Media for All by 2015

19 January 2004

Birds sing. People talk. The need of human beings to communicate with one another is as fundamental as that.

It is how we make conscious our invisible bonds of connectedness.

As John Donne said, back in the pre-gender-sensitive days of the 17th century: ''No man is an island, and any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind.''

Many of us engaging in initiatives to extend access to information and communication technologies (ICT), however, do not draw attention to such soft, idealistic aims.

Instead, after a tip of the hat to empowerment and community-building, and some mumbling about vision and values, we hastily re-focus on the practical and measurable benefits of information sharing - healthcare, education, agricultural know-how, weather reports, market prices - and pretend that it's the information being shared that makes the real difference, rather than the transformative act of sharing itself.

The implications of so many millions of us now being able to instantly share our thoughts with millions of other humans is overwhelming.

What will be the effect on humans of this new amazing power to communicate? And on those left out of the charmed circle of connectivity?

These are important questions, on both the societal and individual level, for the creation and maintenance of our personal identity depends on the environment (human and non-human) with which we interact.

Psychologist Chris Robertson put it more succinctly: Identity is interactive.

Anyone who denies that people are affected that much by their interactions should consider: What do torturers do when they want to destroy their victims' sense of identity to drive them mad? They isolate them.

One must have an unusually strong identity to hold on to a steady sense of meaning when you are plunged into solitary confinement.

Torturers and their victims mak up only a tiny proportion of Earth's inhabitants. But hundreds of millions of others left incommunicado have damaging levels of disconnectedness forced on them.

Tens of millions of young parents suffer severe depression each year when childbirth plunges them into social isolation. Instead of the increased bonding they expected, they find themselves at the mercy of tiny, shrieking tormentors screaming inexplicably through the night.

A few lucky parents have access to a partial solution via ICTs. They find a new community to connect with in the form of online parent-support groups.

Cecilia Garcia, Executive Director of Connect for Kids explains that her group offers people a sense of connectedness and mutual responsibility for the well-being of our children.

And that's exactly the point of ICTs. If I could choose to add a Millennium Development Goal, it would be Media for All by 2015.

ICTs offer us an historic opportunity to create a new world of mutual responsibility and human solidarity - though only if and when the majority of the world has fair and equitable access to the means of communication.

A first step is for citizen-consumers to have broader access to the content selected, created, and disseminated by media professionals.

But the real communications revolution will only come when enough citizens can make the initial selection, creation, and dissemination of that content, i.e. when citizens have the option to become media producers, when they can talk with, as well as listen to, those of us who are media professionals playing the role of facilitator.
The People's Media era will begin when the Information Society is replaced by a Communication Society.

An image comes into my mind. It is of a dazed, malnourished young woman standing shakily beside her shack in a slum in Ahmedabad, India, cupping delicately in her hand a baby so puny and weak that his cry is barely audible.

The child is the newest member of a once-flourishing tribal community of forest-dwellers from Rajasthan. The community had not been able to prove their land rights to timber-hungry authorities in the language of bureaucracy, legal deeds asserting that the forest was a commodity belonging to them.

They could only explain their right to live there in their own language: a holistic oral history of living in peaceful synergy with their environment for centuries. But their language, dismissed by local bureaucrats, remains unheard by others around the world that might have supported the community's cause.

Now this community, and thousands of others similarly unheard, are broken up and scattered across city slums, living in conditions described by one tribal woman as a living death.

The words of such people provide more than information. They are communications conveying the living tragedies endured unjustifiably by our fellow humans and reminding us of our connectedness and our mutual responsibility.

When the People's Media era dawns, we will have no excuses left for being ignorant about what is really going on in the world. We will have no more excuses for global apartheid.

IPS guest column for the World Summit on the Information Society (Geneva, December 2003), published in TerraViva online.