Invitation to the World Forum of Free Medias 

Belem of Para, Brazil, January 26 and 27, 2009

The eve of the World Social Forum, (activists of free media, midialivristas) of the entire planet will come together to add strength and discuss the creation of new forms of communication.

For those who are daily practicing and struggling for another communication, this moment combines the expansion of opportunities with the fierce inequalities. While we are increasing citizens' initiatives and counter-hegemonic communication, becomes stronger the concentration of large media corporations and explains the role of these groups as support of the hegemonic speech.

1. The 30 years of neoliberal hegemony preceding the current economic crisis changed the world, the subjectivity, the human imagination and the role of the information in the society. The last decades of technological change, the change in capitalism, the invention of other ways of sharing, living, working, pointing to the crisis of the neoliberal model and the emergence of new paradigms and others imaginaries.

2. A social consensus has been modeled by communication systems interconnected by interests and appalling technology. At the same time, new ways of resistance and counter-speech emerge and spread seeking break the "consensus". Despite of the limitations, the new technologies serves to democracy and emerge with global impact and ability to articulate networks, which operate under new models.

3. A constant gear, formed by large conglomerates of communication, reproduce and play the same hegemonic narrative which makes impulses, desires and expectations. Moreover, the possibility of building other narratives and ownership of new media for new subject of the speech (collectives, suburbs, minorities, etc.), it s a local, national and global experimental creation, in spite of new forms of alienation. Never cultural processes, the creative economy, the valorization of information and knowledge were so crucial to think of society.

4. Whether explicit or not, many people, networks, groups are forced to phenomenal forces whose destructive power becomes evident in the uncertainty of these days, marked by a society model increasingly socially unjust, economically unsustainable, environmentally destructive, morally unethical, uncritical and permissive. The crisis of capitalism, the mass media and the single thought creates, however, an opportunity to reshape the discussion about the role of communication and information in the contemporary world.

5. Revealed, in this financial crash, the role of the oligopolic media with growing influence on society destiny, including omitting and insulating dissonant voices and facts. The intersections between the media and the power of deregulated markets shrank in these 30 years. The financialisation of the economy generated a return of financialisation of the news, adding to it a new instrument for manipulating the economy. Nothing illustrates this more than the commitment of the persistent juggling of concealment of a speculative system only recognized when its explosion won inescapable evidence.
6. States, governments, democracies and development processes were at the mercy of designs and blackmail driven by this self-destructive logic. The financial crisis exposes the crisis of neoliberalism. Large communication structures of endorsed this process, lending it legitimacy, seduction and coerced argumentation. Above all, taking it from multiple strategies for disqualification of dissonant voices echoed by governments, parties, social leaders or even by the resistance of a frighten and embarrassed subjectivity.

7. It is no longer possible to fight for the economic and social democratization of world or a village, without building many more voices of various ranges, with international influence able to counteract to the factory of the forgers of a social alleged consensus. In the same way that capitalism is global, struggles and resistance are global. We do not want to produce a new consensus, but defend the possibility of differences and divergences.

8. These voices will not be unison of opposite sing to what is combat, but precisely the harmonic combination of distinct and varied voices that today arise from the affirmation of the right to communication of the various groups and individuals committed to the struggle for social justice, and that have in this diversity, its strength.

9. It is now even more important that media vehicles not aligned to the hegemonic thinking, independent producers of media and all those who are daily guided against injustice and oppression resulting from neoliberalism recognize themselves in the similarity and diversity of their concerns. The responsibility that binds us together should materialize in forums and actions of coverage that counteract the crisis that is spreading around the globe.

10. So we invite the vehicles of democratic information, communities, the collectives, entities, social movements, the bloggers and each individual? which is itself a communicator - to participate in the I World Forum of Free Media, held in Brazil (in Belem of Para) in January 26 and 27, 2009. The conclusions of WFFM will have important political implications in the deliberations of the World Social Forum, held in the same city beginning on January 27, 2009.

11. Right that we share the same concern and sense of urgency in building a free and democratic media, we await the confirmation of your presence. 

Forum of Free Media, Brazil, November 2008

Translate: thanks to Melina Marcelino and Kelem Cabral