News: Media & ICTs

News reports from South Africa are shocking. Violence unseen in years was unleashed in the poorest districts of Johannesburg, a city where APC counts four of its member organisations and many staff. From neighbouring Pretoria, Tshepo Thlaku of member Ungana-Afrika decided to act, using what he knows best: technology. He started a group on the social networking website Facebook called South Africans Against Xenophobia, Racism & Tribalism. “The group is growing fast like wild fire and there is a number of people from NGOs and church groups sharing contacts and project ideas,” Tshepo declared.

The distinction between “new” and “old” technology is no longer significant in the current state of technology convergence. People from community radios and telecentres are working together for more democratic and participatory access to communication, specifically in rural and poor urban areas. This paper by Carlos Rivadeneyra provides conceptual tools to re-think, from this perspective, what we understand by information society [pdf version, in Spanish].

Digitalisation of media is an approaching reality for Latin American countries. This technologic paradigm shift promises more democratic and diverse access to radio and TV frequencies. However, there is also a great risk of reproducing the same inequalities and power relations that exist in the “analogical” world and thus of media being in the hands of a few. This paper by Gustavo Gómez Germano

illustrates the political and regulatory implications of an apparently technical and thus neutral phenomenon. It also suggests advocacy priorities to create a more informed and active civil society [full version, pdf format].

Other voices: The struggle for community radio in India, by two University of Hyderabad scholars, has just been published by Sage. BytesForAll’s Frederick Noronha interviews the authors of the book: Vinod Pavarala, Professor of Communication and Dean of the Sarojini Naidu School of Communication, University of Hyderabad, and Dr Kanchan K Malik, a lecturer at the university.

Nearly 70% of households in Cameroon have a radio set. APC-Cameroon member PROTEGE QV intends to place information at the disposal of the urban and rural women, particularly by means of radio broadcasting programmes. With their latest project oriented towards small businesses run by women, representatives of PROTEGE QV carried out a field trip earlier this year to rural localities in western Cameroon to hand-over material to two radio stations and promote their Multimedia Resource Kit.

Information has become a powerful weapon that can be manipulated during times of conflict. This was seen again in central Africa between 1993 and 1994, as revealed by Sylvie Niombo of APC-Africa-Women in her analysis of the work, The media and conflicts in Central Africa, edited by Marie-Soleil Frère and published in 2007 by the Panos Institute of Paris.

OURMedia calls itself a "network and forum" and is made up of engaged academics and media practitioners, activists, artists and policy-makers who support the growth of what they term the "democratic potential of community, alternative and ‘citizens’ media".

On the sidelines of the OURMedia conference held in Sydney, Australia, in mid-April 2007, John D.H. Downing spoke to APCNews and explained where his critique of the media intersects with the possibilities opened up by information and communication technologies.

Up until recently, Prague-based Econnect, a civil society association facilitating communication through the internet, broadcasting news clips via its website. Most of the these were simple text articles, some had pictures. Now, Tomáš Tetiva of Econnect says they are changing their approach and going for ‘new media’.