This article aims at positioning the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in a historical perspective, in order to allow a better understanding of the challenges the international community will face in the coming years. This first part of the article is devoted to justifying, both for research purposes and political action, an approach that takes into consideration the historical, structural and conceptual roots of issues that are currently debated, facing the complexity of processes that characterize the world today. Secondly, I briefly mention the major contextual differences between former international debates about communication and the contemporary situation. Finally lexical-content analysis is applied to a selection of documents – final Recommendations of the MacBride Report and WSIS final Declarations from the Geneva Summit (official and alternative) – to identify continuity and change in policy discourses developed at the international level on communication imbalances, the role of information technologies for development and the implication of all this for human and communication rights. In the conclusion similarities and differences between the narratives of yesterday and today, as critically evaluated.
Debating communication imbalances: from the MacBride Report to the World Summit on the Information Society. An application of lexical-content analysis for a critical investigation of historical legacies
PADOVANI, CLAUDIA
2006
Abstract
This article aims at positioning the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in a historical perspective, in order to allow a better understanding of the challenges the international community will face in the coming years. This first part of the article is devoted to justifying, both for research purposes and political action, an approach that takes into consideration the historical, structural and conceptual roots of issues that are currently debated, facing the complexity of processes that characterize the world today. Secondly, I briefly mention the major contextual differences between former international debates about communication and the contemporary situation. Finally lexical-content analysis is applied to a selection of documents – final Recommendations of the MacBride Report and WSIS final Declarations from the Geneva Summit (official and alternative) – to identify continuity and change in policy discourses developed at the international level on communication imbalances, the role of information technologies for development and the implication of all this for human and communication rights. In the conclusion similarities and differences between the narratives of yesterday and today, as critically evaluated.
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