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Creating content
A lonely road out there
The new technology has also made us slaves of a new type of ‘information colonialism’. One, which encourages us to think that the centre of the world is somewhere in Europe or the US.
In one small room of this infrastructure strapped newspaper, sits a plush
new computer. For a few thousand rupees each month, little more than the
salary of a mid-level journalist in a small city, this direct link via satellite
brings in hundreds of snazzy photographs from across the world, and thousands
of new stories every few weeks. It’s easier and cheaper, to learn about Tahiti, Paris, Timbucktoo, Hawaii and The Hague, rather than the small state where most of the newspaper’s
readers live and work.
For someone who comes from the world of content itself and has spent half
one’s life as a print journalist, it’s painfully clear how the gap is growing.
Thanks to ICTs we now have the tools that give us the chance of having a
New International Information Order. (Does anyone remember these debates
from the seventies?) At the same time, the new technology has also made us
slaves of a new type of ‘information colonialism’. One, which encourages us to think that the centre of the world is somewhere in Europe or the US. One that makes us feel that it’s not work generating content about our own societies, but just pick up what flows so easily from the so-called ‘developed world’. One, which threatens to convert large parts of the planet into ‘downloading’ societies and consumers of information, instead of ‘uploading’ ones
and producers of information.
Our gap between connectivity and (tech) capacity on the one hand, and content on the other, keeps growing even more vast. More so, in countries like India, where the mastery of technology seems to be an end in itself, almost wholly divorced from the need to solve the many problems of our deprived millions.
Interested?
Read the complete article here.
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