16 May 2026 MD 2026/2 Editorial

It is a challenge to engage with digital communication technologies in ways that relate meaningfully to local community realities, and yet without undermining inherent values and traditional knowledge. In response, this issue of Media Development focuses on digital media literacy and cultural integrity to highlight the interaction of digital communication technologies with local cultures/communities and to identify key concerns as well as some of the practical solutions communities are developing.

Digital colonialism is the economic and political imposition on the nations of the Majority World of digital technologies largely developed in the Minority World i.e. the Global North. In the field of communication studies, many scholars long ago recognised the need to tackle the behemoth of the transnational corporate system – which evolved into globalisation – and to practise what Cees J. Hamelink in his book Cultural Autonomy in Global Communications (co-published in 1983 by WACC in its series on Communication and Human Values) labelled “cultural dissociation”. In the spirit of the then New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), Hamelink urged nations seeking political sovereignty and independent development to create their own cultural and information structures.

Over four decades later, digital sovereignty – the collective ability of nations and communities to shape, govern, and safeguard the digital infrastructures, data, and standards that underpin their societies, including Artificial Intelligence – became a key principle of the UN’s Global Digital Compact (see Media Development 4/2025 Integrity and Trust Underpin the Democratic Digital Sphere). The GDC affirmed the indispensability of a rights-based, people-centred digital order to ensuring equitable access, protecting human dignity and including the Majority World in norm-setting processes.

As Adrián López Angulo notes in his article in this issue of Media Development:

“We must counter the idea that there is only one technological future, and that, for me, is the main task of critical digital literacy. Other technological worlds are possible, and they are being created by the indigenous peoples of Latin America and the world: through community radio stations, community connectivity networks, community digital archives, and social and community-based mobile virtual network operators.”

It may be that the Global Digital Compact will only become effective when groups of nations (e.g. within Latin America, Africa, Asia) and rights-based advocacy groups unite to take action to replace media monopolies and digital technocrats with structures rooted in decolonized understandings of social justice. In his article in this issue of Media Development, Aniruddha Jena remarks that:

“Community radio in India should not be treated as a residual or supplementary medium. It is better understood as part of a plural communications ecology that protects democratic difference. It can host the everyday labour of cultural continuity: intergenerational storytelling, the circulation of local vocabularies, the recognition of customary practices, the public expression of grief, memory, and protest, and the translation of institutional processes into forms communities can inhabit.”

In his collection of essays titled Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas (2025), the late Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o calls for stripping language of the psychological and material impacts of colonialism, past and present. In particular, he points out that colonization in the sphere of language “meant a negation of native languages as valid sources of knowledge and means of intellectual and artistic inquiry. The lack of roots in our base creates a state of permanent uncertainty about our relationship to where we are, to our abilities, even to our achievements.”

There is a direct parallel here with the “language” of data technologies and algorithms that are known to embody implicitly Westernized, autocratic or imperialist features, and cultural constructs. The UN’s Global Digital Compact stops short of identifying the need to decolonize code and data. However, in relation to Artificial Intelligence, it does want to ensure that “the application of artificial intelligence fosters diverse cultures and languages and supports locally generated data for the benefit of countries and communities’ development” (53).

A starting point will be for the Minority World to relinquish its grip on the development and deployment of digital technologies and to encourage the Majority World to develop and deploy its own. The World Summit on the Information Society’s principles of inclusion, openness, and people-centred governance offer a clear path towards a global architecture which is more balanced and capable of addressing the thorny issue of decolonization. Other technological worlds are possible in a world of genuine inclusion.

Such a revolutionary idea demands shifts in geopolitical and economic frameworks that governments and corporate interests will strongly resist. But, as the Swahili proverb says: Lisilo budi hutendwa – What has to be done, must be done.