Judith Clarke

The news is partly good: the ITU’s 2006 statistics show the developing world catching up a little with the developed world in using communication technology. The poorer countries are using mobile phones more, buying more computers and getting onto the internet more.1 But that is not the whole story.

Michael Traber

Knowledge is more than information. It includes understanding and interpreting information as the basis for decisions that directly affect people’s welfare. True knowledge demands access to information about issues that impact on people’s lives and their ability to contribute to policy-making. Understanding the context in which knowledge moves – especially that of public communication – is vital to processes of social development, so that anything that diminishes genuine public communication must be challenged. The following article, prophetic in its time, discusses some of the obstacles to a clear vision of what needs to be done.

Nicole Aylwin and Rosemary J. Coombe

By an overwhelming vote in October 2005, UNESCO adopted the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (hereafter the Cultural Diversity Convention). The Cultural Diversity Convention is designed to recognize the importance of cultural diversity and its contribution to the well being of humanity and its future improvements. Some of its listed objectives include, ‘to protect and promote the diversity of cultural expression’, ‘to create conditions for cultures to flourish and to freely interact in a mutually beneficial manner,’ and ‘to promote respect for the diversity of cultural expression and raise awareness of its value at the local, national and international level.’

Silvio Waisbord

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are one of the most ambitious global commitments ever to improving social conditions, particularly those affecting the most excluded and marginalized populations worldwide. As such, they are a blueprint to motivate, guide, inspire and hold accountable governments, donors and organizations. But where is communication?

Eric Loo

With freedom comes great responsibility, says a famous movie script. Not so with the Cambodian press. The many publications owned by as many factions are unrestrained in slandering their adversaries. Everyone’s fair media prey – except for the King. Unbridled reporting with no clear ethical guidelines often sees public decency being violated, which has caused near zero public faith in the media.

Thomas Tufte

The following two testimonials are from Grahamstown, a town of 120,000 inhabitants in Eastern Cape Province in South Africa, where in 2002 I did fieldwork among 14-19 year old youth from 5 different socio-economic strata. The objective was to seek a deeper understanding of how a local community handles the HIV/AIDS pandemic in everyday life in order to use those insights to critically assess the relevance, quality and appropriateness of current HIV/AIDS communication.

María Elena Hermosilla

Escribir sobre comunicación para el desarrollo me obliga a repasar mis propias experiencias profesionales en comunicación rural, derechos de las mujeres, recepción activa de televisión o prevención del consumo de drogas, desde espacios institucionales muy diversos: ONGs chilenas y brasileras, Gobierno, organizaciones sociales. Me hace revisar bibliografía y constatar que los problemas están, una vez más, signados por el encantamiento ante los avances tecnológicos.

Katarina Soukup

When the time came a few years ago to find an Inuktitut term for the word ‘Internet”, Nunavut’s former Official Languages Commissioner, Eva Aariak, chose ikiaqqivik, or ‘travelling through layers’ (Minogue, 2005). The word comes from the concept describing what a shaman does when asked to find out about living or deceased relatives or where animals have disappeared to: travel across time and space to find answers.

Aníbal Ford y edición por Julieta G. Casini

Este trabajo es una edición del artículo publicado por el profesor Aníbal Ford, en Resto del Mundo: Nuevas Mediaciones de las agendas críticas internacionales.2 Aquí también rompemos la estructura tradicional del paper y sólo presentamos algunos ejemplos que inciden en la comunicación y el desarrollo. La propuesta es analizar algunas de las problemáticas que directa o indirectamente afectan o van a afectar a América Latina.

Bella Mody

AIDS is predominantly a disease of poor people in poor countries. 2005 UNAIDS reports point out 90% of new infections take place in developing countries. Two thirds of all people living with the virus and 77% of all women living with HIV are in sub-Saharan Africa. India has the second largest number of people infected with HIV after South Africa. The epidemic is growing fast in East and Central Asia as also in Eastern Europe.

United Nations Development Programme

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are an integrated set of eight goals and 18 time-bound targets for extending the benefits of globalization to the world’s poorest citizens. The goals aim to stimulate real progress by 2015 in tackling the most pressing issues facing developing countries – poverty, hunger, inadequate education, gender inequality, child and maternal mortality, HIV/AIDS and environmental degradation. UNDP helps countries formulate national development plans focused on the MDGs and chart national progress towards them through the MDG reporting process.

Nancy Muturi

The following article briefly discusses the current situation of information and communication technologies and the challenges of adopting new media technologies in the Caribbean. It also offers some insights into the way forward post-WSIS citing examples from the region. The terms ‘new media’ and ‘communication technologies are used interchangeably throughout.

Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron and Clemencia Rodriguez

In the good old times, during the 1970s, things were called by their name. Studies of journalism were called exactly that. Universities had departments of journalism, where new professionals were trained to work in radio, television, or print media. However the emergence and domination of fields closer to corporate interests such as advertising and marketing soon began to put pressure on academic departments of journalism. Suddenly, the old departments of journalism changed to departments of ‘communication studies’ or – in Latin America – ‘social communication studies.’