Download Sarajevo Alive - Sarajevo Online

From Co-Existence to
Conviviality
A leap into Direct Reality
By Gilbert Cattoire
www.directreality.com
Spring 1995, Sarajevo
 What were 3 journalists and a telecom engineer
doing in Sarajevo in March ‘95,
 with laptops and satellite phones,
 building a satellite IP link ?
►A
web forum between Sarajevo & the “Rest
Of The World”
Sarajevo Alive - Sarajevo Online
►
The Official Project
 A gesture of solidarity with the local daily
Oslobodjenje.
 Official assignement was to interview a few
selected personalities
 Political debates were to be avoided.
Sarajevo Alive - Sarajevo Online
► Backed
►&
by Unesco
a Syndication of 30 international
newspapers (La Stampa, El Pais, Süd
Deutsche Zeitung, Yomiuri Shimbun, The
Guardian,…)
Sarajevo Alive - Sarajevo Online
► The
Accident
 The team took the decision to let any
inhabitant express themselves on whatever
topic they wanted
 All postings were published unedited and
uncensored
Sarajevo Alive - Sarajevo Online
► The
resulting content was a breakthrough in
war journalism:
 A besieged city's online diary,
 updated daily,
 to which people all over the world responded
spontaneously.
Sarajevo Alive - Sarajevo Online
► Access
to the service was easy
 The website was updated twice daily via email
 The feed was also available via a mailing list
► Emotional
response was overwhelming.
Internet as a medium was beyond doubt the
“hottest” of all.
From Co-Existence to Conviviality
► Enabled
by digital communications, the
audience fits quite naturally as an integral
part of the information process, influencing
the course of events as they happen.
► Journalism
is evolving away from its
mandatory lecture mode to include
conversations and actions.
A Leap into Direct Reality
► Because
exposure to news is disintermediated,
allowing participants to participate and litteraly
direct reality from a personal, first-hand
perspective, as opposed to the passive mass
media experience were reality is being directed for
you.
► And because this leads to no less than a new
political proposition. New cultures, new social
interactions are pushing people through the
Internet door, from coexistence to conviviality.
From Co-Existence to Conviviality
► ...there
is more to news than zapping
► ...there is more to politics than blind alleys
► Of
course we all knew all this all the time.
► But
where was it for so long? And where are
we going?
From Co-Existence to Conviviality
► the
Internet is an “evolution catalyst”
 blogs are a perfect illustration,
 Wikis (watch out for them) are even more
symptomatic.
From Co-Existence to Conviviality
► both
the offer and the demand for such
direct experiences are reaching people
beyond the usual sphere of “social
activists”...
► ...
at least expanding it to a new degree
A Leap into Direct Reality
► “Let everyone talk, publish everything (don’t
edit), favour dialogues”: the spontaneous
principles that let Sarajevo Online make the news
have since become mainstream with blogs.
► Making
webloging technology available to anyone
was indeed a genial intuition.
Communicate + Collaborate =
Participate
► People
are willing to
participate if they are
given the means to
collaborate and
communicate.
► Sounds
obvious but
was hardly ever the
case until the Internet
came along.
Communicate + Collaborate =
Participate
► It
feels good to know that there’s more to progress
than the emerging reality of intelligent machines.
► We’re
direct.
still in the evolutionary game, live and