IMPACT OF INTERNET TECHNOLOGIES ON GLOBAL POLITICS DISCUSSED IN NGO FORUM

Press Release
NGO/316
PI/1180

IMPACT OF INTERNET TECHNOLOGIES ON GLOBAL POLITICS DISCUSSED IN NGO FORUM

Three-Day Conference to Conclude This Afternoon

Advances in communications technology have shrunk the world, but "narrow- casting", over-simplification and the prevalence of developed-country news producers have led to uneven coverage of world events, according to the Director of Communications for the Secretary-General, Shashi Tharoor. He addressed those issues this morning during a panel discussion on "Culture and Communications Technology: Empowerment and Marginalization”, at the fifty-second annual Non- Governmental Organization (NGO) Conference, organized by the Department of Public Information (DPI).

Mr. Tharoor told representatives of more than 800 NGOs gathered in New York for the three-day conference that the United Nations was determined to rise to the challenge of reaching an international audience in both the developing and developed world. He pointed to the agenda-setting function assumed by the news media. Daily pictures of Bosnians dying, for example, had aroused public concern and prompted governments to take action, causing the United Nations to be "thrust into a peacekeeping operation in a country where there was no peace to keep".

Also speaking about the Internet, the Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton, Ali Mazrui, whose statement was read aloud by the moderator, said that the World Wide Web might carry the seeds of moral and religious reform. The new technology could give Islam a chance to realize its original aim of transnational universalism. It might also cause an Islamic Reformation, in that Islamic women would have equal access to the new technology, and there would be greater possibilities for democratizing the theocracy.

Victoria Jones, a talk-show host of MSNBC-TV, agreed that the Internet had the potential to revolutionize the world, as everyone could use that new technology. At present, however, the decision of what to feature in the media was not made by journalists or even the editors, but by very few people, acting in the interest of the shareholders of the mega-media companies. A nation could not be free when access to information was dictated by a very small group.

Also participating in the discussion were Peter Arnett, Chief Correspondent of ForeignTV.com, who spoke of the need for people under authoritarian regimes to be empowered to take their governments to task, and Meraah Mahajuodeen,

DPI/NGO Annual Conference - 1a - Press Release NGO/316 PI/1180 17 September 1999

Senior Producer, Young Asia Television, who described his organization's efforts to empower young people to report to audiences in an ethical and equitable way.

The Conference will meet again at 3 p.m. today, concluding the session with panel discussions on "New Partnerships and Structures for the 21st Century" and "Globalization in the 21st Century".

Conference Work Programme

The fifty-second DPI/NGO Conference met this morning to hear a panel discussion on: Culture and Communications Technology: Empowerment and Marginalization. The moderator was Victoria Jones, Host, MSNBC-TV. Panellists were: Peter Arnett, Chief Correspondent, ForeignTV.com; Meraash Mahajuodeen, Senior Producer, Young Asian Television; and Shashi Tharoor, Director of Communications, Executive Office of the Secretary-General. A written statement by Ali Mazrui, Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, was read out by the moderator.

Statements

VICTORIA JONES, Host, MSNBC-TV, welcomed participants and then read out the statement by Mr. Mazrui.

ALI MAZRUI, Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, pointed to an uneven and potentially divisive distribution of computer skills in the world. One university in the United States might have more computer-literate people than the whole of an African country. Even within the United States, there was evidence that the digital divide coincided with the racial divide. Furthermore, the World Wide Web might also carry the seeds of moral and religious reform.

He said the Christian Reformation would probably not have been possible without print; it had shaken the foundations of Catholicism. Similarly, the Web could shake the foundations of Islamic tradition. The first casualty of the Web might be national sovereignty. The new technology could give Islam a chance to realize its original aim of transnational universalism. Islam had always sought to kill distance through faith, as Muslims turned five times a day to Mecca, communicating with God through a city thousands of miles away. Many Muslims had already risen to the challenge of the new information age with Islamic resource guides on the Internet.

He said that Islam and the information revolution were on the whole allies. But there were two areas that would need accommodation. One was the gender issue . In Islam, there were two doctrines on the separation of the two genders. One treated women as separate but equal. This doctrine could survive the information revolution. Women could stay at home and be computer workers. The second treated women as separate and unequal and assumed two different doors of knowledge, one for men and one for women. Afghanistan’s Taliban was the most extreme example of that doctrine. The information highway would eliminate that divide. Women would learn forbidden knowledge through the Internet. In time, the veil was bound to be destroyed by new technology.

The second area, if there were an Islamic Reformation because of the new technologies, could be the democratization of the theocracy. Democracy was a people-focused system, while a theocracy was God-focused. The digital divide, according to Mr. Mazrui, could not only give way to digital democracy, but could give rise to further humaneness.

PETER ARNETT,panel member,in the field of television, once competition had come into play, standards had begun to erode and it was now about the bottom line. Today, the Internet provided tremendous opportunities for both individual and community empowerment. However, it also brought with it various tensions.

Care had to be taken; otherwise the technological revolution could spin out of control, he said. There were elites in many countries who were not comfortable with the potential shift in power and authority brought on by empowerment through the Internet; examples could be found in Singapore and China. Also, individuals empowered by the Internet might use it to challenge traditional notions of power.

He said there were ways to fully realize the potential of Internet technology. It was important that NGOs realize how political a tool the Internet was. It was critical to good citizenship to understand the technology. The most successful groups and NGOs were those that were embracing technology and not those rejecting it; those using it to educate and reach out to the public.

Technology must be used in a measured and responsible way, he said. In that context, the value of professional journalism must not be forgotten. To fully realize the promise of new technology, the commitment of the private sector was needed.

MERAASH MAHAJUODEEN, Senior Producer, Young Asia Television (YA TV), said he was representing both his organization and his country, Sri Lanka. There were a growing number of youth issues that needed to be addressed, including the problems of drugs, prostitution and illegal labour. Relying on mass media to do so, however, risked the development of a kind of cultural homogenization, where people abandoned their particular customs and beliefs. In order to respect different tastes and maintain a rapport with audiences, media personnel had to first understand the issues about which they reported and then convey that understanding to the audience in an ethical and equitable way.

For its part, YA TV had been doing just that for the last couple of years by giving a voice to young people, he said. Its basic formula was to empower young people, inculcate in them professional broadcast experience and then let them communicate the ideas that would matter to its growing audience of some 150 million people.

SHASHI THAROOR, panel member, said that today's topic was an immense one. The first trend, about which all panellists had spoken, was the globalization of communications technology and the extraordinary impact of global television and the Internet.

He said the Under-Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, Olara Otunnu, had been accosted by a refugee in Sierra Leone who asked why the United Nations spent $1.23 on every refugee in Kosovo and only 11 cents on each refugee in Africa. Asked how he knew that, the refugee had replied, "why the BBC, of course". He had been watching television in the refugee camps. That example made clear the extent to which communications technology had shrunk the world.

A related trend was the effect of technology on the practice of news, he went on. It was no longer necessary to have tonnes of equipment and a satellite dish the size of a house to produce television. Each year saw ever cheaper cameras, operated by non-technicians, including the reporters themselves. Pictures could be sent on a telephone line. That should lead to wider global coverage where no story was too remote, too expensive or too difficult to transmit. Technology should start eliminating the excuses for uneven coverage.

However, he said, the globalization of communication had been matched by the localization of news -- where a fire in Brooklyn was made to seem more important than the bombing death of 100 people in Moscow. Whole communities or whole nations no longer sat down to watch the same programme, as a local focus increasingly prevailed. News anywhere in the world still reflected the principal interests of its producers, who were largely from the developed world.

As a result, he continued, the Bosnian crisis got far more coverage than the conflict in Mozambique, where the conditions of brutality, cleansing mass rape were just as acute -- arguably more so -- than in Bosnia. Yet, how many in the world saw the same level of coverage? Moreover, a fraction of coverage was given to the United Nations’ successes, such as its efforts to resolve that crisis in Mozambique.

The agenda-setting function of modern media coverage was another trend, he said. Amid the talk of expanding the Security Council, everyone forgot that it already had a sixteenth member, namely Cable News Network (CNN). It was true that the media did not make policy, but it could determine which policy needed to be made. When Bosnians had been bleeding and dying on television everyday, governments could not ignore the clamour to do something. It was then that the United Nations had been thrust into a peacekeeping operation in a country where there was no peace to keep.

An increasing phenomenon was that of "narrow-casting", he said. There had been a dramatic decline in the coverage of international affairs, even in the respectable print media, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, let alone a country’s average newspaper. Stories about so-called "remote” or "obscure" parts of the world were no longer seen in the general broadcast media. A story about Chad, for example, would appear only on a special interest or public-access channel about Africa. It was therefore more difficult for the United Nations to raise public interest on Chad.

There was also the great risk of simplification: "if it bleeds, it leads", he said. The question of empowerment and marginalization, was not a question of technology, but of the way in which news was made. Stories from the third world, for example, contained only English-speaking interviews. That led one to ask whose point of view was being aired in world coverage. The question of access to the Internet posed an enormous technological gap -- not only between rich and poor countries, but also within poor countries. The dividing line within many poor societies was no longer just the poverty line, but the fibre optic and high-speed digital line. Resisting such forms of marginalization was vital.

He said the United Nations faced the challenge of reaching an international audience in both the developing and developed world. Equally challenging was trying to keep the interest of 188 Member States alive while relying very heavily on just three or four of those countries. Despite the vastness of the challenge, it was one to which the Organization was determined to rise.

The moderator, VICTORIA JONES, said she had noticed in the United States an increasing merging of news and opinion. This was a problem for the whole world, because the United States dominated the world news. She said the O.J. Simpson case was an important one, because it embodied the three American obsessions that were being exported: “sex, race, sex, celebrity and sex”. Last year, it had been impossible in the media to talk about anything but Lewinsky. The media were fiddling while Rome was burning. Had there not been such an obsession with the Lewinsky scandal, the situation in the Balkans might not have deteriorated to such an extent a year later. Similarly, in East Timor, it had not been until babies were seen being thrown over the wall into the United Nations compound that the story had started in America.

The decision of what to feature in the media was not made by journalists or even editors, but by a very few people whose concern was not for the population, but for shareholders. Megacompanies, more or less monopolized the news. But there was hope. Using the new technologies in the best possible ways, peoples’ views could be known. She said that the people present at this conference should continue to hammer at the doors, but they should also find the human face to their story, because that was the only way to get them on TV and into the papers.

The Internet had the potential to revolutionize the world, she said, adding that she hoped it would revolutionize the world for women. All that technology was there for everyone to use as they wished. She said the wonders of humanity already existed on a spiritual plane, because humans were spiritual beings. All they had to do was to bring what already existed on the spiritual plane to the physical plane. The people at this conference could achieve this goal despite the resistance from mainstream media. Eventually, they would be heard and bring about change.

Discussion

Asked how the individual viewer could make a difference, Mr. ARNETT said that pressure had to be put on think tanks, associations and media-aware groups to ensure that the views of individuals are heard and represented. Such groups were trying to see how the Internet could be used to benefit more people.

Asked how journalists could report the news to the public in a world of government propaganda and "disinformation", he said there was a contest for the facts. The media in the United States did a good job of taking the government to task. The West had an aggressive media in that regard. That was not the case in the developing world. The question in those countries was how, under authoritarian regimes, to take the government to task.

Mr. THAROOR added that mechanisms were needed to foster, encourage and even finance the creation and maintenance of independent and free media. For example, currently the United Nations was trying to set up an independent media authority in Kosovo. Ethical standards and professional skills were needed to foster and ensure peace-building in societies.

Asked how the average citizen differentiated between real information and disinformation, Mr. MAHAJUODEEN said that various organizations provided information but only a few were reliable sources. The individual had to verify which source had a reputation for reliable and beneficial information. Mr. ARNETT, asked if he had any advice for journalism students regarding the risks of reporting the news, said that in the face of brutality, journalism went on. Despite the death of some 70 journalists during the Viet Nam War, journalists had emerged from Britain, Japan, the Philippines and other parts of Asia, who were willing to risk their lives. His advice was to take precautions while reporting the news. "The chances of being severely hurt are low and so do what you believe you should be doing.”

Asked whether the United Nations would one day have its own television channel, Mr. THAROOR said that he thought it would one day. If regular news programmes did not cover the issues, then the Organization needed to step in and fill that need. While United Nations TV did exist, it had a very limited audience. It was more important to get the United Nations message into the mainstream media because that was what the majority of people were watching.

Asked about the journalist's sense of morality in presenting the news, Ms. JONES said that when it came to the news, one person's moral stand was another person's immorality. The news should present the facts as they were and allow the viewers to determine the morality as they saw it. "People have tremendous good sense.”

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