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Alice in Wonderland and the People's Charter Prologue It all begins with a mad teaparty at which Alice claims that when she says what she means, she means what she says. She is criticized by the March Hare who explains that "I like what I get" is not the same as "I get what I like". 1 Todays' media moguls agree with Alice and argue that if people like what they get, they get what they like. However, the March Hare could be right and although millions of people may like what they get from the media, they may not get what they like. Disempowerment and Empowerment Today we observe -across the world- that people face pervasive worldwide governmental and commercial censorship; distorted and misleading information; stereotyped and damaging images of the human condition including gender, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, physical and mental illness and disability; restricted access to knowledge, and insufficient channels to communicate diverse ideas and opinions. The reality of our cultural environment reduces the capacity of ordinary men and women to control the decisions that others take about their lives. This 'disempowerment' violates the human entitlement to dignity, equality and liberty. To defend human integrity against this, the provision of information should contribute to the 'empowerment' of people. This implies the need to create a pluralist, and sustainable cultural environment. This is a tall order. The provision of information is an arena largely controlled by very powerful interests. The media moguls and their political friends will not voluntarily put their stakes at risk. The information industries, the telecommunication operators and their large clients, the intellectual property industries and the supporting governments are not likely to act against the disempowering impact of current forms of information provision. The much heralded project of the Global Information Superhighway for example poses serious threats to people's informational self-determination. This happens as a result of the potential and highly likely censorship exercised by mega gatekeepers. At the gateway to the Information Superhighway stands a shadowy figure looking oddly like Rupert Murdoch. As the Information Superhighway project is to be privately funded and commercially driven by the market there needs to be a system that defines what services the consumer will get, that charges consumers for what they get and shuts out those who cannot pay. If major companies invest billions of dollars in the Information Superhighway they will want control of access to consumers so they can recoup these investments. In the debates on the construction of a Global Information Superhighway the emerging consensus opinion is that the realisation of this project should be delegated to the forces of the market. As the new technologies mature, the largest players are preparing themselves for the interactive possibilities of digital networks. The Hollywood majors and companies like Time Warner are getting ready for grand investments to ride the information superhighway. The Internet -at present a public meeting place where more than 30 million PC users in some 150 countries exchange information, search databases, play games and chat- is beginning to attract the attention of the international business community. Business Week in its cover story of November 14, 1994 suggests that Internet is emerging as "one of the most exciting places for doing business". Internet has been guided by the rule of sharing information for free and has now been discovered as a major vehicle for commercial advertising. A communicative structure that so far has been public, non commercial, non regulated, non censored, anarchistic and very pluralistic may soon turn into a global electronic shopping mall. There is a serious threat that this free cyberspace is turned into a market-driven, commercial, regulated, censored and hierarchical Global Information Infrastructure (GII). Al Gore, US Vice-President and the prime spokesman for the GII-project, has said repeatedly that the key constructors of the Information Superhighway have to be private entrepreneurs. He has also expressed the expectation that this free market effort will foster an "Athenian democracy". Although the reference to classic Athens may have been made in ignorance, it is a very significant statement. The pluralism of a market-driven GII may indeed reflect Athenian democracy: a highly exclusive system that left most people (such as slaves and women) out. If a market-driven arrangement is -for some time to come- the standard environment in which mass media -conventional and new-operate, then informational pluralism cannot be expected from monopoly providers, or competitive providers, or from regulators of whatever persuasion. Within the scenario of a market-driven playing field, the only force that can make a difference are the buyers on the market. I disagree with the European Court of Human Rights when it states -in its judgment about the Austrian public broadcast monopoly-that the State is the ultimate guarantor of a pluralist provision of information. The ultimate guarantor of pluralism is civil society, the people themselves. The responsibility for a pluralist provision of information cannot be left to the Princes and the Merchants, i.e. to the interests of states and entrepreneurs. Whether more voices will be heard, ultimately depends upon whether people want to listen to these voices. The essence of censorship -the gravest threat to pluralism- is not just with those who censor but also with those who consent. Censorship during the Gulf war was not only effective because it was so cleverly orchestrated, but because so many people supported it and preferred ignorance over information and one- sidedness over pluralism. In most societies people are at present not seriously concerned about the quality of their cultural environment. People are more worried about the killing of whales than about the disappearance of minority languages. However, since our cultural environment is as essential to our common future as the natural ecology, it is time that people's movements should focus on the organisation and quality of the production and distribution of information and other cultural expressions. If people refuse to be silenced, if they do not want to live with a massive choreography of televised violence, or if they do not want to be surrounded by electronic surveillance and political propaganda, they cannot trust states and markets to accommodate their information needs. They will have to take responsibility themselves. In the end the quality of our cultural environment is not determined by the media moguls or the regulators but by the community of media users. Mobilizing the media users community and stimulating critical reflection on the quality of the cultural environment is a tall order. However, it can be done and it is actually being done. There is an increasing number of individuals and groups around the world that begins to express concern about the quality of media performance. Also a beginning has been with the creation of a broad international movement of alert and demanding media users. The movement is based upon what has been called the People's Communication Charter. The People's Communication Charter is an initiative of the:
In the early 1990s the academics and activists associated with the Third World Network in Penang and its affiliated Consumers Association of Penang initiated a debate on the feasibility of a world people's movement in the field of communication and culture. The TWN and CAP had by then already an impressive record with the development of people's movements in such areas as international trade and the tropical rain forest. They had proved capable of bringing the concerns of grass roots people in Third World countries to the diplomatic negotiations of the Uruquay GATT multilateral trade round and the UNCED in Rio de Janeiro. An obvious problem turned out to be that information consumers are not normally organized in representative associations. They are a diverse community, geographically dispersed and ideologically fragmented. In order to create a constituency for concerns about the quality of the cultural environment, the People's Communication Charter was initiated as a first step. This Charter provides the common framework for all those who share the belief that people should be active and critical participants in their social reality and capable of governing themselves. The People's Communication Charter can be a first step in the development of a permanent movement concerned with the quality of our cultural environment. One of the ideas that has been launched for this implementation is to organize an International Tribunal that would receive complaints by signatories of the Charter and invite the parties involved to submit evidence and defense upon which the Tribunal could come to a judgment. For the immediate future the plans are to finalize the text of the Charter, to begin exchanges on local modalities of implementation, and to convene a worldwide meeting on the Charter's People's Movement in 1997 at the time of the General Assembly of AMARC. In 1998 as the United Nations celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is hoped to get some acclaim for the initiative from the international political community. The Charter is not an end in itself. It provides the basis for a permanent critical reflection on those worldwide trends that determine the quality of our lives in the third millennium. If we aspire to pluralism in media contents, then the current threats to people's right to communicate can only be effectively dealt with if media users can be mobilized to demand diversity in information provision. The cultural environment is as vital to our common future as the natural ecology. The reality of this environment reduces the capacity of ordinary women and men to control decisions about their lives and about the socialization of their children. However, when people begin to say that although they may like what they get, they are not so certain they get what they like much of the time, then a powerful response to the current reality of information provision is in the making. 1 From Lewis Carroll, Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, Penguin edition of 1982. 1. From Lewis Carroll, Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, Penguin edition of 1982. PCC, p/a Society for Old and New Media, Nieuwmarkt 4, 1012 CR Amsterdam, phone: +31 20 5579898, fax: +31 20 5579880 |
