The Zapatista Effect: Information Communication Technology Activism and Marginalized Communities
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper will demonstrate how access to relatively inexpensive Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has allowed marginalized communities to bypass traditional channels and agitate for political changes. Widespread ICT usage has allowed marginalized peoples not only to disseminate their views, but to build grassroots alliances with similarly minded groups. Access to ICT has allowed groups in countries such as Burma, China and Sudan the freedom to share information that may otherwise be suppressed. The ability to freely access and disseminate information is a considered a fundamental right in most free and democratic societies. In many countries, this principle fails to translate into reality. Many of the world’s governments actively constrain their citizens from information access to the commons. Marginalized groups are denied participation in decision-making processes and are ignored by traditional media. They often live in “ICT Poverty”, a state in which little information flows into or out of their communities. As a result, these peoples are denied their ability to benefit from their citizenship rights. Particular attention will be paid to indigenous groups such as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, a largely Mayan group from the impoverished state of Chiapas, Mexico. The Zapatistas burst onto the scene in 1994 and used the Internet to build a trans-national solidarity network among human rights groups. The media spectacle they created forced the Mexican government to negotiate with Zapatista communities over issues such as land rights, compensation for resource extraction and indigenous political autonomy. Many other marginalized groups have used the Zapatista model to overcome social barriers and improve local conditions. Perhaps the most important use of ICT is to raise awareness and build relationships with advocates in other nations. The use of ICT by these groups can have a major impact on global coverage of events and help create public pressure to change policy. As information professionals, what are our responsibilities in regards to bridging the gap between Canadian libraries and marginalized peoples in the international community?
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it