III. Digital Documentary and the Digital
Revolution:
“ We
stand on the threshold of a telecommunications revolution- a revolution
potentially as profound and far-reaching as the agricultural and industrial
revolutions. The one significant difference between the present changes is that
the telecommunications revolution is happening so fast, we can actually be
aware of it… We have the ability to make the revolution anything we want it to
be.”
III.1. The
New World Information Order: A Foreshadowing:
In
1980, UNESCO, the United Nations Scientific, Educational and Cultural
Organization, announced the need for something called The New World Information Order. The stated intent was to address
the undeniably superficial coverage of the developing world in the globally
dominant Western media, following the example set by the New World Economic Order created by the United Nations General
Assembly to reset the rules for international commerce.
According
to UNESCO, Western news media projected a very unfavorable image of the
developing world with its focus on events, rather than processes; however,
rather than find creative ways of producing new, alternative media on the grass
roots level in the developing world, the NWIO proposed to rectify this
imbalance from the top down - through Draconian government regulations which,
among other things, would make it necessary for all journalists to obtain
government-issued licenses to practice their profession.
The
response from the Western world was swift and harsh. After all, freedom of the
press has long been a sacred cow in the West, and government interference in
the communications media has been officially taboo since World War II. In reality, of course, manipulation and
disinformation campaigns are quietly tolerated, as long as they are very
discrete; the sinister Orwellian over tones of the very name New World Information Order made the
whole proposal an easy target, and condemnation was virtually universal in the
Western media.
This
condemnation was followed by a series of Western media attacks on UNESCO
itself, as well as very personal attacks on its Senegalese Director-General,
Amadou Mahtar Mbow, whose penchant for high-living and autocratic management
style had made him many enemies both inside and outside the United Nations
system. Mbow responded with a vigorous defense, stating that he was the victim
of a ‘veritable smear campaign”, and adding
that, as the first ( and , at that time, the only) African senior manager in
the UN system at the time, he was being treated “like an American black who has no rights.” [2]
In
1984, the United States left UNESCO, and was soon followed by the United
Kingdom and Singapore; in 1987, Mbow was replaced by Fernando Mayor Zaragoza of
Spain, and the New World Information
Order was thrown into the dustbin of historical obscurity. Unfortunately,
many of the very real problems caused by the Western global media monopoly the
proposal had sought to confront were also consigned to oblivion in the West, though
less so in the developing world . As some anonymous Korean once said when asked
about the difference between Korea and Japan, “ Oppressors have short memories, but the oppressed can never forget.”[3]
III.2. The Digital Revolution – A New World
Information Order in Progress:
Ironically,
today, a little more than three decades later, a genuine New World Information
Order has actually been created – though without any action by any United
Nations organization or member state. Indeed, this New World Information Order is
fundamentally different from anything envisioned by the members of UNESCO,
since it is technological rather than political.
This
technology is universal in that it cannot discriminate and is available to
anyone virtually anywhere, and it is democratic in that it is relatively
inexpensive. However, this technology is also inherently subversive, since it
is constantly evolving at a rapid rate, and is therefore all but impossible to
control, making authoritarian governments ruling with centralized control an
endangered species.
It
therefore comes as no surprise that many delegates to most recent UNESCO
spin-off to the NWIO, the World Summit
on the Information Society, (www.wsis.org/forum)
were concerned with finding a way to monitor and control what is now called The
Digital Revolution. [4]
Now
that the digital genie is out of the bottle, so to speak, governments and international
organizations have been having great difficulties harnessing it. Indeed, in the first 10 months of 2012, there
have been a bewildering series of explosive media events which would have been
inconceivable prior to the proliferation of digital technology, and which are indications
that growth of digital technological communications may be spiraling out of
control.
To cite a few well-publicized examples: an inflammatory video of execrable quality
gets sudden worldwide distribution, provoking a very violent response in many
of the Muslim countries of the world; a Russian feminist punk rock group which
had never made a record becomes an international cause celebre when they are
arrested by police performing illegally in a Moscow church; an American
presidential candidate is exposed making disturbing remarks to supporters at a
political fundraiser by a hidden camera, and the resulting video goes viral on
social media, and is a major factor in determining the outcome of the election;
and, now, most recently, the sudden resignation of the director of the American
Central Intelligence Agency due to embarrassing e-mails discovered in the
course of an unrelated investigation into a squabble between two American
women.
Meanwhile, moving images of both trivial and
dramatic events – including demonstrations, wars and atrocities from around the
world are recorded on the ground by individuals with cell phone cameras, and
then uploaded onto websites which can be seen by virtually anyone anywhere - that is, anywhere with access to the
internet. [5]
The
sole common denominator of these disparate phenomena is the humbling power of
the digital media to create and disseminate information at an incredibly high
speed. The genie may well be out of the bottle, but we urgently need to
understand some of the lessons and implications of these changes to be able to
harness the energy of this telecommunications revolution to better serve the
needs of the planet and its inhabitants rather than be manipulated or controlled
by it.
The
challenge is to observe and assess these phenomena as rapidly evolving as well as happening, and
to then develop strategies that will not be out of date when actually applied.
For governments and bureaucratic institutions, where decision-making can move at
a glacial pace, this is perhaps the ultimate challenge
[1] Jay Ruby, (The Ethics of Image Making) in New Challenges in Documentary, Alan Rosenthal, Editor; Manchester
University Press, 2005, p.219
[2] www.answers.com/topic/amadou-mahtar-m-bow
[3]
Source unknown
[4] As McLuhan wrote in 1968,”In
the name of progress, our official culture is striving to force the new media
to do the work of the old.” Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, (The Medium is the Massage ) Bantam
Press, 1968 p.81
[5]
According to the International Telecommunications Union, an estimated 35% of
the world’s population of c. 7 billion had internet access in 2011. The number having internet access worldwide
has grown from 670 million in 2002 to 2.45 billion in 2011. However, internet
access is not distributed equally within or between countries – hence the
so-called “digital divide.”
En.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_access#Availability
