A large part of the world can no longer function without data centres. These are the networked computing and storage facilities that enable the delivery of software applications and data. They are vital to the daily functioning of governments, societies, and users alike. Currently, there...
June 18 is the International Day for Countering Hate Speech and June 20 is World Refugee Day. With migrants and refugees often targeted by hate, it can be natural – and even useful – to mark the days together. Certainly WACC Europe, after their 2017 media...
This year alone has seen devastating floods in Brazil, Indonesia, Kenya, Tanzania, China, Dubai, Oman, Bahrain, and Qatar. Wildfires broke out in western Canada and Texas. Cyclones swept islands and nations along the Indian Ocean. News reports informed audiences that pets and livestock needed temporarily to...
Over the past 20 years, the many structural issues in the world’s communication and information ecosystem tackled by the 2003 and 2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) have become more complex, entrenched, and detrimental to democracy and communication rights. Primarily this is a result...
The WSIS+20 Forum High-Level Event to be held in Geneva 27-31 May 2024 will mark twenty years of progress made in the implementation of the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society, which took place in two phases – Geneva in 2003 and...
Media Development 2024-2 Weaving Communication in Solidarity Articles in this issue of Media Development underline the need to resist by every means possible the steady erosion of democratic values, of press freedom, and of people’s capacity to see, hear, and express their needs and concerns in public without...
Ever since a right to communicate was imagined by Jean D’Arcy in 1969, the concept has been controversial. Like the right to memory, without which individuals and communities would be deprived of their identity and dignity, neither figures in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...
Cees J. Hamelink In a recent book on “Communication and Human Rights”, I propose that all discussions on communication rights, the right to communicate or the right to communication should be based upon the notion of “communicative justice”.1 This means doing justice to the human capacity...
Nico Carpentier Power is pervasive, all-encompassing, and ultimately ungraspable. At the same time, power generates difference through a logic of privilege. Even though a distinction between “the powerless” and “the powerful” is too simplistic, we can still see, throughout the world, assemblages of the privileged, articulating...
Pradip Ninan Thomas The ability to Voice, Access resources and technology, the strengthening of local capabilities within an enabling environment and being able to communicate through a language of one’s choice – these remain fundamental building blocks in the creation of sustainable communication environments. In the context...