It’s been a month since we returned from Seville, where we participated in the
Expanded Education
symposium, which constituted the bulk of the 11th edition of the
ZEMOS98 International Festival
. During these weeks we have not had many moments of tranquility, necessary to think in depth about what we experienced, however, and perhaps as the first assault of a more extensive and collective process, let these quick reflections go ahead.
The symposium, coordinated by the ZEMOS98 collective itself in collaboration with
Juan Freire
, proposed “reflecting on the idea of resignifying education so that it is not only limited to the academic-institutional sphere” focusing on “looking for new forms of education that incorporate and adapt to the social and communicational processes that the Internet has caused.“
Our contribution consisted of the presentation of the
Open-roulotte
project on the one hand (a presentation that you can listen to in full here) and on the other hand in an informal talk about
projecte3*
within the framework of the
Expanded Factory
workshop, coordinated by
FAAQ
.
The Expanded Factory was presented as a space for reflection and debate with the intention of creating links with social and cultural agents of the Sevillian context and with the ultimate intention of imagining and proposing educational spaces, tools and protocols that could be added to the alternative dynamics already existing in non-institutional spaces of Seville such as
La Fábrica de Sombreros
.
Due to the trajectory of the ZEMOS98 festival, as well as that of Juan Freire, a good part of the conferences and project presentations emphasized the use and application of digital tools to the educational context. Although Open-roulotte, as well as other of our projects, make use of open collaborative web tools such as wikis, our dissertation on this matter did not last more than a few seconds. We actually think that there is a certain misunderstanding surrounding this issue: it seems to us that the introduction of digital technologies, even if they are open source, does not ensure the creation of educational practices that are more democratic and in which knowledge is built collaboratively. As said Jesús Martín-Barbero during his conference, it is not at all about “filling the school with gadgets” (and by ‘gadgets’ we understand both hardware and software) it is, broadly speaking and at the risk of sounding grandiose, about examining what are the relationships and power flows that cross the space of education (both on the micro and daily scale of activity in the classroom, as well as on the macro scale of the school in relation to social, cultural and economic structures and processes, both local and global) in order to think and put into practice educational forms that involve a more equitable and fair distribution of that power (a word, ‘power’, to which, if we remember correctly, only Jesús Martín-Barbero himself made explicit reference.
Regarding this relationship between education and technology, it seems very important to us to keep in mind that education, in itself, is a technology (of subjectivity). Like all technology, education appears in a specific historical moment because the conditions that make it possible and at the same time require it exist. What seems necessary to us is to examine what are today the requirements and conditions of possibility for the ‘education’ technology, and to understand to which models of production and government they correspond and to which they could respond.
In truth, it seems to us that until now, what the open-source movement had to offer to the educational sphere was precisely an open and dehierarchized model of discourse production, in which learning is self-organized among peers, etc, etc. It is evident that it is necessary to keep in the public domain the knowledge that is generated from the educational sphere, especially that which is produced in Higher Education (let’s accept it, currently and unfortunately, no knowledge is produced from primary and secondary education) and even more so in these moments in which private enterprise is breaking into universities, in which it has found a valuable innovation basin that translates, in its least sophisticated form, into the registration of patents.
But we insist, it is not enough to reject a private vision of knowledge:
Ronaldo Lemos
, one of the speakers invited by the organization of the ZEMOS98 festival, came to talk about certain grassroots cultural formations in Brazil that simply ignore, out of pure pragmatism, the legislation that regulates copyright and intellectual property. Although Lemos only mentioned it in passing, one of the most prominent among these movements is perhaps that of Tecnobrega. Based on the culture of remixing, Tecnobrega music has achieved great popularity in Brazil; the artists who practice this style not only cheerfully and without permission use materials subject to copyright, but also freely distribute copies of their own songs. The authors of Tecnobrega distribute these copies only for promotional purposes in those areas in which they are going to perform soon.
The musicians obtain their monetary benefits from these performances that become authentic events and in which the staging and the participation of the public are as important as the music. In addition, the distribution of copies is carried out through a subtle system in which a series of influentials (to use marketing jargon) work, that is, people whose criteria in Tecnobrega matters is recognized by the community and who are therefore in a position that allows them to give prestige to the music they “promote.”
Beyond its unquestionable cultural relevance and the fact that they can even be considered as “empowerment” tools, movements such as Tecnobrega offer new economic models that do not need copyright to be viable. In reality, we could say that the proprietary conception of knowledge (regulated by copyright) corresponds to an obsolete economic model that treated and traded with tangible, material goods that could be quantified, divided, stored and guarded. On the contrary, under the current conditions of “digital reproducibility”, knowledge can hardly be ‘accumulated’ in the strict sense since it is more like a turbulent flow that we can only hope to channel or retain momentarily by means of dikes and dams to then drain it and let it continue its circulation.
It is precisely from “peripheral” places like Brazil that cultural practices arise whose modes of production and distribution are inscribed in an authentic knowledge economy insofar as they spontaneously understand its fluid and unstable character. It is clear in this case that the efforts to assert intellectual property and copyright come from corporations and pressure groups whose business model is still based on the production and distribution of material objects (however difficult it may be for us to understand a book or a film as a material object today).
In reality, those same corporations could see these places “on the margins” as innovation basins that offer models for a new knowledge economy, based, yes, on the same principles of maximum profit and self-interest. With this we want to say that it is not enough to make knowledge common, it is necessary to institute and maintain devices that allow an equal distribution of agency capacity. We think now that the question that
Daniel Miracle
launched precisely to Ronaldo Lemos after his “apology” for the implementation of
LAN houses
in the favelas of Brazil was going in that same direction. It is always dangerous to assume from the outset that vernacular uses of the Internet are essentially alienating, but this should not exclude a critical analysis in the direction that Daniel raised: okay, we see that in Brazil there are self-organized bottom-up processes that facilitate access to knowledge by sectors of the population traditionally excluded and that these populations omit the idea that that knowledge is under a private regime, to what extent does that access to knowledge revert to a greater capacity to take control over their own conditions of existence, of ” counting and being taken into account“, to use the expression proposed again by Martín-Barbero?
All these reflections seem too far from the educational context, but if we think that education is one of the fields where the struggle is established to make prevail and fix the modes of production and government of which we speak, perhaps it will be easier to establish the links. There will be time.