After a challenging year dominated by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the latest issue of Media Development, WACC Global’s quarterly journal, examines “Communication in a Time of Crisis.”
Articles in the issue...
Posted at 00:00h
in
Comment,
Digital Rights
Public safety and national security are two advantages of facial recognition technology.
Law enforcement agencies use the technology to identify known criminals and to find missing children or seniors. Airports are increasingly adding facial recognition technology to security checkpoints. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security predicts that by 2023 97% of travellers will be subjected to facial recognition.
The news media “misrepresents reality when it comes to the actual progress of gender equality in the world,” according to a new book which draws on data from the Global...
Indigenous community radio stations have been “gaining traction around the world,” but many remain hamstrung by legal, financial, technical and administrative challenges, according to a new study, Are Indigenous Voices...
Posted at 00:00h
in
Comment,
Digital Rights
Using smartphones to track and trace during the Covid-19 epidemic creates a smokescreen for wider surveillance measures that may infringe people’s right to privacy.
Human rights activists are concerned that such data can be used to discriminate against migrants, refugees, and on racial grounds.
[caption id="attachment_32520" align="alignleft" width="190"] MD 2020/4[/caption]
Media Development 2020-4
Communication in a Time of Crisis
The Covid-19 pandemic burrowed its way deep into the human psyche. It fractured family and community. It negated...
Fifty-five years after the death of the French author Albert Camus, and at a time when Ebola was raging in West Africa, the British journalist Ed Vulliamy wrote a glowing tribute about one of the writer’s best-known books first published in 1947. “Of all Camus’ novels, none described man’s confrontation – and cohabitation – with death so vividly and on such an epic scale as La Peste, translated as The Plague.”1
By Chris Arthur
When I started to write this reflection on how – or whether – the coronavirus pandemic would change human behaviour, the first thing that came to mind was unexpected. I remembered war photographer Robert Capa’s famous comment: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”
By Philip Lee
A paradox was evident during the coronavirus pandemic. People turned to digital technologies to be in communication and yet felt increasingly out of communication. Self-isolating people became distanced from the socio-cultural environment in which they were accustomed to live and it began to appear alien. To adapt the well-known saying from L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between (1953), the present became a foreign country, where they did things differently.
By Marites N. Sison
A sampling of news headlines, five months after the WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic, shows media and institutions finally catching up to the gender dimensions of the novel coronavirus: Covid-19 crisis could set women back decades, experts fear; Why Covid-19 is a disaster for gender equality; Decades of progress on gender equality in the workplace at risk of vanishing; Women essential in fight against pandemic.
