Re: <nettime> radio b92 & more on wired mag.

[Bernardo Parrella <berny@well.com>]

Talking of Radio B92, Wired 5.04 (April 97) runs a story on "Belgrade: the
Internet Revolution" by David Bennahum, mostly based on his visit in Serbia
(and at Radio B92, Sezam Pro, etc.) in the last days of 96. Here are a few
quotes:

"Two day later, Milosevic allowed B92 to broadcast again, giving the
opposition an important symbolic victory, and inspiring the students to
start calling their struggle 'The Internet Revolution (...) The government
sees the Internet the same way it sees Radio B92, as preaching to the
converted. The look at who the audience is and  say, 'who cares?' Milan
Bozic explains...[but]...what we know for now is that 10,000 people out of
8 million have Net access in Serbia, and that in this country this number
appears to have tipped the system. There the democrats just may win"


In the same issue, the Netizen story ("Birth of a Digital Nation" by John
Katz) says that "the digital youngs are revolutionaries. Unlike the
clucking boomers, they are not talking revolution; they're making one.
(...) The Net is revolutionary in precisely those ways. It liberates
millions people to do things they couldn't do before." And so on, outlining
the "postpolitics of this nascent ideology, fuzzy and difficult to
define...[whose] members are not representative of the population as a
whole: they are richer, better educated, and disproportionately white."


Questions: are these two different groups of people fighting (for) the same
revolution? Is the Net a unifying factor in that sense? Can the
postpolitics of the so-called digital nation equate the Serbians' political
coscience and strenght achieved by a new access to information (B92,
websites, email)? Does such a global Netizen exist?



   -- bernardo


<berny@well.com>


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