Scaling a Changing Curve: Traditional Media Development and the New Media: Shanthi Kalathil, a media and development consultant, authored this report on new media. The report examines the implications of new information and communication technologies for the media-assistance field, and how these innovations can be incorporated into traditional media-development models.
Archive for the 'opinion' Category
In a paper entitled “Mobile Phones and Social Activism: Why cell phones may be the most important technical innovation of the decade” originally published on his blog, Ethan Zuckerman argues that the cell phone may be “may be the most important technical innovation of the decade”. Zuckerman, a Fellow affiliated with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law Schools in the United States, traces some trends in the use of the mobile phone around the world as an “activist technology”. His core thesis is that mobiles are powerful because they’re “pervasive, personal, and capable of authoring content.” Zuckerman’s article also addresses the issue of mobile phones used in conjunction with broadcast radio:
The only technology that compares to the mobile phone in terms of pervasiveness and accessibility in the developing world is the radio. Indeed, considered together, radios and mobile phones can serve as a broad-distribution, participatory media network with some of the same citizen-media dynamics of the Internet, but accessible to a much wider, and non-literate audience.
Continue reading ‘Ethan Zuckerman on “the only technology that compares to the mobile phone”’
A paper by Carlos Rivadeneyra “Convergencia para el desarrollo: Radiodifusión comunitaria como estrategia para la inclusión digital” (in English “Convergence for development: Community radio as a digital inclusion strategy) has been recently released by APC. The paper is available in Spanish only.
The distinction between “new” and “old” technology is no longer significant in the current state of technology convergence. People from community radios and telecentres are working together for more democratic and participatory access to communication, specifically in rural and poor urban areas. This paper by Carlos Rivadeneyra provides conceptual tools to re-think, from this perspective, what we understand by information society.
In an article in the online publication Wajibu, Grace Githaiga, Executive Director of EcoNews Africa and Vice-President of AMARC, argues that “the Internet has a better chance to succeed as a tool for development and participation if it is linked to existing communication and information experiences.”
Continue reading ‘Community radio & ICTs: Can the poor benefit?’
Michael Roberts of Bellanet and Partha Pratim Sarkar of Bytes For All wrote a paper about the potential of podcasting for development in 2005. The authors note that podcasts are not only for listening to on MP3 players or computers, but can also be used as a way of networking programming to be broadcast on local and community radio stations.
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