The first major spatial change of the twentieth century is represented by urban expansion, the fastest pace which took place in the so-called Third World countries. While one of the most obvious features corresponding to the concentration of the population is even greater increase in area occupied by cities, which grow continuously. Suffice it to recall that our current urbanization rate is 85% and is expected to reach 88% by 2025.
This expansion, by altering its form, changed the notion of city as a result of the continuity of the urban fabric can not recognize boundaries clearly defined between them. This is the case in our country, large conurbations (Buenos Aires, La Plata, Rosario) in the city and its satellite towns axis they become a single urban conglomerate, with its own characteristics and distinctive.
The second change is represented by the expansion of the mass movement, communication and information. While the expansion of the mass movement has done that today people can move from one place to another as a century ago was unthinkable, these trips are becoming less necessary. The responsibility is to blame the media have created conditions of instantaneous those who have returned many of these transfers perfectly useless. For years now there are companies for which a coordination office is simple enough, and a growing number of educational institutions that channel much of their work through the virtual classroom, Internet or email.
often compared the digital technology revolution with the advent of printing. Since Aristotle, Socrates and Plato to the present, the main change was the printed word: the writing, books, lecture, discussion. Gutenberg's printing press, which transformed the mid-fifteenth century the art of reproduction of texts and production of books but without changing its essential structures, changed our ability to move information and knowledge across time and space.
is clear that we are currently facing a major revolution. Information technologies and communication not only present a new leap in how we can move and share information and knowledge. With the display change was radical, as are the methods for organizing, structuring and writing consultation which have been modified.
The electronic text revolution was, in principle, a revolution in reading: is read linearly but also in deep inside. Led to new ways of reading and writing new applications for which new techniques are required intellectuals. The electronic text allows the reader to record it, copy it, dismember, reorder, becoming an original co-author. It also allows you to override distance and access virtually any book anywhere. Something like the dream of the Library of Alexandria, and at home.
This reading revolution has been added also a new revolution: the production of materials. Today not require skills or complex specifically developed to be the producer of a web page, which are made available to public the work done by yourself, or those produced by others with whom one identifies or over which it has something to say, or simply want to display.
But these revolutions are daughters of the revolution, the most important, was the partnership between information technology and communication: web networking, communications and mobile phones, storage devices, e-mail separately are not as powerful as together. Uniting, set up a new territory in which to develop new activities or activities otherwise old, a territory-mail in which information is produced and stored, it is shared and adjust, and organizations can be built as a virtual school or a virtual community to address issues related to health, care, environmental, educational or safety. This is only possible when you have the information technology and communication act together. And there is an electronic space in addition to other existing and is as real as the physical space.
are precisely those technologies that give them the necessary support to multiple communities to develop. In this case, when we speak of communities, not just think of a physical space, but primarily as a group of people who find something in common Whether you are in a physical space, scattered throughout the city, or across the globe. It is social networks and communities of interest, to which I refer in more detail when discussing the phenomenon of offshoring. The technological revolution is, appropriately, in the way these people use information technology and communication to meet, share and do things together.
This revolution requires us to reflect on its impact on the definition of public space. And can bring separate communities and unconnected, and can realize the dream of the Enlightenment, also can be left out of participation vast sectors of the population for which the technology is only the other toy inaccessible.
Indeed, technology can reproduce the logic of exclusion, digital exclusion, but can also be used to decrease. Incorporating this tool can help recreate solidarity, strengthen social ties and opening new forms of citizenship, or at least to carry on there.
Argentina, like many other countries, has invested large amounts of public money to build community telecenters, a place where the community can go and learn some skills. But most were failures, and could not sustained. And even where it did work, no lessons were learned to take them elsewhere.
The reasons must be sought, first, that the idea was poorly planned. Lacked a strategy that consisted not only in setting up a call center, but part of how we use it to develop the knowledge and learning in a community, not just an individual.
Paradoxically, in these same locations operated Internet cafes, Internet cafes, the well-known that not only work better, but in general are used by young people. Of course I used to upload information on their social networks (like Facebook) or pictures on his fotolog, play online send e-mails and chat more as entertainment and education.
Today the challenge is to open telecentres do think the community that the community understands that computers are not only used to store and retrieve information, but created a virtual space to do things together: for example, improving their health, schools, public services. Serve to promote the formation of social networks in which individuals and small communities are heard each other and exchange their experiences. That is, discuss problems and develop more Rugged democratic identities.
A third change was made from the so-called conquest of space, has lost its romantic connotations to become practical. In the era of profitability, the adventure would have been too expensive if it had not allowed the exploitation of space as an extension of the networking of the planet by launching into orbit of satellites for communication and observation.
According to anthropologist Marc Augé
[1] these changes in the arrangement of space that have been happening since the twentieth century tend to what is called offshoring. By relocating we understand some phenomenon in which the traditional association of the concepts of space and place has been broken, resulting in consideration of certain areas as non-places. Thus, together with its concept of relocation, enter the places not to characterize some of the new contemporary spaces that do not bear any mark of identity, there are no social skills, or are carriers of any story, so they are areas of policy and loneliness. This is the case of supermarkets, motorways, airports. But also includes under this name to all networks that broadcast the image instantly, voice and messages back and forth from Earth, we might say, following your reasoning, which in this case do constitute places, although without the support of physical space for the meeting. We could talk, more precisely, virtual places. Chat rooms, where they meet usually the same people, who are recognized and have established a relationship full of affection are a good example, as well as discussion forums, interest groups and social networks, virtual classroom .. .
sociologist Alain Touraine
[2] , meanwhile, says that in reality we live between two worlds. One, that of a globalized world economy, characterized by the features stated above. And compared to the other world, in which we seek identities that are becoming more defensive.
trying to protect us from the threats of globalization, anonymous and isolated us again, we ended up clinging to any group that allows us a sense of belonging, whether ethnic, religious, sexual, age, or neighborhood.
In Argentina, where traditionally the group joined the company total, this is a relatively new phenomenon, but whose birth we can not ignore. Maybe it's the only way to understand the outcrop of certain violent groups, the appearance of active forms of segregation and discrimination, tribal adolescents with characteristics distinct from each other and even their own names. Touraine
The conclusion to this warning, it becomes imperative that an effort to re-articulation of a social and cultural policy.
[1] Augé, Marc Spaces of the Future. 50 th Anniversary edition of the newspaper Clarin. 1,995.
[2] Touraine, Alain. Argentina in the Third Millennium. Metro Ed. 1,997
