Way back when, I was a social-issues reporter at The Vancouver Sun. No one really knew what that meant. It wasn’t supposed to be traditional social issues, but more like trends and social-science research.
I can’t remember how I got started on this talking through computers network thing. I believe it might have been Larry Kuehn of the B.C. Teachers Federation who got me interested in it.
At any rate, I worked for a couple of weeks on a feature in the fall/winter of 1992 that was hundreds of words long. My editors clearly thought I was embroiled in one of my kooky obsessions with the obscure. They cut it down considerably and finally ran it in January 1993, just to humour me, I think.
That was my first dip into the world of the internet. Interesting now to see how it seemed like such a force for good back then. I thought of it again when I heard the radio interviews and read the stories yesterday about the Internet’s “birthday.”
THE INVISIBLE CITY OF COMPUTER NETWORKING: Social activists discover networks offer a sense of power, solidarity: [1* Edition]
One of the students in Austria’s Global 2000 environmental group had sent out a three-page notice about the Austrian legislature’s move to weaken its precedent-setting timber “eco-labelling” law. He gave everyone a brief summary of eco-labelling – labelling that tells consumers what country wood products come from so they can decide if they want to support that country’s forestry practices – and listed names and fax numbers for sending protest letters.
Degraaf, whose main job with WCWC is to track what is happening with rainforest timber in Borneo, knew something like this was in the wind. She’d seen a Reuters news story from Malaysia several months before, sent on by Patrick Anderson from the Amsterdam Greenpeace office. Martin Frimmel from the Austrian Greenpeace office had already sent out two warnings in November.
With all that, Degraaf wrote a letter protesting against the Austrian move and faxed it to the chairs of each political party’s legislation group, the prime minister and the environment minister.
After she and dozens of others on the network wrote in, the Austrian Greenpeace office sent out an update: “Bad news, but some hope” and asked them to keep sending faxes.
For the people who work in social movements – labor, peace, environment, human rights – computer networks offer a sense of community, solidarity and power that has been difficult for them to achieve otherwise. They’re mostly volunteers, often working in small and spread-out groups. Or they don’t have the money to get together and can’t afford a lot of phone calls or even faxes. And they often feel overwhelmed by the resources of the corporations or governments they’re fighting.
“With this, you have an impression that we have one big team, one big force,” says Degraaf, who studied international relations at the University of B.C. and has been working with the committee for a year.
“I don’t know who these people are but we open saying ‘Hi friends’ and end with ‘A big hug.’ There’s this feeling that we have incredible strength together.”
The system gets called into play for whoever needs help. When the committee wanted international response to B.C.’s committee report that said logging should be allowed in Clayoquot Sound, Degraaf sent out the call for it on e-mail.
They’ve also started a conference on temperate forests, so environmental groups around the world can keep track of what is happening in B.C. and the US. Northwest.
Peace, labor, human-rights and environmental groups communicate with each other mainly through the Web network, which links about 500 social-action groups across Canada. The Toronto-based group also connects with Solinet, the labor-information network run by CUPE, PeaceNet, EcoNet and ConflictNet in the United States, Pegasus in Australia, GreenNet in England, Comlink in Germany and Alternex in Brazil, among others.
The networks allow groups from around the world to make announcements or post reports in hundreds of subject categories from human rights in South Africa to the protection of marine life in the North Sea.
The Vancouver-based Greenpeace organization first started using e-mail to communicate with its ships and 26 offices around the world.
Since 1988, it’s also been creating a computerized collection of environmental information so that anyone in any location can get instant research. It also searches newspaper databases and will send out copies of stories that environmental groups in different parts of the world might never see in their local papers – the kind that Degraaf got from the Amsterdam office.