Cybercultur@: Emergent local knowledge communities in Latin America

“Cybercultur@: Emergent Local Knowledge Communities in Latin America”

This paper reports a project in which a set of people get together and creates an Emergent Local Knowledge Community (ELKC) in order to face concrete "local" problems by developing their own information, communication and knowledge systems.

Cybercultur@ (KC@) is used quite different from the widely accepted “computer interactions in cyberspace”.

a) Originally “cyber” has nothing to do with ICT. Inspired from the original Greek word Kybernetes (pilot, steerman), developing KC@ means the process of collective appropriation of technology for self-steering and conquering degrees of self-determination to solve local problems.

b) “Culture” is understood as a "cultivation" of a threefold process:

• Information, as the ability to establish symbolic correspondences between experiences and signs;
• Communication, as the capacity to organize and coordinate actions.
• Knowledge, as an emergent process of relating configurations of information in order to transform socio-cognitive structures.

c) The sign “@” represents a positive feedback loop of intelligent (dialogical) solutions to local problems using ICT as knowledge platforms.

In theoretical terms, fieldwork is inspired on Freire´s critical pedagogy, Vigotsky`s Proximal Developmental Zone (PDZ) and Piaget/García´s genetic epistemology, all of them fully compatible to Burawoy´s public sociology and Trueba´s ethnography of empowerment.

Initial findings relocate conceptually and empirically the discussion on “digital inclusion” in the World-System.

In three years members of ELKC “La otra min@ de Charcas” (students, teachers, workers, housekeepers, technicians, peasants) in México have been generating local knowledge on alcoholism, environment degradation and political problems in a critical territory controlled by “Zetas” drug cartel.

Passing from local to situated knowledge needs a network of different ELKCs facing similar global problems. For this reason, in 2010 other ELKC experiences have been started in Piauí and Paraíba in northwest Brazil.