PRESS CONFERENCE ON ‘CARING COMMUNITIES’ MEETING
| Press Briefing |
PRESS CONFERENCE ON ‘CARING COMMUNITIES’ MEETING
Without meaningful public diplomacy the meritorious goal of enriching the quality of life of today’s ageing population through information and communication technology would be impossible, correspondents were told at a Headquarters press conference today.
Benjamin Gilman, United States Public Delegate to the fifty-eighth session of the General Assembly and former United States Congressman, briefed reporters on today’s day-long forum entitled “Caring Communities for the Twenty-First Century: Imagining the Possible -– Age of Connectivity: Harnessing the Generations”, taking place at Headquarters. Mr. Gilman said the meeting, which had been attended by some 100 governmental and non-governmental representatives, had tried to offer a quality blueprint for an enriched society for all ages.
Organized by the International Council for Caring Communities, in collaboration with the United Nations Information and Communication Technologies Task Force, United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT), the Department of Economic and Social Affairs and the Department of Public Information, the goal of the forum was to provide an opportunity to examine the role of information and communication technologies in helping to meet the challenges presented by population ageing.
Stressing the need for public diplomacy, Mr. Gilman noted that, in the war against terrorism, the United States Government had lacked a good public diplomacy programme. Several years ago, the United States Government had “decimated” the United States Information Agency, folding it into the Department of State. He had opposed that decision, which had resulted in the loss of proper information being circulated to government agencies and overseas embassies.
As part of his keynote address, he said he had encouraged conferees to develop a campaign for public diplomacy. In that connection, he recommended that caring communities form advisory councils, work with business and marketing experts, develop good messengers and work with the media. The best goals in the world were meaningless without implementation through proper public diplomacy.
Also briefing correspondents, Alexandre Sidorenko, the United Nations Focal Point on Ageing, agreed that many laudable goals had been formulated throughout the United Nations system. The forum had focused on the goals set by two rather recently convened international meetings, namely the 2002 Second World Assembly on Ageing in Madrid and the 2003 World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva. The goal of the Madrid Assembly was to create a society for all ages. The goal of the Geneva Summit was to overcome the digital divide and to build an all-inclusive information society.
The focus of today’s discussion, he said, was how the goals of the two conferences could be achieved. One of the major tasks in achieving goals in the field of ageing and information and communication technology was to have workable public diplomacy.
One of the predominant themes had been the lack of political will, particularly in developing countries, to consider the needs and expectations of older persons, he said. To establish the necessary political will, he had stressed the need to mobilize civil society to persuade governments to look at the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century.
Asked to describe the problem of merging the goals of the Madrid and Geneva conferences in terms of substance, Mr. Gilman said the problem was educating the public through public diplomacy. It was important to ensure that public programmes in areas such ageing were understood and implemented. Public diplomacy would ensure that.
Mr. Sidorenko added that overcoming the digital divide was not merely an issue of bridging the gap between the developed and developing countries. There was another dimension, namely an intergenerational dimension that was more predominant in developing countries. In many developing countries, the elderly were isolated from even the very basic means of communication, such as telephones. Today’s society was not youthful anymore, with one out of every 10 people over the age of 60. In 2050, one out of every five people would be 60 years or older.
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