The Vice President of Communication and Culture, Freddy Ñáñez, affirmed that the national workshop on Popular Communication «Communal Think Tanks» is being held to create a new method of liberation communication for the 21st century, «hand in hand with the people,» who are “the only ones who can respond to technological capitalism.»
During the opening of the event held in the La Carlota Events Room, Ñáñez expressed that today the Venezuelan people are «gathering together to look at each other and collectively consider what strategies to apply from now on to mitigate the impact of new communication and information technologies and thus take advantage of the opportunities they offer us.»
He recalled that over the course of 25 years, the community has changed its way of consuming information, entertainment, and producing communication «with the alternative community media that launched the media backlash in 2002,» as well as the experience of Chávez Candanga (*), which «inaugurated a digital militancy» and from there developed the digital troops that emerged from the then-dominant social media and «with Robinson Digital 1-2, which expanded knowledge to other sectors of the population.»
«Behind social media lies a dynamic and capacity to build digital environments that reflect who we are and what we want to be as a society, and with organizational capacity, we can face every adversity and turn difficulties into opportunities.»
The Minister of People’s Power for Communication and Information emphasized that this workshop is a meeting to contribute, in theoretical terms, to the systematization of resistance and «to understand what we have achieved and what we are capable of doing when we come together and have a logbook that unites us on a daily basis.»
He emphasized that the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, has methodized this open struggle with the strategies of «streets, networks, media, walls, and radio broadcasts,» which emerge from the «historicization of communication resistance» over the last 25 years.
In other words, it is a space to update a method that must demonstrate the truth of Venezuela; to provide the answer to technological hegemony, it has simply been grassroots organization, the inventiveness of the community, and the ability of the Venezuelan people to generate spaces for articulation to constantly renew communication.»
Con Maduro +:
The sectoral vice president praised the recognition of the head of state for being one of the most interested in researching, investigating, and creating «our own theory around digital media and current media, with the phenomena that these advances constitute, and especially the threats posed by technological advances, but also the opportunities it brings to a people who are aware when they are organized.»
The national leader «since he created his program, what he has done is include new communication technologies as battlefronts, expanding on Chávez Candanga‘s experience, giving it the depth that new technologies required,» noted Ñáñez.
*: Chávez Candanga is the name given in 2010 to the first initiative by Commander Hugo Chávez on social media as an informative and organizational tool of the Bolivarian Revolution and the People’s Power.
