🚀 go-pugleaf

From: INTER PRESS SERVICE
Subj: COMMUNICATION: Towards a New Global Information Paradigm

DATE: 03-01-95 (20:35)

By Roberto Savio (*)

ROME, Mar (IPS) - The creation of a new global information system
is a matter that calls for urgent attention by communicators
worldwide.

This need emerges from the fact that we are entering a new era,
in which an entire set of ideas that have been fundamental over
the last 50 years are being abandoned, or their influence
radically reduced.

At the same time, new factors are bursting forcefully on the
scene, impossible to understand if analysed in an isolated and
incomplete fashion.

Ideas such as international cooperation or solidarity are
rapidly losing ground, while development aid has drastically
fallen off, from an annual average of 0.45 to 0.20 percent of
Gross Domestic Product - an over 50 percent drop - among member
countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development.

A similar, although more moderate, tendency is occurring in the
policies of the United Nations.

Issues from the South have also steadily been losing relevance
in some areas of the North, and will be dealt with in a new
fashion in upcoming years due to the enormous changes seen in
recent times.

At the turn of the century, Latin America will include few
recipients of development aid, as by then the majority of the
region's countries will have a per capita income that will make
them ineligible for such aid.

Indeed, several Asian countries have already joined the group
of nations with an intermediate level of development.

Furthermore, the North has also been transformed.

This can be seen by a glance at the United States, a testing
ground for the process of globalisation, where in the last 11
years, the middle class has shrunk 12 percent.

Of that 12 percent, one percent became wealthy - the United
States today has more rich inhabitants than ever before - but 11
percent became poor, causing the number of U.S. inhabitants living
in extreme poverty to rise to over 30 million.

Thus, the gap separating rich from poor is steadily widening,
while in Europe a dramatic splintering of society can be seen,
accompanied by political processes in which citizens participate
less and less in the public life of their countries.

Even realism and logic have failed, demonstrated by the
international community's incapacity to effectively intervene in
Somalia or Bosnia.

The international community spent 940 million dollars to
distribute 80 million dollars worth of food in Somalia, and
virtually all development plans for that area are in a state of
crisis.

On the other hand, the amount of capital in circulation is so
high that it escapes the control of any government, made clear by
the fact that Central Banks have gradually given up controlling
currencies, concentrating instead on curbing inflation.

Growing globalisation thus steadily reduces the ability of the
state to play a strong national role, while people become
increasingly indifferent, and political parties are seen more and
more as power machines.

However, globalisation must not be seen merely as a negative
phenomenon, but rather as an indispensable process of adjustment,
delayed far too long by the Cold War.

The growing adoption of global issues on a popular level must
be pointed out, for example. People have begun to take on themes
such as women's and environmental issues and human rights as
global problems, above and beyond national realities.

New North-South alliances, substantially different from
previously existing ones, are also emerging.

Today, the mechanisms of cooperation among civil society have a
dynamism and strength lacking in official circles, which is
regularly demonstrated in international conferences.

But international communication media fail to treat these
complex and contradictory processes in their true dimension.

It is impossible for today's information network, which focuses
basically on events, to provide a complete vision of what is
happening in the world.

As long as this system favours only known factors - the state,
capital, local elites - the analyses will remain incomplete and
biassed.

It is not enough to have three, four or five correspondents;
there is a need for extended, closely connected structures capable
of reflecting broader tendencies and processes, as well as the
full range of diverse actors that build those new realities.

This model of communication must be constructed now, with all
eyes trained on the 21st century. (end/ips/trd-so/rs/sw/95)