Communication Today: Old Challenges and New Realities
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Communication Today: Old Challenges and New Realities. Die Entwicklung des Internets stellt eine Herausforderung für traditionelle Konzepte der Informationsrechte dar. In der Debatte über diese Rechte und das Internet werden die einzelnen Rechte oft behandelt, und es wird versucht, sie einzeln der neuen technologischen Umwelt anzupassen. Wir sind der Auffassung, dass die Notwendigkeit besteht, sich mit den Informationsrechten im Rahmen eines umfassenden Menschenrechtsverständnisses zu beschäftigen und dabei besonders das Recht auf Kommunikation zu beachten. In dem Heft wird die Entwicklung des Rechts auf Kommunikation untersucht, ebenso die Frage, wie es definiert und durchgesetzt werden kann.
William J. McIver, Jr., William F. Birdsall, and Merrilee Rasmussen, Q.C.
The development of the Internet challenges traditional conceptions of information rights. The discourse surrounding these rights and the Internet typically deals with each right in isolation and attempt to adapt long established understandings of each right to the new technological environment. We content there is a need to address information rights within a comprehensive human rights framework, specifically, a right to communicate. This paper examines the development of a right to communicate and how it can be defined and implemented.
John D.H. Downing, with Yong Cao
Detailed, reliable, and fully comparable data on these component parts of the relationship between global media corporations the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are quite difficult to access. Not surprisingly, given regional economic growth over the past two decades, there is also a major investment in speculating on the future of East and South-East Asia, so that disentangling cold fact from authoritatively enunciated fancy encounters a number of methodological hazards. This article endeavours, through mapping the component parts of the relationship and noting some methodological issues, to provide helpful guidelines for further research.
Pradip Thomas
In late November 2003, the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) was involved in co-organising a regional workshop on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) in Southern Africa. The meetings were held at the University of Botswana, Gaborone. One of the more interesting sessions involved a traditional healer, a bone-setter by profession. His description of the process of healing was fascinating, not least because it was ‘unusual’, but the questions that he raised were equally fascinating. He described the manner in which healing occurs – the roots of a particular bush are placed on the affected part – and the healer energises, empowers and charges the root to heal, leading to the healing. What needs to be done to recognise the specificity of this knowledge, the specificity of its use, how does one legitimate such processes of knowledge generation, knowledge dissemination and knowledge use within an IKS system? And more importantly how can such systems be made legitimate and treated on a par with mainstream understandings of knowledge as Intellectual Property?
Daya Thussu
The opening up of the Chinese media sphere to the outside world has profound implications for the international flow of media and cultural products. Aware of China’s potential, transnational media and communications corporations have adopted an array of strategies to strengthen their positions in what may emerge as the world’s largest media market. What China has common with the other Asian giant, India, is that its media market has been consistently targeted and tamed by a particular company, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (one of the world’s biggest media and communications conglomerates). This article examines the strategies of News Corporation to explore why it has been more successful than others in negotiating its way around the complex Asian mediascape and acquiring a position of strength among Asia’s major media markets.
Gudmund Gjelsten and Asbjørn Simonnes
How do children experience the different values taught at home and in school and those they encounter in mass media presentations? The following article presents some key findings from four years of research among children aged 11-12 and 15-16 in seven municipalities in Western Norway. The study was endorsed and financed by the Research Council of Norway
Patricia A. Made
On World Press Freedom Day in 1991, Southern African participants at a conference organised by UNESCO recommitted themselves to building an ‘Independent and Pluralistic African Press’. Out of this meeting emerged what is now known as the ‘Windhoek Declaration’, a document, which affirms an ‘independent, pluralistic and free press is essential to the development and maintenance of democracy in a nation, and for economic development.’ The following article examines how far this statement is at odds with stereotyping and stigmatising women in Southern Africa.
Celia Aldana
Media are usually in a paradoxical situation: although they generate debate and are key agents in the construction of the public sphere, they are rarely part of the public agenda. In a sense, despite making actors and issues visible, their role is not debated unless something spectacular happens. In a sense, they remain invisible. Is this for the best? Should they form part of the public agenda? Should what the media do, how they perform their role, be a matter of public deliberation?
Jim Richstad, with Lloyd Sommerlad, Dan Wedemeyer, and Michael Ogden
Stan Harms had an almost magical quality of listening to people, recognizing their concerns and hopes, and weaving their ideas into creating the Right to Communicate. The new human right for everyone in the world includes the rights in Article 19 of the International Declaration of Human Rights and goes beyond Article 19 to the promise Jean d’Arcy saw with the explosion of communication technology.