Dear Armand Mattelart: F---k you too
It is a real pity I did not hear of your presentation here in Puerto Rico until after the fact. I had been meaning to take a look at your often-cited literature, which I presumed must have had some merit. However, after having purchased your "Historia de la sociedad de la informacion", and briefly perused it over, I am somewhat surprised that the French state decides to sponsor someone who so patently detests the fruits his own culture. If colonials have internalized their imposed inferiority, your rebellious search for 'justice' has led you to overgeneralize the negative features of the Western condition.
It does not take much brain power to notice that you commit glaring errors of category, upon stating that the "universalization" and "homogenization" of the internet-led globalization is due to mathematics. Assertions like these reinforce claims as to the decayed state of the french intelligentsia, who have merely become the spoiled brats who do not recognize that their very existence is based on the very modernity they so detest. (Only complex modern social structures can sustain 'intellectuals' who do nothing but complain.) Your argument is basically one of protest that seeks no points of commonality and conflict-resolution. Quite the contrary. Their immaturity strike so deeply at 'meta-narratives', that the possibility of any dialogue is immediately discarded. One would presume that individuals seeking justice and peace would have created a more sophisticated body of works than the one you spouted.
"Where does the categorical error reside," you might ask? Well, quite simply in the fact that social orders are not determined by science, in this case mathematics. This is a 'scientific' determinism, akin to other determinisms (social, technological), that were abandoned long ago in the Western intellectual tradition, which you apparently seem not to have read despite citing nearly every author there exists. While you might have seen the messages, you did not understand them.
Let me give you an example, as it is clear it needs to be explained to you very slowly. Let us consider another, less conflictive categorical series than that of "globalization": physics, chemistry, and biology. It is clear that the chemical composition of life will not strictly determine the forms that life will take, as well evidenced by the vast orders of animal life that have existed over the years. Carbon-based entities can form orders of reptilia (dinosaurs) or that of mammalian (humans) which are with us today. To claim that the injustices of "globalization", particularly "homogenization" (a statement that has itself not been proven) is based on "numerical standardization", is to make the same logical error of category.
It is even more surprising that a university department of what is essentially an underdeveloped state (Puerto Rico) should decide to invite you. It is obvious that your anti-science and anti-technology philosophy would completely ruin our first attempts at true modernization--one based on the creation of new goods and services for world-wide export. Another intellectual, who also critiques the modern social order who is more 'liberal' than yourself would strongly disagree: Noam Chomsky. According to him, the third world (in the case of Puerto Rico, second world), urgently needs to develop its science and technology more than ever, if it is ever to increase its sovereignty.
This raises the question wether the Puerto Rican nation would be better off dismissing from its faculties those professors who propose philosophies and speakers which are so patently detrimental to the national well-being. It is one thing to use the "liberty of expression" promote the open and honest exploration of critical issues, and it is quite another thing to use this ideology to foment dysfunctional ideas that are so detrimental to a community. All civil liberties are equally accompanied by civil duties.