Interview with Andres Lombana Bermudez
The introduction of Digital Tribulations, a series of intellectual interviews on the developments of digital sovereignty in Latin America, can be read here.
I first met Andrés while walking to the AoIR conference in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro. We struck up a conversation in Portuñol as we approached the campus; when I mentioned my upcoming trip to Colombia, he began sharing research contacts. Three months later, we reunited in a strangely quiet Bogotá during the peak of the holiday season. We walked to the Universidad Javeriana, which appeared spectral in its emptiness. In the silence of his office, as we tried to make coffee in a deserted building, our conversation began. Later, after picking up his daughter, we sat over steaming bowls of ajiaco (the traditional Bogotá chicken soup) to continue our discussion.
In our conversation, Andrés traces a path from DIY electronic music in 1990s Bogotá to media research at MIT and Harvard. Along the way, he talks about sovereignty as something unevenly distributed, shaped by access, infrastructure, and power, visible in Colombia’s concentrated media landscape and long-standing technological dependency. His perspective bridges activism and scholarship: it begins with curiosity about the internet’s commons-based, collective possibilities and, over time, confronts the realities of platform capitalism. Furthermore, we discuss how platforms shaped the 2016 peace plebiscite, the technopolitics of the 2021 “social outburst”. Andrés is the type of academic who still welcomes novelties with genuine curiosity; for instance, he investigated how K-pop collectives developed advanced tactics of algorithmic sabotage and transnational mobilization that caught the Colombian political establishment off guard.
Strikingly, in Colombia digital sovereignty remains marginal in public debate. Andrés closes by pointing to local, community-run infrastructures—from citizen air-quality sensing to rural networks—as practical starting points for a more autonomous digital future.
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What is your background, and why are you interested in digital sovereignty?
My career is characterized by various detours, leaps, and connections. I am currently a professor and researcher at the Faculty of Communication at Universidad Javeriana, where I co-direct the Center for Citizenships and Technologies. I am also an associate researcher at the ISUR Center of Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Additionally, I collaborate with several networks such as Tierra Común, Global Voices, and Clubes de Ciencia Colombia.
My training is interdisciplinary—or, if you prefer, anti-disciplinary. My undergraduate degrees were in Political Science and Literature, followed by graduate studies in Media Studies, while in parallel, I maintained a close relationship with transmedia arts and creative computing.
Before traveling to Boston to pursue a Master’s in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, my interest lay in the poetics and creative possibilities of computing and new digital media. I entered the world of the internet, computers, and digital arts through experimentation. In the late 90s and early 2000s here in Bogotá, I made electronic music, photography, video, and animations in a DIY style from a home studio, using analog and digital cameras and participating in the city’s nascent underground electronic music and arts scene. At that time, although I didn’t know the concept of “digital sovereignty,” I was fascinated by the kind of creative and poetic sovereignty that “new media” allowed at an individual and personal level.
At MIT, I worked with Henry Jenkins’ group investigating new media literacies. It was very interesting for me because, in Colombia, what I had learned about computers and digital arts was empirical and self-taught—from home, with PC games and software, connecting to the internet and exchanging with collaborators from other parts of the world. In Colombia in the late 90s, social media consisted of ICQ chats, forums, and blogs.
The project I worked on at MIT was supported by the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative, a fund that financed research to understand how formal and informal learning and the social and cultural practices of young people were being transformed. At the Institute, there was speculation about the creation of Web 2.0 and new ways to reinvent the internet after the dot-com bubble burst in the late 90s. It was the first decade of the 21st century, and there was much interest in experimenting with ways to “humanize” the World Wide Web. There was speculation about the design of new social media, more participatory, social, interactive, educational, and mobile platforms.
Some colleagues at the Media Lab were designing prototypes of social websites, thinking about how to put the human at the center and how to enhance creativity and participation through the internet. Henry Jenkins, my mentor, investigated participatory culture, cultural consumption, and fan communities, developing concepts like transmedia storytelling and convergence culture, and trying to build bridges between amateur culture and creative industries. He also had a deep interest in using media and technologies for political and civic action and for youth learning processes.
During my time at MIT, my interest in digital sovereignty shifted toward learning communities, amateurs, and knowledge creators—particularly those based on values from free culture and the digital commons. For example, communities like Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Flickr, TinyIconFactory, and Scratch.
Later, I went to Austin to pursue a PhD at UT, the public university of the state of Texas. Initially, I intended to research and create interactive narratives, experimenting with film and the web, video games, and sound, but a break occurred. After the MIT experience—a place with a learning culture that deeply valued interdisciplinarity, experimentation, and hacking—arriving in Austin felt like a return to the past. Although I had access to film and radio studios and participated in sound design for my classmates’ films in the Radio-Television-Film department, I felt somewhat limited in terms of creative possibilities and opportunities to cross disciplines. I felt it was difficult to access open science and technology labs, web servers to develop and experiment freely, and interdisciplinary spaces to exchange knowledge with students and professors from all kinds of fields.
Returning to the past, I encountered less celebratory and more critical visions of the internet and technology, along with direct access to other worlds on the margins of the digital revolution. This break caused my perspective on digital sovereignty to shift toward considering digital inequalities and understanding how sovereignty varied according to different conditions of access to technology, knowledge, skills, and other resources among different populations. I understood then that digital sovereignty is differential. It varies between individuals, communities, nations, and regions.
In Austin, I worked with the research group of Craig Watkins, an African-American sociologist who was starting a project to investigate how digital inequalities affected the learning and life trajectories of young people. Watkins had a critical perspective on the paradoxes of providing connectivity and devices to everyone in schools: in the US, closing the digital divide was considered a social problem, and connecting schools was part of the solution. In Latin America, that approach was also being imitated.
With the research team, we were immersed for three years in a high school located on the outskirts of the city, with a majority of Latino and African-American students. I followed a group of Mexican-American teenagers, observing their extracurricular practices, interviewing them, and talking to their families. Children of immigrants making digital film and video at school, accessing computer and multimedia production labs. These young people wanted to pursue professional careers in the creative industries. They lived in a city designed to attract creatives. Festivals like SXSW, Austin City Limits, parks, coffeeshops, bars, open patios… Richard Florida, one of the theorists of the “creative class,” had even participated in Austin’s urban planning to boost the “creative economy.” And yet, despite the branding, not everyone could be part of the creative class in Austin. Most of the youth in the school we researched did not manage to follow that “creative class” trajectory. The lack of social and cultural capital of these young people and their families was the main barrier preventing their dreams of participating in the creative economy as professionals from becoming a reality. A gap much harder to close than the connectivity void.
After finishing my doctorate, I returned to Cambridge and Boston. I went to Harvard as a postdoc at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, where my understanding of digital sovereignty shifted again, taking a more political approach. During this return to one of the metropolises of the digital era, I was able to better understand the importance of the governance of infrastructures and sociotechnical systems. That is, the importance of platform administration, control of information flow, moderation of online discourse, and digital human rights.
The theme of youth continued to run through my work, this time in another context: young people with access to more resources and privileges in New England. With the Berkman Klein Center’s Youth & Media project, we did co-design research with teenagers in the Greater Boston area to develop learning experiences and activities regarding digital competencies, safety, privacy, and access to job opportunities.
We also researched the governance of online communities like Scratch, a software and digital platform for block-based programming—like a “Lego” for coding. Scratch was designed with values of free software, peer cooperation, and constructivist pedagogy. It is a global-scale multilingual platform that supports the development of computational thinking and creative programming for children and youth around the world. Other platforms we researched were DIY.org and Minecraft servers with an educational focus. Some of these platforms managed to moderate their participants’ discussions, creating safe environments; others reached democratic agreements and conducted mentoring processes with teams of paid adult moderators—a job that required human commitment and effort and could not be automated.
During this period, the problem of disinformation and computational propaganda grew exponentially in several countries. Brexit occurred, Trump’s first election, and also the victory of the “No” vote in the Peace Plebiscite in Colombia. At Berkman Klein, the Media Cloud team had been doing work to understand information flows in the media ecosystem, combining quantitative methods like social network analysis with content analysis. This allowed them to clearly understand the dynamics of news circulation, hyperlinks, and content, and to visualize phenomena like polarization in the US media ecosystem. That work deeply influenced my interest in developing computational and mixed methodologies to understand the dynamics of information flow and control in national, regional, and global media ecosystems. This would mark my research agenda in the following years.
How did the peace plebiscite in Colombia influence your research agenda and your interest in data analysis and disinformation?
The peace plebiscite was to ratify the agreement between the government and the FARC: people had to answer yes or no, and “NO” won. Being abroad, it was very sad to experience the defeat of the “YES.” It was something very difficult to process—painful and frustrating. However, that frustration motivated me to deeply investigate the digital media ecosystem in Colombia.
By then, in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century, infrastructures were no longer blogs: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter were consolidated and had become the primary sites for political campaign operations—spaces to cultivate and amplify polarization and antagonism between sociocultural and political groups and identities.
Colombia has been fractured since its founding as a nation-state and has a long history of partisan conflicts, armed violence, and cycles of repression and exclusion. During the peace negotiations with the FARC guerrillas led by the Santos government, society was divided between supporters of a negotiated exit and those who supported the war. That division was exploited to carry out information campaigns on digital platforms to exacerbate passions, fears, and emotions.
These platforms distort communication and the processes of interaction with information. At first, I didn’t think they were such orchestrated campaigns, but they were, and they continue to be: uncivil actors, marketing companies, and political parties quickly discovered they could use mass social media platforms as weapons. They have taken advantage of their functionalities, metrics, and interactions to mobilize people’s passions and fears, creating a climate where it is very difficult to build consensus, listen to the positions of other groups, forgive, or empathize with difference.
Since 2016, the year of the peace plebiscite, I began working seriously with large volumes of data to better understand the dynamics of information flow in media ecosystems. Today, the toolkit of computational and digital methods is very powerful. Using the archive of news published in Colombian digital media available on the Media Cloud platform, and capturing public tweets through the Twitter API, I began to build corpora of texts related to electoral processes, political controversies, and sociopolitical protests in Colombia.
With these datasets, it is possible to apply qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze and visualize the changing media ecosystem and try to understand it with empirical evidence. Like a microscope. Or better, a telescope, a galaxy. Using the digital traces left by people’s messages published openly on the web and digital platforms, it is possible to combine methods like social network analysis, content analysis, and descriptive statistics to understand phenomena like disinformation, misinformation, online violence, and the process of building media agendas and frames.
Upon my return to Colombia in 2019, my research agenda focused on teaching and learning these mixed methodologies and researching with them. From Javeriana and from ISUR at Universidad del Rosario, we have been developing several research projects using this quali-quanti approach to understand the transformation of electoral processes, social protest, and public health communication.
What relationship did you find between social protest in Colombia, especially during the 2021 national strike, and new forms of digital activism and repression?
During and after the Covid-19 pandemic, very novel things occurred related to social protest in Colombia. One consequence of the pandemic was the acceleration of the digitalization of many of people’s daily activities. In Colombia, as in other Latin American countries and the world, the pandemic forced a “great digital leap,” connecting and digitalizing practically all sectors. The scale and duration of the 2021 strike, known as the “social outburst” (estallido social), cannot be understood without that great leap and the public health and confinement measures we had in the country during the pandemic.
The protest against the Duque government, however, had started before the pandemic. The president elected in Colombia in 2018 for the transition to the post-conflict era was center-right, and his party had led the “NO” campaign in the peace plebiscite. Leaders of that party had expressed a desire to “shred” the peace agreement, and once in government, they were quick to sabotage its implementation and discredit institutions like the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP). From Duque’s first year in 2019, before the lockdown, social protests were massive, and people took to the streets to pressure the government for educational, social, and economic reforms, and for the implementation of the peace agreement. Young people, in particular, mobilized massively in public spaces with marches, concerts, graffiti, and street performances.
In 2020, massive protests were halted by extreme confinement and strong repression: you couldn’t go out. The government’s measures during the pandemic were somewhat distorted, biased by pressures and data on global deaths and infections. Many measures were justified with the argument of the rising curve in other countries. “Look at Italy, look at Spain, look at the curve of infections and deaths.” Many emergency measures were taken based on very alarming data that wasn’t from here. And those measures ended up having an authoritarian tone. Governance was conducted through presidential decrees, without deliberation in Congress and without consulting communities.
In September 2020, after months of mandatory confinement, protests broke out in reaction to human rights violations triggered by authoritarian measures and police abuses. In the same year as the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, here in Colombia, a massive mobilization against police abuse emerged. The trigger was the death of a citizen due to police violence in Bogotá. The murder was documented in videos that quickly circulated on digital platforms. People couldn’t take it anymore and went out to protest in several Colombian cities. They also protested massively on digital platforms with hashtags, memes, and streaming. Massive protests were reactivated, and for two weeks, there were heavy clashes between protesters and the police.
Almost a year later, in 2021, the national strike arrived. A massive protest that lasted nearly three months. Although initially a protest against a tax reform, it quickly transformed into a massive mobilization against the State and all its institutions, demanding the reduction of socioeconomic inequalities, the implementation of the peace agreement, and an end to police violence, among other demands.
During the pandemic, a problem worsened: many young people without education or work, the Ninis (Neither studying nor working). These young people led much of the 2021 social outburst protests. Blockades and occupations of squares and streets, especially in Cali and Bogotá.
During the 2021 national strike, the government took several repressive measures that, instead of facilitating consensus and dialogue, fueled the intensity of the “social outburst.” Meanwhile, the opposition political party and social movements took more radical stances, adding more demands and intensifying their claims and direct confrontation both in the streets and on social networks.
Thus, an intense feedback loop between protest and repression was configured in both physical and digital spaces. In response to activism and protest with hashtags, videos, and streaming on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok, the government used espionage software, profiling, and propaganda campaigns. The Ministry of Defense created units and control posts for digital patrolling, pursuing those who uploaded certain types of content or expressed criticism of the government and the police.
The 2021 national strike in Colombia was similar to what happened in Chile in 2019 and other Latin American social outbursts. Massive sociopolitical protests led by youth both in the streets and on digital platforms, organized mostly in a decentralized and spontaneous manner, without visible leaders, but with a great capacity for mobilization and flexibility to allow diverse groups and movements to join the demonstrations. These outbursts are relevant for understanding how forms of participation and technopolitical activism evolve, as well as the new forms of digital repression used by states.
This led me to K-pop: K-pop activism here was unknown. There were fan collectives organizing local networks and connecting with transnational networks for several years. During the 2021 national strike, K-poppers joined the protest and captured the attention of the media, politicians, and the Colombian public. They sabotaged hashtags on digital platforms, mocked the government and right-wing parties that condemned the protest and supported the use of force to repress the mobilization. While left-wing politicians thanked the disruptive K-popper action, right-wing ones condemned it.
Even the current president of Colombia, Petro, began to appropriate K-pop symbols: there are photographs of Petro making finger hearts as if he were a K-pop idol. That appropriation of K-pop symbols also occurred at the level of protest tactics. Many citizens on Twitter, outside the fandom, began to protest by imitating K-poppers. They appropriated the sophisticated digital sabotage and algorithmic manipulation practices that K-pop fans had developed to support idols and bands on digital platforms.
In my research agenda, K-pop is an ongoing project: a limitation of digital ethnography is that it’s hard to get interviews; the K-poppers I’ve met in person after the social outburst are mostly students and are not as aligned with the fans’ political activism. The K-pop fandom is very diverse, fragmented, and multifaceted. For me, it remains a mystery to meet in person the Colombian bases that articulated the networks during the social outburst, also mobilizing fans globally.
And what about media concentration in Colombia?
When I grew up in the 80s and 90s, there were two television channels (and one public one) and two major national newspapers. Media concentration has been a characteristic of the Colombian ecosystem. Media have been managed by large business groups, and there has been a low presence of public media, especially at the mass media, national scale. Because it must be recognized that in Colombia, there is also an important trajectory of community and alternative media: audiovisual collectives, community radio and television, especially in rural areas and indigenous territories; it’s a line that interests me, although I don’t know all that richness.
If you have traveled through Colombia, you see inequalities across the territory: connectivity and infrastructure are very different in rural areas, outside Bogotá, the center of the State. Colombia is centralist; in remote territories without roads, water, or electricity, those community media often prevail, which have been key to resisting violence. There are studies like those of Clemencia Rodríguez on those citizen media that resisted decades of armed conflict. It’s paradoxical: there is media concentration, but also community media; and today, many digital media are doing citizen and community journalism, telling local stories, although they are not the ones you see on TV or hear on the radio.
Although the conflict has decreased in recent years with the peace processes, it cannot be said that we have total peace. The 2016 peace agreement was a step toward the post-conflict era, but then we regressed. In a society fragmented and traumatized by violence, peace, agreements, and processes of restoration and forgiveness must often be made. And mass and commercial media have much to learn from citizen media regarding how to facilitate the search for consensus, dialogue, and civic commitment. Citizen media connect with popular education, with processes of sociopolitical mobilization and civic empowerment.
The Colombian media landscape is heavily influenced by the US. Much of the content on radio and TV has had a bias toward North American productions. Since television (70s, 80s, 90s), the influence of North American popular culture has been very strong. Brazil seems more independent. Here there is more penetration, perhaps for historical reasons: Colombia has been a US ally in Latin America. Decades of military and financial aid, marked by the war on drugs, shaped the media and a technological infrastructure aligned with the US.
So, what about digital sovereignty in Colombia? Is it not as developed as in Brazil? Is there no discourse?
No, the topic is not addressed in public discourse. It is needed. We need to talk more about digital sovereignty, understand its different contexts, and the different dimensions in which digital sovereignty is exercised. We also need to talk more about other sovereignties. Colombia is not as large a country as Brazil, and it is close to the United States. Furthermore, we must not forget that at the beginning of the 20th century, Colombia lost Panama in one of the most spectacular actions of gringo interventionism. Years after losing the territory of the isthmus, the US would pay an indemnity of several million dollars, which the Colombian government would use to create its central bank (Banco de la República). It’s like what President Donald Trump is trying to do with Greenland, saying he’s going to buy it.
Sovereignty is a complicated concept for fragile and fragmented nations and states. Those national histories are important for thinking about sovereignty. In Brazil, for example, technological sovereignty has been historically present; it has been part of public debate, academic discourse, and industrialization policies.
If you look at what happens when television arrives in Colombia, it is practically an extension of North American and German technology. The technology comes from other countries. From TV towers to cameras and receivers, none of that is autonomously developed in Colombia. In the country, there have been few incentives to create proprietary electronic and digital technology at an industrial level. When the internet arrives, it is the universities that connect. They are not thinking about digital sovereignty because the discourse there is more about academic exchange and knowledge. It wasn’t talked about much.
Even today, it isn’t discussed unless it’s in cases where there has been jurisprudence on the right to be forgotten, for example. There are some tutelas (legal protection actions) that some citizens have filed against Google because bad things appear about their companies when web queries are made. I should review that topic better; I am not an expert in jurisprudence, but I believe that here the Supreme Court and those tutelas carried out by some citizens to have control over what is represented on the internet, over their data, are interesting examples of digital sovereignty. Digital sovereignty is not a very visible topic in public discourse or in Colombian media. Nor is it discussed or researched much in universities.
Where the issue of sovereignty has been most visible in Colombia is in relation to security policies, cyberdefense, and cybersecurity. There are scandals about the purchase of espionage software from Israeli companies by the Duque government. The purchase of proprietary software by the Colombian state reflects the type of technological sovereignty that has been historically promoted: dependent sovereignty, that of a consumer, buyer, and user of technology manufactured in other countries. It is a very paradoxical sovereignty.
In Colombia, there have been no public policies for open software, for example, like in Brazil. Also in other countries in the region like Ecuador, Venezuela, and Uruguay. Here there are no chip factories. The internet cables that come here are mostly cables from Miami, Florida. That geography is important because there is no Latin American cable here, for example. I think Brazil probably has one, I don’t know.
In Brazil, there are the great theorists of dependency theory and critics of economic developmentalism. Cardoso and Faletto are intellectuals who come from there. In Colombia, although there is criticism of development, it is carried out from another, more anthropological and sociological approach. Furthermore, at the level of public policies on cybersecurity and technology, the country has aligned itself closely with the Organization of American States, the UN, the OECD, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the World Bank. Governments align themselves and follow what those multilateral organizations dictate. In Colombia, it seems to me that we are very diligent in complying with everything those institutions tell us.
One could say that in Petro’s current discourse, there is a call for agricultural sovereignty, food autonomy, and environmental sovereignty. That has been made visible in the discourse. Autonomy to care for natural resources, not to allow the extractivism of minerals, for example, oil, mines. The current government is very clear on that, but not at the digital level. I fear it’s because the government’s entire digital apparatus is mounted on foreign digital infrastructure.
There are exceptions. There are networks with local infrastructure here in Colombia, like the RENATA network, which is an advanced network the government has for education and research. There are also networks of libraries, museums, and the National Library. There are examples of digital sovereignty at a small level. Here at Javeriana, there are data centers and servers for research. They are very close to where we are now, in the Faculty of Engineering, in the CAOBA center, in the Big Data lab. These are local, internal infrastructures. You can use some of the virtual machines there if you have a research project. There are machines where research data can be held and processed, like the ones we collected about social networks; we collected and processed them in one of these virtual machines.
There are also examples of sovereignty from free software, feminist, and citizen science activism collectives that have created and governed their own infrastructures. We have an interesting research project on environmental activism in Bogotá, seeing how a group of data and environmental activists came together to create an infrastructure parallel to that of the local government to measure air pollution.
Bogotá is very polluted. The activists designed very cheap and small DIY devices to measure microparticle pollution in the air. Additionally, they designed a mobile application to visualize the data captured with the devices. They began to collect measurements they made and upload them to a totally autonomous platform. They started to contrast them with government data. They created that parallel infrastructure to pressure the government to innovate in environmental monitoring and management—to expand the coverage of measurements. While the government had 13 measurement points, the mobile sensor infrastructure reached 200 or 300 nodes. I don’t know how many they have now, but comparing it with the government’s measurements, it was clear that it wasn’t measuring the problem fairly, that it wasn’t reaching the places where there was more pollution. There was an injustice with the data the government produced that was affecting the most vulnerable populations and didn’t allow for environmental emergencies to be declared in time.
That infrastructure is based on other values: visible, open, participatory data at the time of capture, analysis, and communication. The citizen scientists and activists communicated the measurements on social networks and managed to pressure the local government to change some of the ways environmental emergencies are declared in Bogotá and to start using the citizen infrastructure of sensors and monitoring devices. That is very interesting. Even in the last Bogotá government, Mayor Lopez hired some of these activist collectives to incorporate the devices and monitoring infrastructure into public schools as part of educational processes with children and youth. This is a very interesting digital sovereignty project related to environmental issues and data justice at a local level.
And what about the discourse of media literacy in Colombia? How has it developed over time? How was it also influenced by the arrival of platforms?
Media education and literacy are vital for contemporary democratic societies. I am currently writing a book on that topic. I believe it is necessary to return to the movement of educational reform and critical pedagogies that drove the emergence of media education in the 20th century. In recent years, this pedagogy has resurfaced in the context of accelerated platformization and datafication of societies as part of the solutions to the complex problems we face. After what happened during the pandemic with schools and learning and teaching processes, no one today can ignore the issue of media literacy and media education. It is a vital topic.
When I traveled to the US for graduate studies, I didn’t know much about UNESCO’s initiatives on media and information literacy, nor about Colombian and Latin American initiatives. After nearly 14 years of working in media education and digital learning programs in the US, upon returning to Colombia, I was interested in understanding how that pedagogy of and about media had been approached in the region. And indeed, I found that it existed but had another name. In Latin America, there is a tradition of educommunication (educomunicación) that dates back to the mid-20th century: school newspapers, school radios, and popular education (like Paulo Freire and Mario Kaplún). In Colombia, most educommunication initiatives were not formalized in curricula; they emerged in community media, often with support from the Catholic Church, in social movements. These are initiatives that focus less on media/technology and more on communicative processes, power, and dialogue—very different from the “technical skills” and “device operation” approach.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, Latin American governments have been promoting digital transformation and connectivity. Sometimes they mention digital skills and literacy, but very focused on the operational use of the computer and software—instrumental skills for navigating the internet. The concept of “digital citizenship” also appears, which by the way is popular among Latin American governments and has been used in public policy formulation. This digital citizenship has also had an operational, technical focus on instrumental skills for searching and evaluating information, without addressing digital rights, security, privacy, or self-determination.
During the pandemic, this functional emphasis on digital citizenship grew, promoting the use of government platforms (educational resources, procedures, e-government). An operational and functional digital citizenship was promoted, which boosted commerce and transactions through the internet. What is known as the “digital leap” of the pandemic helped diversify people’s practices, especially their activities as users of digital platforms managed by big tech companies: Google Schools, Google Education, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc. In this way, digital citizenship has been promoted without awareness of data and infrastructure sovereignty or technological autonomy. And that is partly because there has been no public debate or popular imaginary in the country that addresses the problem of digital sovereignty; nor did it exist in the times of 20th-century industrial technologies. In Colombia, we didn’t build cars, televisions, calculators, or typewriters. So we don’t have a tradition of sovereignty over technologies either at a practical or discursive level.
The current government in Colombia has pushed the discussion on AI public policies; it is aware of the risks of this technology and its environmental impact, but it doesn’t talk about digital sovereignty. It talks about national and popular sovereignty (with events like the one that occurred in Caracas a few days ago, the detention of Maduro, and Trump’s threats to Petro). The Colombian president calls on people to take to the streets as a sovereign people, evoking the discourses of independence and Bolívar, but he doesn’t mention the digital realm or the internet. In terms of sovereignty, the leap to the digital has not yet been made.
Another example: this government launched Digital.IA, an educommunication and media literacy initiative focused on training people to face disinformation and foster peace on social networks. It was developed by a team led by free software and free information flow activists. They have many videos, podcasts, and online educational content on programming, information evaluation, citizen journalism, transmedia storytelling, among others. The project’s website even has a chatbot that “tells you if a news item is true or not,” which is quite problematic. Part of the project’s content is in a Google Drive—in Google’s cloud. This fact reflects the lack of awareness about digital sovereignty in Colombia. Furthermore, it reflects the little attention the problem of sovereignty receives in media education and literacy projects.
And what about the relationship between Colombia and other Latin American countries? What can be done in the coming years?
I believe that exercising, talking about, and imagining digital sovereignty involves education. My book is called Expanded Media Education (Educación Mediática Expandida) and alludes to the need for an expansive and integrative education in highly mediatized, interconnected societies in constant technological change. The ecosystem of media and technologies will continue to expand, and we need critical and innovative pedagogies to teach and learn new forms of citizenship, to exercise our rights, and to imagine other technological futures. We need education at all levels: intergenerational and inter-institutional (including government).
The current AI boom is an opportunity to problematize sovereignty—an opportunity to dialogue and learn about what it means for states, regions, and communities to control and govern technological infrastructures: with what data are AI systems trained? Where is that data hosted? What rights do citizens have when interacting with AI systems?
A few decades ago, the digital myth was “let’s connect” to have access to information, greater participation, more markets, and more knowledge; so there, sovereignty was overlooked, diluted in favor of connection to the global network. Demystifying the digital requires thinking about the materiality of technology, identifying the power relations it enables, and observing how it manifests at a local level. Today, the problem of technological sovereignty cannot be ignored so easily. And in some countries in the Latin American region, like Brazil, it is a topic that is quite debated and researched.
I believe the future lies in small-scale digital sovereignty at a local level. It’s already happening: communities, activists, and universities building and managing their own infrastructures. Starting with local projects and then creating networks and projects guided by their own values and principles.
An example of this approach is community internet networks in rural areas, where commercial connectivity doesn’t reach due to lack of profitability and the complex geography of some Latin American countries. These networks connect to the global internet, but they also have their own servers, set up their local telecommunication infrastructures, and collect and manage data from their own communities. In some Latin American countries, these networks have obtained permits from governments to use the electromagnetic spectrum and set up local, autonomous telecommunication infrastructures. Community networks in Colombia are examples of digital sovereignty, autonomy, and pedagogical innovation. The communities participating in these networks, for example, learn and practice the meaning of having data on a community server, managing it, and protecting it. Some of these networks have collaborated with Wikipedia to have local educational content that works without connecting to “the big internet”—they are examples of small-scale, local, and community internets.
This could happen in colleges, public schools, and universities by creating spaces for digital sovereignty. It requires a collective effort, a change in mentality, and critical, technical, dialogic, and solidary skills and dispositions. Free software, which allows for greater control and empowerment, sometimes has “unattractive” interfaces; people are used to attractive screens and intuitive visual designs. Digital literacy should also promote the use of less seductive interfaces that are not designed for hours of scrolling. Returning to the terminal, to simpler interfaces, but with more control and friction—with more space for slower and more reflective interactions. It is a change of consciousness. And education doesn’t depend only on the Ministry or a government, but also on families, companies, museums, and libraries.
Something that needs a lot of attention in Colombia is supporting research on the internet, data, and digital technology with interdisciplinary approaches that help us understand the complexity of the transformations that have been occurring and be aware of the social, cultural, political, and ethical implications of the appropriation and massification of these technologies. Initiatives like ISUR, the internet studies center at Universidad del Rosario—which we helped design and establish with Julio Gaitan from the Law School and with the support of colleagues from the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard in 2018—have been key to contributing from academia to the visibility and discussion of digital-related problems. At Javeriana, we are creating the Center for Citizenships and Technologies to support research, teaching, and cooperation projects between government, companies, communities, and universities.
The field of internet, data, and platform studies is still to be consolidated in the country—especially at the level of collaboration and convergence between disciplinary knowledge, communities, and multiple sectors. And also at the level of its infrastructure, materiality, and historicity. We need to understand from interdisciplinary perspectives how sociotechnical communication systems work and how they are intimately entangled with social, cultural, and political processes. Maria Jose Afanador and other historian colleagues from Universidad de los Andes have been doing a very interesting project on the history of the internet in Colombia, interviewing people who worked from different institutions to establish the first nodes in the country.
We need to better understand technological infrastructure to also be able to govern it. A key thing is understanding how the digital, with its speed and apparent immateriality, is mounted on faulty and broken infrastructures. For example, the national mail system in Colombia—a system characterized by its slowness and inefficiency since its inception in the 19th century, and which even today is faulty. For example, last year I sent a letter to Rome, and three months later, seeing that it hadn’t reached its destination, I had to start tracking where it was. And I discovered that the letter hadn’t even left Bogotá. It was near El Dorado airport in an office of the current mail company; for some reason they couldn’t explain to me, the letter could never leave its city of origin. And it never reached its destination.
Here, the malfunction of communication infrastructures and systems has been a historical pattern. Faced with the failures of local communication infrastructures, the digital appeared as a “never-before-seen” solution—as a viable and functional alternative that would finally allow us to make the “leap” to modernity, to the global, to knowledge and information societies.
In Colombia, there were projects that took advantage of the myth of the digital as an engine for social transformation and greater inclusion: the Santos government installed digital kiosks similar to Brazil’s digital culture points. However, here the emphasis was more on connectivity and access to technology, not on cultural production. There was very little training for people, little education; it was something imperative: “the internet arrived, connect,” with an absence of pedagogy and attention to the sociocultural processes of appropriation. Research on what young people did in the digital kiosks has revealed that the uses were mainly for entertainment: watching YouTube, cultural consumption, little learning, and almost no software development.
I believe that digital transformation has been very oriented toward making us global consumers, and not so much toward empowering us as citizens. Since the economic opening of the 90s at the end of the last century, we have lost critical space to think about and exercise the rights of citizen-user-consumers of technology. This has had a profound impact on civic education and the way we participate in an advanced and complex capitalist and consumerist society. If we continue like this, with the monopolies that manage the global digital infrastructure, our sovereignty will be increasingly decimated, affecting decision-making at all levels—from the state at a collective level to people at an individual level, also passing through the decisions of cities, organizations, educational institutions, etc. If Colombia and Latin American countries do not start developing their own digital infrastructures, it will be very difficult to govern ourselves.
