Progetto di cooperazione telematica sul tema Tempi e Spazi. Comunicazione di Eugenia Galateri [italiano]
Information and Communication Technology represents a new area for experimentation especially with respect to the forms of interactivity which it makes possible. There are new freedoms to exercise, even as individual subjects: the ease of access to public speech, also in the sense of written communication which now approaches oral communication and which modifies what we think of as public and private; physical boundaries dissolved; non-requirement of specialist knowledge for use, ease of communication and working within the net, etc. We would like here to outline some of the steps we have followed in the project Cooperazione Telematica e Interattivita’ (Telematic Cooperation and Interactivity), which has involved various Network Documentation Centres since 1996. In particular we have worked on the construction of web pages on Time(s) and Space(s) visible on the Prato City Network (http://www.comune.prato.it/tempi). The work group responsible for these pages holds monthly discussion sessions which have produced some of the material presented below; it is made up of six women and is in addition open to contributions from anyone who wishes to participate by sending material relevant to our theme. Our field of research and investigation is interdisciplinary (philosophy, sociology, religion, town planning, history, cultural anthropology) and covers both public spaces (organization, time tables, opening hours) and private spaces (families, time spent on caring for others, time for ourselves), memory, differences (cultural differences, sexual differences, age differences), etc. Taking as our starting point the wealth of wide-ranging bibliographical material available on the Italian database Lilith, in a series of meetings in various places we have been thinking about the transformations in the world of work and economic production, about the need to see linked the spheres of work as production and of work involved in the care of ourselves and of others, about possible changes in the social organization, about how the identities imposed by sexual roles represent restrictions for both women and men. Women’s reflections and point of view on time can provide an indication of direction and wider connections for the already wide-ranging debate in which Italy is at present engaged about the 35 hour working week and the reorganization of working hours for offices, shops and services in the city. There is one central point which informs all our work: the wish to draw attention to the fact that different subjects need different times; that the individual characteristics of each of us in the different stages of our lives can represent the focus of women’ s research and investigation in recent years, what we mean by saying that differences represent a collective fund of wealth which can be drawn upon by all of us, male and female alike. We have tried, through this project, to export a knowledge from our independent women’s places to a public space run by a local government. We have tried to find a way of relating to others, where those who speak and those who listen (those who write and those who read) present themselves, not simply as a “social actor”, with well-defined roles and identities, but above all as individual men and women, body and mind, in their own experience of life as it is lived. What we want to do and what we feel it is necessary to do, is to share the vast wealth of information and documentary sources acquired over years of analysis and research by Italian women and to give it wider circulation. This is the principal aim of the Lilith Network, which has been searchable in Internet since 1996 and is hosted by the server (ServerDonna) managed by the Associazione Orlando in Bologna at the following address: http://www.women.it/lilith The seminar on the increase of information exchange possible by means of computer technology, held in Florence in June 1997, revealed a keen interest in time(s) and space(s) in towns and cities on the part of many women already working on the city networks. Here we met some interested and attentive partners from the Prato City Council: Beatrice Magnolfi, the Councillor in charge of relations between the Council and the city (Assessore alla trasparenza), Rosanna Tocco, in charge of the City Network and Franco Neri, the Director of the Biblioteca Lazzerini Library. These people made it possible for the Florence Women Cooperative (Cooperativa delle Donne) and the Ossidiana Association (Associazione Ossidiana) to set up and run a Time(s) and Space(s) site on the Prato city network, which has been in operation since September 1997: http://www.comune.prato.it/tempi The pages of this site were designed to explore a complex interpretation of the theme and to invite active participation in their development. They cover, for example, social time, time for (y)ourself, telematic workshop on city spaces, work times, news-sheet, different cultural models, details of books and articles. The bibliographical details of recently published books and articles on the theme of time(s)and space(s) provide the basis for new acquisitions for the newly-set up specialist collection of the Biblioteca Lazzarini Public Library in Prato. The documentary material of the collection can be accessed via the pages of the city network. The Collection database, TESP, containing 500 records, many with abstracts, is updated every three months. It gives information on the material collected over the past seven years and up to the present by the FILI Documentation Centre (Centro di Documentazione FILI), which is in part already recorded in the Lilith database, which should be consulted for further bibliographical information (above all for un-published material). Many of the abstracts concern materials produced for numerous conferences, forums and seminars held in Italy on the organization of time(s) and space(s) in the city. As well as the pilot experience of the Modena Local Council, there is also, for example, the forum organized by the European University of Florence on Gender and the Use of Time, from 1994 to 1995, and meetings organized by other local Councils, political parties and trade unions. We would like to draw special attention to the Atlante sui Tempi edited by Sandra Bonfiglioli. There are also numerous press cuttings from magazines and journals. It is important to note that this is all material which is normally neither easily traceable nor easily found and which thus represents valuable indications for research and in particular for university dissertations. We would very much like to set up exchanges with other women even outside of Italy and learn of different approaches to the theme. With this in mind, we have included on our site some links to pages which deal with cultural points of view on time and space, beginning with cultural backgrounds which differ from the European, or western world in general. In our Western European countries in particular the organization of time(s) and space(s) is still always based solely on work time(s) defined by market forces of production. Our daily life, however, includes multiple time(s), space(s) and work(s), of differing intensity and duration according to the different stages of our life and our different cultures. In the next few months we are planning to organize our research and debate on a concept outlined in a recent study by Carmen Leccardi: new technologies not only open up new and untried existential conditions , but they also foreground our concrete uneasiness with respect to the concrete use of time (for example, we are potentially informed about what we could do, but at the same time confronted with concrete impossiblities, given our daily assault, which they thus accentuate, of lack of time to do things. The Time(s) and Space(s) pages work group meets once a month and is open to collaboration from anyone (female or male) who feels like contributing news of events, research, texts or articles of interest to our theme. The work group responsible for the Time(s)/Space(s) site is made up of a number of women architects, librarians, documentalists, teachers and a graphic artist. The e-mail address of our contact is millefi@tin.it
Happy surfing!