Information/Communications Rights as a New Environmentalism? Core Environmental Concepts for Linking Rights-Oriented Computerization Movements

Abstract

With the growing role that information and communications technologies play in everyday life, a range of advocacy movements has begun to emerge around various “rights” everyone should enjoy in relation to their informational activities—for example, rights to personal privacy, access to information resources and infrastructure, free expression in online fora, control over one’s digital creations, etc. While these various rights movements are largely growing up in isolation from each other, these increasingly can and are being seen as varied aspects of a broader “information/communications rights” movement. There are a number of striking parallels between this emergence and interweaving, and the rise of the environmental movement(s) 40 years ago, when a similarly varied range of concerns (e.g., about local degradations, species loss, ozone depletion, toxic emissions, etc.) and their particular advocacy actions developed a more shared sense of the “environment” and the need for coordinated custodianship. Using key features of the growth of the environmental movement as a framework, this chapter analyzes three of the most prominent computerization movements associated with information rights, namely community networking (and information and communications technologies for development), free/open source software, and informational privacy. It examines the core principles and key indicators of movement development, highlighting the linkages and tensions with each other as well as the environmental movement. The chapter concludes that there is good potential for their integration within a broader, nascent information/communications rights movement, and points out some of the challenges in achieving this.

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