| OPINION :
Media for all by 2015
By Anuradha Vittachi (*)
Birds sing. People talk. The need of human beings to communicate with one another is as fundamental as that.
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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: '' Noman 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 landrights 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.
Links:
Connect for Kids www.connectforkids.org www.connectforkids.org
(*) Anuradha Vittachi, director of OneWorld International Foundation, is the
author of numerous articles of issues of global justice. This column
wasproduced by the IPS Columnist Service.
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