communications structures and systems to the state, the military and to projects of global hegemony and fascism by both state and non-state actors. For these reasons, we need to stay vigilant of the trends of large media and IT corporations such as AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, Viacom/CBS/MTV, and reckon with them into our struggle against giant corporations.

As I have said in the previous World Social Forum, global media is to corporate capitalism what missionaries were to the colonial enterprise—it creates the sensibility, cultural posturing and values base necessary for a full-scale expansion and capture of markets. We fight against giant pharmaceutical, biochemical and agricultural companies for poisoning our water and air, for homogenising order, and for turning our ways of life into one big marketplace. Is not the slow poisoning and homogenisation of our thoughts, desires and values through media and the attendant creation of consumerist desires not something we should wage a similar war against?

The Devil in the Details
The reminder of the well-known poet Rimbaud that the devil is in the details has always helped me when trying to understand the ways in which various forces, global and local, interact with each other. Political mongering takes place where we cannot see all of the actors, nor all of the stakes, but we need to stay cognisant of the fact that behind every event and story are multiple and complex actors, stakes and possible results.

In the same way, if we start looking for where these colossal media and IT corporations are today, we will find them in places that would not have occurred to us to search. In the United Nations, for example. When Ted Turner, once owner of CNN, made a pledge of US$1 billion over ten years to the United Nations, he won untold favours in the eyes of the Clinton administration and the UN.

IT corporations such as Cisco Systems, through their foundations, have made inroads within the UN, appropriating language of gender empowerment. In partnership with the United Nations Women’s Development Fund (UNIFEM), Cisco Systems and Cisco Foundation have been working on women’s training programmes for job creation in the IT sector, allegedly to promote gender equality. But on closer examination, one sees that these women are trained in the use of specific patented products, essentially meaning that the women are being primed to become technicians of Cisco products, and not necessarily as workers with broader-based skills and knowledge that can be applied outside Cisco Systems.

While glancing through a report that will be launched during this World Social Forum entitled “Threatened Existence: A Feminist Analysis of the Genocide in Gujarat,” I was amazed to note in one of the annexes the large contributions of U.S.-based IT corporations such as Cisco, Sun, Oracle, HP and AOL Time Warner to a U.S.-based organisation called the Indian Development and Relief Fund (IDRF), widely believed to be linked to the Hindutva forces in India. The book refers to IDRF as one of the top five grantees of Cisco Foundation in 1999, having received US$70,000, ostensibly for its development and relief activities. While the authors did note that these U.S. foundations have been “unsuspecting” in their gift giving, one need only speculate on the returns in favour that such a gift in the name of “corporate social responsibility” would accrue in terms of political leverage.

New digital and satellite-based technologies play a critical role in the expansion of financial, trade and market regimes, providing the technology, infrastructure and sheer speed of operation. They have also changed the face of warfare dramatically, making computer and IT savvy a part of every soldier’s training. The precision digital technology that was used in the Iraq war made the American GI a communications specialist more than a machine-gun or hand-grenade wielder. Today, there is an eerie quality in the surveillance measures that are using devices that we know to be communication tools such as the Internet, hand phone and other such devices that support “connectivity.”

We need to stay alert to the multiplicity of sites of resistance in relation to the struggle against corporate globalisation. Even as we look for the devil in the details, however, it is vital that we do not slip into a binary understanding of the world. Everything cannot be simplified or essentialised as Good or Evil. There are many nuances in every situation, and we need to be able to respond to new situations with all of our feminist courage, wisdom and heart.

Feminists know, more than most, the multiplicity of intersecting realities, and we have always sought to look at the way in which the different forces of power interact with each other to reincarnate another head of the hydra we call Patriarchy. We have to apply this same rigour in the case of globalised media and ICT system and structures.

Mounting a Broad-based Resistance
I made a list last year of things that we need to do in order to strengthen a broad, non-sectarian resistance that can draw in more people into the struggle against an unjust, violent and oppressive system. I present the list again as it remains relevant today:

1. We need to keep our minds open to being challenged, and to be willing to give up our familiar analytical lenses and known platforms for advocacy and action. This is the challenge of Porte Alegre, and now Mumbai, to feminists around the world—the demand that we stay aware of the multiplicity of the platforms of struggle for change. We can no longer speak of sexist portrayal in the media without taking on the ways in which media misrepresents the most dispossessed and marginalised in society to maintain the moral, social and cultural authority of dominant classes. All of us from various social movements need to be aware of the struggles of other social movements, their analyses and sites of resistance, and be willing to give support to struggles that have not been our traditional spaces.

2. Communication activists have long struggled to make visible the ways in which neo-liberal globalisation is built on the backbone of globalised and corporatised media, information and communications systems. Working shoulder to shoulder are community radio and other community-based media and communications activists that seek to preserve, if not expand, what little space exists for non-commercial and community based alternatives. It is time that the different social movements recognise the importance of these different sites of struggle and support these efforts.

3. While the onslaught of global commercialised media systems has been reshaping the landscape of national, local and alternative media, this is by no means a finished project. There are many groups, including feminist and cultural activist groups using various media and communication tools to create, revitalise, energise and renew cultural expression and folk communication without recreating the ‘noble savage’ nor romanticising the tribal nor essentialising the past.

4. We need to recognise to the important demands made by indigenous peoples and marginalised communities for greater cultural diversity, autonomy and access and control over cultural resources. More often than not, poor, marginalised and indigenous communities are absent in programming equations since they do not form a powerful consumer bloc and have little purchasing power. Observe the trend of television programming and how it is geared toward audiences that have the greatest consumptive power (including children of the middle and upper middle classes for whom the cartoons are created).

5. There is a need for a more vocal and visible force monitoring the movements of large multinational media conglomerates such as AOL Time Warner, Disney, Sony and NewsCorp that already command vast shares of the media and communications market. We should also be alert to their impact on smaller regional, national and local media. We need to update our critique and resistance to media monopolies since they are antithetical to democratic discourse. Resistance needs to come from strengthening the minds of our young and old alike so that they can discern through various levels of media savvy.

6. A reality that feminists have had to contend with around the question of sexually exploitative imagery of women in the media is that sometimes, those who protest the impact of globalised media systems and the overwhelming influx of cultural content from the West tend to be the most rabid nationalistic, jingoistic or religious fundamentalists. We need to resist knee-jerk reactions and most of all, resist at all levels any unholy alliance with right-wing forces that take up positions that seem progressive on some issues, but are completely conservative around others, including women’s reproductive rights and the rights of sexual minorities. Our responses to globalised media and communications need to be far more nuanced and deliberate.

Susanna George is the executive director of Isis International-Manila.

IT in India: Social Revolution or Approaching Implosion?

This article, written by Kristina Gaerlan, is based on Kalyani Menon-Sen’s panel presentation on Globlalised media and ICT systems and structures organised by Isis International-Manila during the World Summit on the Information Society held last 10 to 12 December 2003 in Geneva, Switzerland.

JAGORI (which means “wake up, woman”) was started by a group of seven feminists (six women and one man!) in 1984, and is a women’s resource, communication and documentation centre. Our mandate is to meet the information needs of Indian women’s movements, and help rural women and their organisations to link up with larger debates and issues at the national level. In the last twenty years of our work, we have been able to build a network of feminist activists (or activist feminists), particularly in the rural areas in the North Indian states where patriarchy operates in a strongly feudal context and where gender oppression and women’s subjugation take brutal and very material forms that are not very different from those prevailing in colonial times.

Our primary constituency is rural poor women. These are women surviving on the edge of India, constantly falling off the edge of the ‘development’ map delineated by policy-makers and politicians, struggling to retain a precarious foothold on work and survival. In trying to become an information bridge for grassroots women, our major challenge is the huge numbers we have to reach, and our very limited resources. We have to work with forms and technologies of communication that will be accessible to women for whom even the basic technology of reading and writing is out of reach.

Over the last twenty years, we have used a variety of media. We started with songs—a very successful vehicle for mobilisation. We have produced several music cassettes. We have also produced posters, pamphlets, newsletters, booklets, TV spots, video documentaries, as well as community theatre. In the process, we have also honed our skills in making documentation a political activity.

The act of putting something down in writing is an intensely political act—it can bring a woman’s life and mind out from her private silences, into the public domain where it cannot be ignored by others. Our work has helped to smash the silence around forbidden issues such as violence, child sexual abuse, sexuality and mental illness. Most recently, we have also had to confront the painful issue of sexual harassment and exploitation within NGOs. Throughout, we have used documentation as an act of giving women a voice, of recognising and affirming agency, of enabling them to speak the violation and name the violator.

The Politics of Information
Today, India is one of the global nodes of the ‘IT Revolution’ and a large number of well-meaning agencies are frantically trying to bridge the “Digital Divide”, or the gap that keeps women from accessing information and information technologies. But for the women JAGORI works with, this is not a new situation—the situation of drowning in information that is of no use to them is a familiar element of their reality. In fact, information is central to the maintenance of the ‘natural order’ in patriarchal societies. Information and knowledge have always been used as tools of domination and subjugation, as means of consolidating and strengthening feudal oppression, caste discrimination and women’s subjugation. Half the women in India do not have access to even the most basic of information technologies—reading and writing. Thus, much of the information that is vital to women’s lives is coded in ways that make it inaccessible to them—that make it impossible for them to identify and challenge the roots of their subordination. This is the “information gap” that women have always had to contend with.

The situation of women in the Information Age is therefore no more than an update of an old story. While this statement may sound unnecessarily cynical at first glance, it is borne out by many of the documentations of “best practice” in taking IT to the grassroots in India, which once again represent women as objects and passive targets of development. The most successful experiments—and there is no denying that these are genuinely impressive—are those where Electronic Information Centres have been set up at the village level in some of India’s most remote and deprived areas. These centres are often run by young women. Yet, the menu of information that is available for access gives the game away. While it is possible to download weather forecasts and the latest market prices of agricultural commodities, sometimes even the bio-data of prospective brides and grooms (sorted carefully by caste!), there is a notable absence of information on the legal protection available to women facing domestic violence, on inheritance rights, on Constitutional guarantees regarding women’s rights, on the nearest certified abortion centre. It is obvious that despite the rhetoric of “empowerment” that these documents are peppered with, this is very much development as usual dictated by considerations of efficiency rather than by any vision of social transformation.

Information and communication technology (ICT) is about poverty as much as it is about development. The ICT Revolution in India is inextricably linked to the way in which the global economy is taking shape. In a world where capital, technologies and profits move ever more freely across borders, the Internet provides a fast, cheap and efficient way of manufacturing “knowledge products” in locations where labour costs can be cut to the bone, and transferring them back to locations where the highest profits can be guaranteed. The strategy is no different from the logic that enabled colonial powers to exploit the populations of colonised countries—for instance, millions of workers in the textile industry in South East Asia were engaged in such “remote work” in the 18th Century!

The development of technologies that have enabled services to be outsourced to countries where wages are low and labour laws less restrictive has allowed Indian IT companies to build huge empires and claim the credit for an industrial revival. However, once the rosy clouds of huge initial profits have dispersed, it is increasingly obvious that multi-national corporations (MNCs) see Indian IT firms not so much as a source of high-end IT products, but as suppliers of low-end “IT coolies”—cheap and efficient workers who will provide quick-fix solutions to the small nitty-gritty problems that crop up every day in the course of their global operations.

The IT Worker—Privileges and Pay-offs
The average IT professional in India is male, a graduate of one of our respected technology schools, and a strong candidate for recruitment by Microsoft or any of the global IT conglomerates. These—the finest IT brains in the world, according to many—spend their time working at about 10 percent of their intellectual capacities but earning salaries equivalent to 300 times the minimum wage and living in gated communities insulated from the uncomfortable reality of an economy where, despite the bouncy energy of the stock market, inequalities and injustice are visibly increasing. Whatever one may say about their exploitation by the global economy, there is no denying that these are among the most privileged section of professionals in the country.

At the other end of the spectrum from the IT professional is the worker in the “Business Process Outsourcing” segment of the IT sector. Here, the workers are mainly women who fall into two broad categories with very different profiles.

The first category is the home-based IT worker in the unorganised sector—like all home-based workers, usually a married woman with children, who has some basic marketable skills (in this case, typing) but finds it impossible to get and keep a regular job that also allows her to manage her domestic workload. This category of women is involved in tasks such as medical and legal transcription or maintenance of daily accounts, for small clients—individuals or small businesses in Northern countries. These women fall into the same pattern (albeit a different and more privileged socio-economic profile) as all other home-based women workers in the unorganised sector—they continue with exhausting and mind-deadening work with irregular payments and less than optimal wages because it is the only alternative available and does not threaten the ‘stability’ of their traditional roles. The average earnings of women in such work looks far less enticing when one deducts the investments they make—buying a computer, paying for electricity and internet connectivity, frequently staying up all night to meet deadlines. Added to this is the insecurity of employment—contracts are extremely informal and do not conform to either Indian or U.S. laws—there are no easy legal remedies if payment is denied by the client.

The second category of “IT women” is much larger and more visible than the first. These are young women working in call centres. These workers—often very young girls from middle-class homes—earn far more than their peers in other sectors and lead apparently privileged lives. They are transported to and from work in air-conditioned vans. Their workplaces are climate controlled and attractively decorated, with piped music providing a soothing background. Food and drink is on the house— call centres constitute a large chunk of the clientele for Pizza Hut outlets and ice-cream parlours in their vicinity. Employees and employers are all young people and there are opportunities for socialisation between shifts.

This might seem like every young girl’s idea of heaven. Yet, under the surface of this happy scenario, is a situation of exploitation that should cause serious concern to all those who speak of workers’ rights.

“Call Centre Girls”: The Dumbing Down of a Generation
In India today, thousands of young women are learning to talk with an American accent so that they do not give themselves away to the harried Colorado housewife calling to report a malfunctioning washing machine and who has no idea that her call is being answered from the opposite side of the world. Call centre work does not require any high-end technological skills. It is mind-numbing and de-skilling—the knowledge and skills acquired in school and college are inapplicable here. The work itself is boring but stressful, and girls are expected to retain their composure and patience even in the face of verbal assaults by irate customers.

The necessity of matching the time-schedules in the U.S. means that working hours are completely upside-down. There are three shifts of eight hours each—midnight to 8 am, 8 am to 4 pm and 4 pm to midnight again. The girls change shifts every two weeks, taking a day off at each change. There are no holidays—call centres in Delhi are open round the clock even on national holidays. “Call Centre Girls” have no social life—indeed, they are hardly able to exchange more than a few words with their families, far less spend time with friends on working days. On days off, most of them do not even read the newspaper or watch anything more than mindless programmes on TV. Many of them show symptoms of bipolar disorder with going to work each day as the “high”—when they are at home, they are listless, bad-tempered and depressed. Their usual activity on an off day is “hanging out” at one of the shopping malls that are a new but increasingly familiar feature of the Indian urban landscape. Not surprisingly, almost all call centre workers are single women living with their parents. Turnover is high—most workers leave the job when they get married—unless, of course, they marry a colleague on the same shift!

In the Indian context, IT is creating a generation of stunted women who do not see beyond their immediate privilege—who do not realise that the flow of outsourced work will slow to a trickle and may then grind to a complete halt in the next few years. The backlash from a restive labour force in the U.S., and the entry of players such as China who can provide even cheaper labour, are both very real threats.

Once the Chinese workforce breaks the English language barrier, the Indian IT revolution will begin to implode. The worst affected will be young women, who will be the first to be thrown out of their jobs. They will also be the least equipped to deal with this situation since they will not have the skills to command any other kind of work. Call Centre girls today lack any personal or professional networks, and most have very little understanding of the larger forces that are shaping their lives. Like other dispossessed women workers, they will be forced to either quit the labour market or become easy prey for exploitative employers.

An additional problem in the case of women workers in the IT sector is their isolation from labour movements. For the average trade union, it is difficult to see IT women as exploited in any way—they are earning more, they are educated, and they come from middle-class households that provide back-up services to allow them to hop from job to job if they choose.

The Challenge for Feminists
India’s IT revolution provides yet another demonstration of the fact that technology is neither value-free, nor value-neutral. Embedded in the ICTs are values that reflect the most brutal aspects of both patriarchy and capitalism. The challenge for feminists is therefore not only to devise and propagate information technologies that women can shape and control, but also to do this in ways that engage and interrogate the mainstream as well. We have many questions. Are there feminist ways of using IT and communication technology that can subvert its inherently exploitative message? How can we use the Internet and e-learning technologies to transfer IT know-how to women with limited technological and reading skills while also drawing them into the women’s movement? How can we use and influence mainstream television, characterised as it is in India today by a seductive cocktail of consumerism, religion and glamorised oppression?

We recognise the need to re-evaluate our own theorisation of documentation. Articulating our own experience in a form that allows others to understand and empathise with it is the first step to unravelling oppression. Today however, we are faced with a situation where our documentation of women’s traditional knowledge may actually have rendered them more vulnerable to exploitation by global commercial interests. For instance, the easy access, via the internet, to health lore has helped put IPR fences around our herbs, healing technologies and traditional remedies. The IT Revolution is forcing upon us questions feminists never thought to ask. Where earlier, we refused to accept that anyone could own knowledge, today we ask: How can we document experience, knowledge and skills in ways that we can share among ourselves, but are not accessible to those who oppress us? The answers to these questions will, we hope, lead us into the real IT Revolution—one that will put into women’s hands, the means to change their own place in the world.

Kalyani Menon-Sen works with Jagori, a feminist documentation centre in India. Jagori describes itself thus: “At the very least we are a women’s documentation centre, and at the very best, we are at the cutting edge of feminist theory.”

When Technology, Media and Globalisation Conspire: Old Threats, New Prospects

by Anita Gurumurthy

This paper was presented during the panel on globalised media and ICT systems and structures and their interrelationship with fundamentalism and militarism organised by Isis International-Manila during the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India in January 2004.

Globalisation Through a Feminist Lens
Feminist frameworks are critical to the discourse of globalisation because these explore how patriarchies combine with the capitalist project. Feminist scholarship has delineated how the strategies of transnational capital draw upon indigenous social hierarchies and how women’s work is defined in terms of gender, race and caste.1

A feminist lens also helps us understand locational experiences. The connections between the experiential and the institutional processes of globalisation, and the focus on localised questions of experience, culture, history and identity, feminists point out, are not just about the impact of globalisation, but about what constitutes globalisation.

The global economy supported by information communication technologies (ICTs) stands on the intersection of the crumbling proletariat of the North and the off-shore proletariat of the South. In recent years, the feminised end of the Information Technology (IT) industry received considerable academic attention. We know now, for example, that the IT sector is not exempt from labour market segmentation along gender, caste and class lines. Women comprise a relatively small proportion of the aggregate workforce in the software sector, and those who get the jobs are the educated urban women. Even as some make it to the white-collared alleys of the industry, most seem to be in not-so-skilled jobs that echo the images of employment at the margins such as the low-skilled piece-workers in the production chain. The IT industry takes women’s domestic labour for granted and is embedded in the dependable social relations of gender. In the meanwhile, Third World governments compete with one another to attract the outsourcing business; their IT policies are short-sighted and over-eager, committing to prepare the youth for employment in ‘sunrise industries’ but silent on workers’ rights and on using IT for the capacity-building of future generations.

The literature of globalisation has established the feminisation of labour, the conditions of female labour, its flexibilisation and casualisation as main features of the new international division of labour. Particularly in the IT sector, if the workplace was examined from a gendered lens, the pertinent questions would be: Who are the women who can aspire to become “knowledge workers”? How are labour rights to be safeguarded when the home fuses into the workplace? How real is the much-celebrated mobility and flexibility that women in the IT sector supposedly enjoy? How do two-earner households organise reproductive work? Whose labour do these households depend on when they buy domestic services?

The Politics of Geography
The information economy raises fundamental questions about the politics of geography, time, gender, race and caste. Saskia Sassen notes the contradiction between the nature and effect of ICTs: the spatial dispersal of economic activity made possible by ICTs contributes to an expansion of central functions.2 Global communication can be made possible only with material conditions that support it. National and global markets, as well as globally integrated organisations, require central places with vast physical infrastructure where the work of globalisation gets done. Although certain sectors, like the unorganised sector appear to have little connection to an urban economy dominated by finance and services, they in fact fulfil a series of functions integral to that economy. In the day-to-day work of the finance-dominated services complex, a large share of the jobs involved are lowly paid and manual, many held by women and immigrants. Thus, ICT-assisted globalisation counts on a labour-market segmentation along gender and racial lines.

The emerging landscape of global cities exposes glaring contradictions. Even though the services sector may account for only a fraction of a city’s economy, it imposes itself on the larger economy.3 Cities such as Bangalore or Bangkok or Mexico City, as newer constituents of the global information economy are not any different from New York, London, Tokyo, and Paris in the new geographies of centrality. In any of these global cities, the presence of a critical mass of firms with extremely high profit-making capabilities contributes to the pressure on prices of commercial space, industrial services, and other business needs, thereby making survival for the smaller firms precarious.

Scattered Yet Connected Hegemonies
Critiques of globalisation point to how survival sex and entertainment work suggest the feminisation of survival. The household, state and global policies interlock to exploit women’s labour and their bodies. Debt is a unifying theme—at the household level, women are pushed by poverty and indebtedness into survival sex and at another level, nation states in Asia look at marketing women’s bodies as routes for debt-servicing. Transnational feminist perspectives look at cross-cultural relations of race, gender and class, and provide an analysis of how global economic institutions, nation-states, patriarchal households and traditional structures that are seemingly scattered, link up to support women’s exploitation.

And even as trafficking in women and children has assumed alarming proportions, and we are just about beginning to consolidate our strategies to address challenges, we are having to deal with the normalisation of sexual exploitation of and violence against women and children on the Internet. The global entertainment industry, poised on the power of new ICTs, is a force to reckon with, but a force beyond the grasp of law and regulation.

Pimps and criminal syndicates violate laws prohibiting sexual exploitation and violence with impunity, by locating their servers in host countries with less restrictive laws, to avoid regulation. The new technologies have thus enabled the creation of online communities free from community interference or standards where any and every type of sexual violence goes and where misogyny is the norm.4

The Commodification of Knowledge
The intellectual property regime has commodified social knowledge, and in the global market, only certain forms of knowledge are recognised.

A large majority of the poor and the dalits in South Asia have always lived within indigenous social hierarchies that have undervalued their knowledge. Their access to new knowledge and information has always been stifled. In highly stratified contexts, the marginalised have had to manage their survival. The patenting regime and the corporate control of agriculture effectively obliterate the last link of the poor to survival. Alongside unimaginable environmental damage are stories of the suicide of poor farmers and their invisible widows.

The latest is that the international scientific community, with assistance from Rockefeller Foundation and McKnight Foundation, is floating the idea of a Public Sector Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture (PIPRA) to support public sector research. This initiative, it has been argued, is yet another charity that does nothing to address the threat biotechnology patents pose to research in future, nor is it concerned with the Third World’s charges of biopiracy. PIPRA is aimed at pushing agricultural technology that has met public opposition in the developed countries.

In the loss of livelihoods and market control of agriculture is yet another story of scattered yet connected hegemonies.

The Challenge of Fundamentalism
Globalisation has facilitated the global movement of material resources. Money laundering and the movement of arms have never been as easy. For fundamentalism, the new economy has provided easy networking and collaboration opportunities.

At the national level, the dynamic has been different. Socialist feminists in India point to how the government’s surrender of sovereignty to international aid institutions coincides with the reconstruction of nationalism along chauvinistic religious lines.5 A state incapable of addressing survival issues of the poor will be only too eager to offer the marginalised quick routes to ‘empowerment’ through the Hindutva ideology. Dalits who converted to Christianity are being converted back as Hindus in a virulent ideological attack against minority religions under propaganda packaged as ghar-vapasi (home-coming). Dalits and tribals/adivasis are being roped in to fight Muslims with the aid of modern ITs like CDROMS. 6 Thus, in India, traditional media like printed literature are being replaced by technologies that cross barriers of literacy.

Identity politics and cooptation of the marginalised provide a useful route to deflect attention from the failure of the nation-state. Growing inequities characterised by increasing rural indebtedness, landlessness, dismantling of food security, increase in child labour and casualisation of work, as well as loss of work due to mechanisation, are compounded by the rise of communal violence.

The overtly homogenising trend of globalisation and the global media has also created a backlash in the reassertion of identities. The global has subsumed the local, and fundamentalist forces have sought to reinterpret culture, invariably through the control of women’s spaces.

While the advances in ICTs have shrunk distances, these have not necessarily brought people together. Highly individualised and parochial niches, combined with the accent on homogenisation, have lowered the threshold for diversity. South Asia, home to about 45 percent of the world’s poor, is within the reach of at least 50 broadcast satellites. It is estimated that by 2007, there will be 550 million viewers in South Asia, with half of them hooked on to cable TV and able to watch 350 channels.

The emancipatory potential of the new media seems to support the increasing multiversity of identity politics. The spectrum of communication channels in South Asia—regional, communal and linguistic—is mind-boggling. Against the social landscape of South Asia, which reveals religious, linguistic and ethnic faultlines, these communication channels pose a huge threat to social capital and the legitimacy of nation states.

This is a serious problem for feminists. The question is whether this access to global information channels could result in real empowerment and lead to significant improvements in the quality of life, or if it will only further lower the diversity threshold. How can feminist frameworks offer alternatives that respect plurality but uphold women’s autonomy?

Militarism in the Context of Globalised Media and ICTs
The unabashed use of militarism by the U.S. is part of its imperialist and neo-liberal agenda. Militarism is an agent of the political project of globalisation and is consolidated by the centralised power of the new ICTs. The “shock and awe” strategy in Iraq rode on the marvels of ICT-assisted precision bombing, marking the glamorisation of the annihilation of life, destruction of the environment and razing of national sovereignty. Aid and trade benefits are dangled as baits for use of air and land space for military operations. Global militarism is crafted jointly by new weapon supports, satellite systems, the global media and the use of economic clout.

In war-affected countries of the South, women have to endure not merely the pains of reconstruction but the challenge of fundamentalist revivalism propped up as the fitting rejoinder to Western and U.S.-led militarism.7 The over-valorisation of cultural identities has trampled Asian women’s human rights not only in their home-countries but also where they are living as migrants or refugees.8

Feminist Perspectives of an Alternate ICT System
The primary challenge is the paradox inherent in the global ICT system—the absence of an ethical framework vis-à-vis the promise of empowering, even subversive, opportunities.

The skewed ownership of global media is a fundamental threat. Globally, media ownership reflects supranational ownership patterns and mega-mergers with other worldwide businesses. The monopoly of Microsoft illustrates the tremendous challenge to democratise software architecture and ownership. Recent attempts in the U.S. to introduce legislation on government’s adoption of open-source software were scuttled by Microsoft-funded lobbyists. So, whither the promise? What kind of ICT system will help realise the goals of social transformation?

At the global level:

• We need to democratise the information sphere including ownership, control and use
• Knowledge from the global South needs to be accorded its legitimate place in the global information society architecture.
• The idea of a global commons needs to be kept alive as a bulwark against the appropriation of public space by commercial/sectarian interests.
• There is a need to question the deployment of ICTs as a tool to promote neo-liberal agenda in developing countries. E-governance is now being packaged as a tool for greater efficiency but the dimensions of accountability and equity of e-governance are seldom discussed.

At the local level:

• ICTs need to be appropriated for the architecture of local commons, the democratic bottom-up face of the global commons. Women need to spearhead the construction of local commons.9
• ICT design must be informed by local contexts and the needs of marginalised women.
• ICT initiatives need to address both economic and socio-political empowerment of women. In this sense, they have to have transformatory potential.
• ICTs must be used to restore plurality and reinvigorate social linkages in the South.

The multiple tasks for civil society have just begun to crystallize. The non-negotiable touchstone to these tasks is feminist frameworks.

Anita Gurumurthy is a founder member of IT for Change, an NGO in India that seeks to influence the information societies debate through research and action. Anita’s core interests have included research and writing on development with a Southern perspective, with specific focus on areas such as gender, health, globalisation, and information and communications technologies.

Anita acknowledges Gopakumar Krishnan and Parminder Jeet Singh for their substantive contributions to this article.

Footnotes
1 Sharmila Rege, “More Than Just Tacking Women on to the Macropicture: Feminist Contributions to Globalisation Discourses,” Economic and Political Weekly, October 25, 2003, pp. 4555-63.
2 Saskia Sassen, “Place and Work in the Global Information Economy,” Metropolis: First International Conference, Milan, Italy, 1997.
3 Often missed is that the contribution of the new economy in countries like India is marginal. Optimistic predictions notwithstanding, in India, the IT sector’s output to GDP stood at 3 percent in 2001-02. The rapid growth rates recorded are from small bases, and the impact of the IT sector on employment-generating growth is also uncertain.
4 “The Internet and the Sex industry”. From the website of Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
5 The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a national political party promoting a chauvinistic notion of Hindu religion referred to as the Hindutva ideology, has led this ideological campaign in the tribal dominated state of Chattisgarh.
6 The BJP used CDROMs (multimedia CDs with audio and video features) during the campaign in the recent elections in Chattisgarh state. The BJP replaced the Congress party after the elections.
7 Fundamentalism also creates and defines its own genre of militarism built upon exaggerated perceptions of threat to national culture and security. The Taliban state was built on such premises, as was the nuclear bomb in India by the BJP, the ruling party.
8 See Gigi Francisco, “A Deafening Silence on Women’s Human Rights,” DAWN Informs, November 2003.
9 Gopakumar Krishnan and Gurumurthy Kasinathan, “Local Commons—A Bridge across the Digital Divide,” 2003, <http://www.ITforChange.net/resources>.

False and Real Differences: Alternative and Mainstream Media in Latin America

This article, written by Kristina Gaerlan, is based on María Suárez Toro and Margaret Thompson panel presentation on Globlalised media and ICT systems and structures organised by Isis International-Manila during the World Summit on the Information Society held last 10 to 12 December 2003 in Geneva, Switzerland.

At first glance, an invitation to speak on behalf of FIRE in Costa Rica, about the intersectionality of militarisation, fundamentalism and global communication would seem ironic. First, because Costa Rica is one of two countries in the world that has no army. Secondly, it is one of a few countries in the world where telecommunications is still an efficiently run nationalised enterprise, providing electrical power and telecommunication services to 97 percent of the population at the lowest prices in Latin America. The country also continues to fund and oversee basic social services. In addition, FIRE is located in a country where the fundamentalist Catholic Church owned and operated a multi-million dollar radio station that broadcast to the entire population, but the Church decided to close this down. Thus Costa Rica represents a unique setting indeed, in a world were militarism, fundamentalism and corporate communications are on the rise.

The bad news is that although Costa Rica has no army, the United States asked permission from the government to establish a police training school that would probably substitute the School of the Americas and eventually become a government military school, much like the situation in Puerto Rico where a military school is not only about the school itself, but also about the kinds of military and political control needed to protect the school.

Another item of bad news is that as mentioned previously, while telecommunications is a public service in Costa Rica, the U.S. administration has lobbied strongly for privatisation of these services as a prerequisite for the free trade agreement now being negotiated in Central America. Less than two years ago, 100,000 people took to the streets to protest this privatisation project, but now the pressure comes from elsewhere.

The other bad news is that the closure of the Catholic fundamentalist radio station was triggered by a scandal involving money laundering, fiscal fraud, and possibly even child sexual abuse by the fundamentalist priest who was in charge of it. The church closed the station so he could remain in impunity. The community radio journalist who exposed the scandal involving this priest was assassinated, and the crime remains unsolved, although many have strong suspicions of who might be behind it.

An army-less Costa Rica where telecommunications is a public service is a “species in extinction” in today’s world. And proponents of neo-liberal globalisation seem poised for the final blow, taking advantage of this intersection between militarism, fundamentalism and globalisation.

As the country undergoes these changes, the media in Costa Rica play a critical part in the impact of this intersectionality. Their part involves silencing of the opposition, serving as a platform for supporters of privatisation, and transformation of communication into a business rather than a platform for communication as a human right. Civil Society complains that it is harder for social organisations to get their voice in media. Thus, they create their own.

Alternative Media’s Potential
In light of the way that mainstream media coverage serves primarily to support neo-liberal globalisation, alternative and community media play an increasingly important role in giving a voice to ordinary people who are struggling to keep alive the “species in extinction” such as those in Costa Rica so that people can know about such struggles in the midst of a homogenising neo-liberal policy worldwide.

One such venue among many in Costa Rica is FIRE­—Feminist International Radio Endeavour/Radio Feminista. As an alternative media outlet, FIRE has made use of interactive ICTs (information and communication technologies) to reach a global audience, involving live broadcasts through the internet and multimedia productions. Audience members may communicate with producers during broadcasts in a chat room on the FIRE website, as well as via e-mail, and the conventional telephone and fax.

FIRE does live webcasts on special occasions, including international events such as the World Summit on the Information Society and every UN conference since 1991, as well as the World Social Forums in Puerto Alegre, Brazil in 2001, 2002 and 2003, and annual broadcasts on November 25th for the International Day Against Violence Towards Women. Likewise FIRE broadcasts from numerous regional and local events, including the IX Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encuentro and the Indigenous Women’s Continental Summit in Mexico in 2002. And, because all the broadcasts and information are archived, the website may be visited anytime for special information on certain topics.

To assess the impact of FIRE’s diverse and interactive approach using ICTs for its media activities the organisation is collaborating on a three-year multi-method research project which is also designed to better understand the FIRE audience. Methods include a quantitative analysis of webpage statistics of hits and visits since the group’s first Internet broadcast in 1998; and an Internet survey in English and Spanish sent via e-mail to individuals around the world who had written FIRE, which was also posted on the website. A qualitative analysis of letters received from all over the world—whether these were in Spanish or English—was also performed, as well as case studies of selected live web transmissions by FIRE.

The survey was filled out by audience members of FIRE from 34 different countries, most of whom are women, although there have been many male listeners of FIRE since it first began broadcasting in 1991 on shortwave, and later on Internet in 1998.

The website statistics indicated an enormous increase in the number of visits and hits between 1998 and 2002, confirming the power of the Internet. On average, people visit the website on average about 1-2 times every two months, with one-fourth visiting at least once a month.

The typical listener is 40 to 49 years old—slightly older than the average Internet audience. FIRE has a generally educated audience, with one-third having some college education, and one-half, graduate school. Most of the respondents were journalists, communication practitioners, professors or lawyers.

Important Roles  
Beyond the audience profile, however, the significance of the study was that it identified different potential roles for alternative media groups like FIRE as a result of their interactive communication with listeners: (1) as a bridge, (2) as a connector, and (3) as a multiplier and amplifier.

Firstly, FIRE is a bridge between the women’s movement and the audience. One of the group’s goals is to connect voices, technologies and actions, which requires active involvement in the women’s movement at the local, regional and international levels. For the survey question “Why visit the FIRE webpage?” the most popular responses were: (1) to hear the voices of women, (2) to hear perspectives different from those found in mainstream media, and (3) because it’s feminist and/or progressive. People look to FIRE for information on feminism, women’s movements and progressive activities or actions.

Secondly, FIRE serves as a connector between and among social and political movements, including the women’s movements. Another one of the most popular reasons for visiting the FIRE webpage is that it offers alternative proposals and strategies to these different movements. This response indicates that FIRE provides its audience not only a discussion of the problems and challenges facing women but also insights into the women’s specific suggestions on what needs to be done.

Thirdly, FIRE’s role as a multiplier and amplifier is evident in the remarkable increase in the visits and hits on its website when it began broadcasting via the Internet. But FIRE recognises that most of the world is not yet online, so the group taps into the immediacy of community radio all over the world through different organisations such as AMARC (World Association of Community Broadcasters). Community radio is connected to the webpage during broadcasts, and can also download programmes from the archives and rebroadcast these.

It should be noted though that despite FIRE’s use of modern ICTs, its broadcasts and distribution of its information remain highly interpersonal, with about 37 percent of the study’s respondents learning about these from someone else.

Alternative and Mainstream Distinctions
Alternative media have made creative use of modern ICTs—to the extent that resources permit—to promote content attuned to the needs and experiences of the people. In Costa Rica, one of the tasks of alternative media is to counteract the impending blow to our political system based on nation-state provided social services.

And mainstream journalists in the region are looking to alternative media for answers to their own work and responsibilities in giving a voice to people. For example, a recent congress of mainstream journalists in the region, the IX Congress of the Latin American Federation of Journalists (FELAP in 2003 stated that “technological, cultural and informational gap has deepened in the last decades, in an almost irreversible way, and the democratic flow of information and the quest for truth is urgent.” They also said that “Counterhegemonic communication is an imperative today: to alter, bring a counterpoint, and create an equilibrium. Community and alternative media is crucial to this.”

This recognition of alternative media is an especially significant development because perhaps for the first time, practitioners of alternative media have an opportunity to form alliances with the mainstream journalists who now realise they cannot democratise media alone.

Another major accomplishment is a recent resolution within social movements at the World Social Forums, calling for support of alternative media and communication within their organisations in resisting neo-liberal globalisation.

For FIRE, applying a human rights framework to communication is crucial because it goes beyond providing information and communication by also tackling the question of people’s access and having a voice in media, and also the right to publish. One concept related to the human rights framework and communication that should be further clarified is how people delegate that right to journalists and media.
The use of the verb “to delegate” is important as it clarifies the relationship of media to the people. Having a voice and publishing in media are a delegated right, therefore media has the responsibility to respond to what people want and to give them voice.

But one right and responsibility that cannot be delegated, but needs to be undertaken by all, is the need to save our “species in extinction” so that corporate globalisation, fundamentalisms and militarism cannot deal the final blow.

Maria Suárez Toro, a Puerto Rican and Costa Rican feminist journalist and professor of communications, is with Feminist International Radio Endeavour, more popularly known as FIRE, which has been innovating in web-streaming of radio for years.

Margaret Thompson an associate professor in the Department of Mass Communications and Journalism Studies at the University of Denver, and teaches international communication. She has coordinated a special study to determine FIRE’s role in the context of the challenges that alternative media in Latin America face amid the pressure of privatisation, militarisation and globalisation in the region.

Note: This was presented by FIRE at WSIS in December, 2003. Since that time and when this was published in mid-2004, much has happened with regards to the examples of communications, fundamentalisms and militarization in Costa Rica. What follows is an update by María Suárez Toro.

Update on the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA)

• On 25 January 2004, the U.S. Trade Representative Office (USTR) and Costa Rican representatives announced that, after two additional rounds of intense negotiations that were held this month, Costa Rica was ready to join the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Costa Rica had been the sole Central American country to leave the official CAFTA negotiations in December 2003 without agreeing to the CAFTA, saying that it needed more time to work out some of the sensitive issues in the agreement which included the telecommunications and insurance sectors and various agriculture and textile goods. In order to reach an agreement, Costa Rica had to abandon its earlier hard-line position against opening up its telecommunications sector. The country agreed to the gradual opening of its telecommunications market in three sectors: private network, internet, and wireless services. It is expected that private network services and internet services will be opened by 2006, by which time the country must create a regulatory framework. Wireless services will be liberalised the following year. Costa Rica did, however, manage to hold firm in not opening up mainland telephone services to competition. The U.S., yielding to demands for slower liberalisation of Costa Rica’s state monopoly on insurance, has agreed that country’s insurance market will be opened by 1 January 2008, with the remainder to open by 1 January 2011. (Farah Nageer, Center of Concern, IGTN Secretariat)
• Following the announcement that Costa Rica had signed the CAFTA, trade union and civil society representatives from the country reaffirmed their commitment to publicly oppose the agreement. Fabio Chaves, a union leader for a group of employees of the Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICU), the state telecommunications enterprise, has said that they will now focus their efforts on street protests. Chaves stated that “liberalising the telecoms market would only benefit the big transnational companies in Latin America, to the detriment of consumers.” (Mora, J. E., “Costa Rican Activists Pledge to Keep up Strike against Trade Deal,” South-North Development Monitor, January 30, 2004)
• In 31 June 2004, more than 12,000 people, representing civil society, marched through the streets of the capital city of San José, demanding their government not to sign the free trade agreements.

Update on the priest involved in the radio scandal

• In December 2003, the controversial priest, Father Minor Calvo Aguilar, was put in prison in Costa Rica, arrested by judicial officials for being the principal planner in the murder of journalist Parmemio Medina Pérez, who was assassinated in July of 2001.

Update about the International Law Enforcement Academy of the Americas

• In 6 June 2003, the United States and Costa Rica had signed an agreement to create an international law enforcement academy for the Americas. The academy was to be located in the Costa Rican capital of San Jose. Its stated objective was to train police officers throughout the Americas to handle transnational crime issues, such as drug trafficking, money laundering, sexual exploitation of children, and violence against women. The school would have been ran by the U.S. State, Treasury and Justice Department, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. According to Costa Rican law, the agreement would have to be approved by the Costa Rican legislature before going to effect.
• Ever since the agreement was signed and people began to know about it, numerous civil protests began to emerge in the country, stating that a country with no army could not host such a school.
• Legislators in a special parliamentary commission established to address such issues began to listen to their constituencies, thus deciding to write a letter to the U.S. Administration requesting clarification as to the fact that the school would never become a military institution.
• Since a response to such a request never came, the project was archived for good.