Researching and Developing Cybercultur@: Emerging Local Knowledge Communities in Latin America

Abstract

This chapter puts forward the concept of ‘cybercultur@’ (KC@) as a different and complementary approach to mainstream research on the relationship between society and technology. Mainstream approaches tend to consider digital technologies and computer-mediated communication to be the key to increasing social development in low-income countries. The KC@ approach rejects the idea that access to computers, the Internet and its content is the key to educational and social empowerment. On the contrary, initial comparative fieldwork research on experiences in Mexico and Brazil shows that information and communication technologies (ICTs) operate as knowledge platforms in a ‘k’-continuum of social representations.¹ A threefold transformation can develop into a small group social organization for the enacting of an emergent local knowledge community (ELKC) as a strategy for coordinating actions (communication) and reordering their symbolic relations with their conditions (information) in order to construct new plausible relationships (knowledge) that help to confront ignorance and mystified notions of the group’s social conditions. Knowledge is action. This process, when connected through adequate technology to the dynamics of other experiences of ELCKs confronting similar situations, activates another process — that of increasing empowerment linked to a network that generates emergent situated knowledge.