Communication, human rights and cyberspace

Abstract

As the World Commission on Culture and Development reported in their 1995 book, Our Creative Diversity, the strident debate over the ‘New World Information and Communication Order’ might be over, but many questions remain to be answered. 1 The principal question is what should be done about the meagre and highly concentrated information flows in the least developed countries. The phenomenal growth-rate of the Internet since the UNESCO report suggests that their concerns, although valid, may have been overstated. However, what we observe today is that the mass media is endowed with the global embrace of communication technology. Satellite infrastructure has caused the globalization of the mass media, shifting relationships of information dependency in a number of areas: between supposedly dominant and subordinate media systems; between media institutions and political institutions; and between citizens and journalists. Information flowing between citizens on a global scale, rather than from national leaders to citizens, will create new communities of interest and give interpersonal communication a new importance. This type of bottom-up flow of information, sometimes called civic journalism, is conducive to the promotion of human rights and global peace.