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connections
discussion forum
background
Our lives, cultures and societies are based on connections
- social, civic and collective activities. Almost all of our
actions involve a social connection of some kind - government,
the law, family, education, religion, nation, communities,
cults, networks or virtual communities. Connections might
involve ethical issues about governance, democracy and moral
responsibility. Communications are predicated on making connections,
sometimes through technology, but always with each other.
So, in this discussion language and linguistics was relevant.
The discussion groups themselves are comprised of connections.
Perhaps we are connected by love or disconnected by hatred.
What are your ideas about how people connect, socialise
and communicate? Here are some ideas about connections from
others.
Each one of us belongs to a variety of human collectivities
which retain their identity even as their membership changes:
a nation, a Church, a social or political organisation, or
an institution such as a school, a hospital, a university
or a city. We natural identify with these bodies, for we feel
that our fate is bound up with theirs ... The ties that bind
us to them and to others within them are not based only on
a calculation of gains and losses, but on a belief in a common
destiny and a disinterested solidarity, which we acknowledge
even when we sin against it.
Leszek Kolakowski, Freedom, Fame, Lying
and Betrayal: Essays on Everyday Life, Penguin, London, 1999,
p 55
There's no such thing as society. There are individual men
and women and there are families.
Margaret Thatcher, Former British Prime
Minister and Tory
I propose the following definition of nation: it is an imagined
political community - and imagined as both inherently limited
and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even
the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members,
meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives
the image of their communion.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities,
Verso, London, 1983, p 6
The ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain,
by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free
every man from fear, that he may live in all possibly security;
in other words to strengthen his natural right to exist and
work without injury to himself or others ... the object of
government is not to change men from rational beings into
beast or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds
and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled
... In fact, the true aim of government is liberty.
Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political
Treatise, in The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, vol I,
ed R.H.M. Elwes, New York, Dover, 1951, pp 258-9
NB Spinoza lived 1632 - 77
Once the state recognises the priority and superiority of
the laws of the market over the laws of the polis, the citizen
is transmuted into the consumer, and a consumer 'demands more
and more protection while accepting less and less the need
to participate' in the running of the state.
Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics,
Blackwell Publishers, London, 1999, p 156
Civil societies are also civic societies, that is, we as
citizens must take some responsibility for changing what we
do not like. There is a wide debate about citizenship underway.
Much of what is written involves claims about the rights of
individuals and even groups. But what happens when those rights
conflict? Have we forgotten the inevitable tensions between
rights and responsibilities and the search for individual
freedoms? Can we retain social cohesion and the possibility
of individual autonomy?
These questions can only be answered by all of us as active
participants in a civil society.
Eva Cox, A Truly Civil Society, Boyer
Lecture 1995, http://www.lamp.ac.uk/ahr/archive/issue1-feb-mar-96/cox/cox.1.html
Volunteering as potentially the most important global social
movement of the new century ... Volunteering can be an effective
way to help solve serious human, social and environmental
problems. It can be an effective way to deliver services,
to provide individualized attention, to engage with those
most in need of help ... Volunteering can be an effective
way to improve the quality of life in our communities through
cultural and recreational programs, through activities that
sustain our ethnic cultures, through the civic groups, clubs
and communities of faith that add vitality to our daily lives.
Kenn Allen, Responding TOGETHER to
the Challenge of the International Year of Volunteers, June
7, 2000, http://www.volunteeringqueensland.org.au/kallen1.htm
The movement towards ethical business is not happening because
people like me say it's a good idea. It's a groundswell, a
growing realisation that business has to play the social role
that accords with its position in our society today ... To
be part of the solution means bearing responsibility for the
total impact of business operations - for the way in which
employees are treated and the security arrangements are made,
and for the effect of the business on the social, physical
and political environment in which it operates.
Anita Roddick, Business As Unusual,
Thorsons, London, 2000, p 19 - 21
Culture plays its role alongside, indeed inextricably interwoven
with, economic and politics. They form a multiplicity. The
medium through which political or economic change or negotiation
takes place is always partly cultural. The exclusion of the
cultural from political or economic rationality is invariably
the exclusion of difference, plurality, the messiness of everyday
life.
MacKenzie Wark, Celebrities, Culture
and Cyberspace, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2000, p 337
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest
of men for the nastiest of reasons will somehow work for the
benefit of all of us.
John Maynard Keynes
Community networking is a generic term to define different
kinds of uses of the Internet and information technologies
for the transformation of our communities. In some countries,
they remain as freenets, in others they are called telecenters,
in others they are seen as an active 'digital city'. In all
cases, community networks gather people willing to participate
in the renewal of their own community in the digital era.
There is more than a simple web or portal. They are new forms
of society, of community. We can define community networking
as a way of using information technologies by a local actor
(association, city, neighborhoods, libraries, new organizations,
women movements, etc.) for the purpose of social transformation
(local development, renewal of democracy, social inclusion).
Introduction, Global Congress of Citzens
Network 2001, http://www.globalcn2001.org/ingles/index_ing.html
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