We mention below briefly a round-up of important issues in this area and the WSIS draft proposals about them. The brief is only suggestive and meant to kick-off effective consultations. Speakers are free to, rather expected to, bring their full expertise to bear upon the subject and inform and educate the participant and the stakeholders involved in building the Information Society. 

 Media is the community’s and the society’s public interaction space. Once it was the marketplace, small talk and the public speeches there, then posters and pamphlets showed up, later newspapers and journals, radio and the TV.  With each step the reach increased greatly; but at the same time the media and message lost some of its specificity. It became what is called the mass media. But this mass media made possible a wider social organization; into nations, regions and than globally. Mass media is the very air that these mass social organizations breathe today. And it is the mother fluid in which the information society takes shape. But the new ICTs have introduced interesting new possibilities for the media.

 With media becoming a mass phenomenon, for all its reach, it did loose many important elements needed for a fair and effective community public interaction space. The ownership of media became concentrated in few hands and content generation was very ‘separated’ from user-masses.  At the least, the content became very homogenous and consequently less relevant, often trite. Worse, it is open to manipulation by vested and entrenched interests. Exclusion of women from ownership, decision-making and content creation contributes to entrenching a male-centered worldview in the civilisational consciousness. This greatly harms the rights and interests of women.

 Since the mass media will still remain an important part of the information society, there is a continued need for necessary correctives. Media ownership controls like cross-media restrictions, other measures to promote plurality of content, encouragement to content contribution from excluded sections and communities, separation of editorial content from advertisement, protecting children from inappropriate content etc are some such measures. These get a good mention in the draft Plan of Action (POA) for the WSIS (see point 42) as well as in Declaration of Principles (point 9). These points are also relevant to the new media based on the new ICTs.

 In addition, an insertion into the draft POA (Point 42 f) calls for launching ‘specific projects that promote balanced and diverse portrayals of women by the media and international communication systems and that promote increased participation by women and men in production and decisionmaking’. This insertion should be insisted upon for adoption.

 The Information Society brings forth many new opportunities as well as challenges associated specially with this new ICTs based media. In a way, such media holds promise to address many of the problems of traditional media. It can be personal and one-to-one even with great reach and spread, the content can be narrowcast for specific interests, it can be personalized, content has unlimited plurality as content creation is easy and distributed and, for the same reason, all sections and interests can be represented. The media can be taken back to the local community and to the local context, where it belongs. In fact, community media, leveraging both traditional media and the new ICTs, is the big opportunity today. Many initiatives in this area are already underway throughout the world. Radio-browsing project in Sri Lanka is a good example: participative video shooting and local content on cable TV are interesting possibilities in the visual media. Need for community based media is stressed at point 41 (f) and 42 (c) of POA.

 It is important that the local community has a stake and ‘ownership’ in such ‘community media’. But it is not enough to hand over the controls of the community media to traditional male dominated community structures. A large representation to women has to be given in this ownership at the community level. Women owned media, and women created content, alone can start building a gender neutral worldview and mainstream it in everyone’s consciousness. This is the primary condition for achieving real gender equality and women rights.

 But there are challenges associated with the new media based on the new ICTs as well. From the gender perspective, the most important is its use for sexual abuse. An insertion to point 42 of POA makes this point at length. It calls for ‘taking  effective measures—to the extent consistent with freedom of expression—to combat the growing sexualization and use of pornography in media content, in terms of the rapid development of ICTs; to encourage the media to refrain from presenting women as inferior beings and exploiting them as sexual objects and commodities; to combat ICT and media-based violence against women including criminal misuse of ICT for sexual harassment, sexual exploitation and trafficking in women and girls; and to support the development and use of ICT as a resource for the empowerment of women and girls, including those affected by violence, abuse and other forms of sexual exploitation.’ So acute is the problem in this area that the first regulations on Internet has come in the matter of checking paedophilia on Internet including putting content and soliciting in chat-rooms.

 The consultations can be carried out over the following sub-themes;

Gender perspective in traditional media- role of ownership and content creation

 Role of media in promoting gender concerns

 Community media – opportunities and challenges

 Internet and sexual abuse