Protect and promote AirDiversity!
Just like bio-diversity and cultural diversity, we need to value and support diversity on the airwaves. Not just government or corporate voices, but the fullest range of citizen and community voices must also be included in that diversity.
That was my call to a group of Asian broadcasters gathered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for a workshop on ‘Connecting Communities through Community Broadcasting and ICTs’ in the run-up to Asia Media Summit that opens on May 29.
I was speaking during the second session on ‘ICTs – Bringing Added Value to Community Radio’. ICT stands for information and communication technologies. As I reminded my fellow participants, radio broadcasting itself is very much an ICT – it is a more established form of ICT along with the telephone and television. Newer ICTs include computers, Internet, mobile phones and other hand-held data processing devices such as i-pods and PDAs.
For more details, see these blog posts:
The ‘rural romance’ lives on in the ICT age: Urban poor need not apply
Communities are not what they used to be…so let’s get real!
By the way, I think I have just made up that term – AirDiversity. I asked Google, which can’t track down any previous use…
Read post-delivery text of my remarks to the workshop:
ams-2007-connecting-people-via-icts-ng-remarks.pdf
Open Minds! 