World Social Forum
Workshop on Communication and Citizenship
The World Social Forum (WSF) will assemble for the first time in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, on January 25-30 2000, as a new international space that proposes to bring together whoever has been resisting neoliberal policies and to promote reflection and dialogue on the formulation of alternatives that could effectively make another world possible.
One of the four main themes of the proposed agenda is "Civil Society and the Public Arena", which includes the topic: "Guaranteeing the Right to Information and the Democratization of the Media", an issue which concerns not only those directly involved in media, but society as a whole.
We live under the sway of the impressive development of communications techniques and technologies, whose repercussions extend to the social, economic, political and cultural spheres, with serious implications for the very future of democratic life. This goes hand in hand with the hyperconcentration of these resources, strengthening the tendency to form private monopolies and oligopolies in the communications sector. This is also related to the fact that technological development is being implemented basically as part of the globalization process.
In order to lend legitimacy to this new state of affairs, the prevailing discourse evokes the advantages that new communication technologies offer, to sustain the claim that they have become the "motor" of social change -negating and concealing social conflict- and that "for the good of humanity" they must be managed by private enterprise. The logical conclusion is that information and communication should be considered one more sector of the economy (and a highly profitable one at that) whose products should be valued as merchandise, thus anulling any criteria of public service, with which communication has always been associated.
In the final instance, since neoliberalism is only concerned with consumers, not citizens, what is at stake is the very future of democratic life, which is being preyed upon by the dictatorship of the market.
As a historical result of social struggle, it has become established as a universal criteria that the vitality of democracy depends on the participation of citizens, which in turn means that the different groups that make up society be duly informed and able to express their particular viewpoints so as to contribute to forming social consensus. This aspiration has repeatedly been denied, among other things due to the absence of democracy in communication systems. What can we expect from a future that promises even greater concentration of these resources?
This situation demands that the peoples' agenda should incorporate the Right to Communicate, and poses to civil society the challenge of developing initiatives to appropriate the instruments of communication and develop free media from a citizen perspective.
In this context, the WSF is an opportunity to advance in that direction and, at the same time, to broaden and empower the initiatives and movements that have been evolving around this cause. For this reason, it has been proposed to include a workshop on "Communication and Citizenship" in the program.
This proposal has been put forward initially by ALAI, APC and Les Peneloppes (member of Attac-France) for WomenAction, in the spirit of a "self-convened" event that hopes to bring together media, journalists' associations, academic sectors, human rights groups, social organizations and movements, citizens' groups, development institutions, elected local representatives, etc. In view of the numerous other proposals that have been presented to the Forum, this workshop, which will take place over two afternoons, proposes, on the one hand, to take stock of the initiatives already underway at the global level, and on the other hand, to establish agreements for action, either overall or at the sectoral level.
Communication for democracy
Democracy in communication