Another acronym is headed your way. The WSSD may be fading from memory, now get ready for the WSIS. It’s another UN mega-gathering, this time designated as the World Summit on the Information Society.
Just as the WSSD deliberated about differences over ”sustainable development”, so the WSIS is a contest about what’s meant by the ”Information Society”.
The WSSD left its mark by underscoring triple-bottom line reporting: companies increasingly have to account for their environmental as well as their social and business performance. What can we expect from WSIS?
You may miss it when the show touches down in Geneva in December, but the aftermath is sure to hit us. After the Big Bang later this year, there’s already a sequel scheduled for Tunisia in November 2005.
As with other UN summits, there will have been several ”Prepcoms” before Geneva’s WSIS I. And likewise there will be a ringing declaration adopted by the countries attending. The whole event is supposed to (1) define a vision of the ”Information Society”, and (2) to lay out an action plan to realise it.
Tunisia, two years down the line, is then supposed to assess what progress gets made.
The WSIS is hosted by UN body, the International Telecommunications Union, and while governments will run the discussions, there is also (after some pressure) going to be structured input from business, international agencies and civil society groups.
WSIS Geneva is a talkshop that’s worth taking seriously.
The reason is: it’s all about global public opinion, and how our thinking ”what’s normal” and sets the parameters of the permissible. Take these three examples:
First, think back ten years, when telecoms in most countries was squarely a public utility, owned by a state and run like a civil service. Today, most public opinion has changed and telecoms is now widely regarded as a business, albeit one that is regulated by the state.
Tomorrow? Well, if big international telcos have their way in Geneva, the orthodoxy will shift even further – to a scenario where telecoms regulation is reduced to near zero. The argument behind this will be that even modest government control has hindered ”roll-out”, and that the private sector should be fully freed up to be able to grow and extend the benefits of the service.
If this position wins the day, it may or may not be a good thing for various reasons and depending on your criteria of worth. Whatever your assessment, my point is that the outcomes will influence the orthodoxy of telecoms ”best practice” arrangements.
Second, consider another recent change in global public understanding. We come from a recent history where telecoms was mainly about one-to-one talk. We’re now in a situation where what’s accepted is telecoms as a trafficker in data flows – text, figures, audio, audio-visual… and voice.
Thus where once we saw telecoms as primarily a conduit for personal discussions, today it’s natural to see the sector as a vector for transactions, commercial services and information content commodities.
As major shifts like this happen, so summits serve as milestones. And they also work as mobilisers that popularise new thinking and enable different directions to come to the fore.
A third example of why WSIS is important will be its agenda-setting function. The burst of the speculative bubble around Internet and mobile telephony has meant that King Profit is unlikely to be crowing at the top of the WSIS agenda.
Instead, the key issue is likely to centre around the developmental potential of ICTs (info and comms techs) to transform the Third World.
The dominant view here is: give people access to Internet and you give them information and therefore empowerment. It’s a notion of a powerful ICT wand (albeit one that gives has limited stress on the communication side of the technologies). ICTs, in and of themselves, are expected to conjure up the solutions to problems of poverty, war and underdevelopment. Utopia, for some.
Typically, less focus tends to be given to the issues of context and content. Overlooked are the rights to democracy and free expression as preconditions for an ”Information Society”. Neglected too are questions about the quality, source and relevance of information. Sidelined are matters such as whether informationalisation amounts to the unfettered privatisation of information and the predominance of US-sourced cultural content. Reality, for others.
In the dominant view, the focus is on the benefits to marginalised people of enrolling and incorporating them into the ”Information Society”. This envisages bridging the digital divide — with women, the poor and the marginalised enabled to leave their problems behind and cross over into the land of plenty.
An alternative take is on what could be gained globally from embracing diversity and difference, should the ”info-rich” make space and drop barriers to receiving (and paying for) information input from the purportedly ”info-poor”.
These divergent emphases will meet in concentrated form at WSIS. The outcome will set an agenda that will tilt global public opinion in one direction or another.
There are also other ”Information Society” debates at WSIS that will ricochet around the world. Intellectual property rights and copyright will be among these. There will be debates about open source software vs Microsoft everywhere. Also up for analysis will be issues of privacy and security.
E-nough, already? No — WSIS will also take on board matters like linguistic diversity on the web, and the impact of technological convergence on licensing broadcasters, internet service providers and telecoms companies.
In short, there are important issues at stake at this international indaba. More — there are important players there too. In the business of making, faking and taking their line from the Summit will be a host of influential institutions. The World Bank and international donors, for a start. And of course the media, consultants, governments, and NGOs.
In the next few years, we’ll be measured — and we’ll measure ourselves too — by our congruence with post-WSIS global public opinion.
Government, companies, media and others will increasingly devise — and revise — policies and practices against this benchmark. From under the acronym of WSIS, a welter of developments will emerge.
We may think we’re informed citizens in the ”Information Society”, but there’s a lot more to come.
Guy Berger is head of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University and deputy chair of the South African National Editors Forum (Sanef). He was recently nominated for the World Technology Awards.