global voices, one world

I’m reading Fraser and it’s really good. Quote on page 64:

Subordinate groups sometimes cannot find the right voice or words to express their thoughts, and when they do, they discover they are not heard. [They] are silenced, encouraged to keep their wants inchoate, and heard to say ‘yes’ when what they have said is ‘no.’ [..] many of these feminist insights into ways in which deliberation can serve as a mask for domination extend beyond gender to other kinds of unequal relations, like those based on class or ethnicity. They alert us to the ways in which social inequalities can infect deliberation, even in the absence of any formal exclusions.

In: Nancy Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy, Social Text, No. 25/26 (1990), pp. 56-80.

Reading her quote reminds us how access alone often is not enough for equal communication. Access, of course, is a first prerequisite that is a necessary but not sufficient condition. In this light, one can think about to what degree citizen media empowers or emancipates; that is to say, how being able to blog alone is not enough, one also has to be heard in a voice that does justice to the speaker – a proper voice. This problem gets only more challenging in a global context, where not just social inequalities but also linguistic and cultural, not to mention basic human rights to freedom of speech, are often an immense barrier to any remote possibility for a healthy conversation between different people, groups, cultures in an age of growing interdependence.