This morning at the Emerging Technologies Conference, Brazilian minister of culture Gilberto Gil Moreira talked about how his country is leveraging digital technologies to create social change. “Technology and culture have been wrongly placed in separate fields, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries,” he said.
Gil said that his ministry’s digital-culture department has formed more than 650 “cultural hot spots” by giving free, open-source hardware and software to grassroots groups to use for purposes both artistic and political. For example, he said, Amazonian indigenous tribes are using the technology to record traditional songs.
Gil feels that digital realities represent an opportunity to make access to information more democratic. “Today, the mobile phone is a fetishized item of consumer design,” he said. “Potentially, it can be a tool of activism.” He said that he envisions grassroots groups one day using mobile phones to connect local content to the larger world in real time.
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