Article

ICTs & new media

Massive technological change over the past decade has created new opportunities for freedom of expression and freedom of information. ARTICLE 19 is responding to new developments and working to defend the new opportunities from censorship.

TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT

Throughout the twentieth century, people received most of their information by word of mouth and from letters, broadcasters or publishers of newspapers and books.

Today, technological development and the increasing availability of the internet have sped up and blurred the distinction between information-creator and information-receiver. Information flows are now broad, diverse, reversible and accessible.

The ability of almost anybody to set up a website and begin publishing or broadcasting content has led to fundamental changes in the media. Companies and individuals can publish anything from text or images to a video using high speed and broad bandwidth digital technology. They can then deliver them direct to computers or mobile devices worldwide.

NEW MEDIA

Technological development has led the media to both expand and reduce. Digital transmission has resulted in more and cheaper opportunities for broadcasters, and greater choice for media consumers. Media organisations now disseminate information through a multitude of platforms in order to satisfy their audiences.

The media has had to:

• diversify how it delivers content
• diversify its speed of delivery
• take account of information created increasingly by people outside the media.

Some media organisations have responded by buying large shares of the media landscape. Such mergers can lead to concerns about diversity and plurality.

'Citizen journalism' has developed and includes bloggers, social media users and other 'non-professional' information sources. Traditional media organisations no longer serve as gatekeepers and information has been democratised.

IMPLICATIONS

Today, information spreads around the globe in seconds. Information is now published that might otherwise never have been made available.

• Assaults on protesters Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran and Ian Tomlinson in the UK may never have been known if they had not been disseminated using new media
• Wikileaks has published dozens of documents revealing corruption and abuse by those with power, including governments.
• Twitter was used to reveal super injunctions in the UK and to inspire mass protests in Tunisia.

In 2012, 665 million websites provided information and commentary on a vast array of subjects, in many languages and forms. Online communities such as Wikipedia use the knowledge of millions of users to create comprehensive databases of knowledge. Search engines provide tools to find information quickly and with minimal effort.

In the developing world, ICTs and new media are used to aid development. They also provide people living in poverty with access to information that helps them make better decisions about their lives. 

CHALLENGES TO FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION AND INFORMATION

Despite the huge advantages of ICTs and new media, there are considerable and newly developing challenges.

Under traditional legal frameworks, a speaker or author is in a clear geographical jurisdiction. However, in a digital world, the location of ideas and opinions is unclear. For example, a Lebanese person in London can write a blog that is hosted in Japan, accusing the Saudi government of corruption.

Another traditional media law says that publishers are responsible for what they publish. But what is the publisher online? Is it the server that stores the content (amongst millions of other pages), the search engine that finds the content, or the Internet Service Provider (ISP) that delivers the content?

Governments can limit the information people see by blocking access in a variety of ways. While newspapers can only be banned by judges, the decision to block a website often appears to be made at whim by civil servants, rather than by judges.

Digitalisation of information has not only enabled governments to automatically block information, but also to monitor what people look at currently and retrospectively. 

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

The licensing of digital information as ‘intellectual property’ is problematic in a digital world. ARTICLE 19 is monitoring the development of intellectual property rights and their effect on freedom of expression.

Intellectual property is an increasingly expanding area of law being led by US companies. It is changing from a model where a person buys something physical (such as a book) and is free to pass it on to a model where a person only has a licence to use the information (for example, digital music) by themselves and in certain ways.

Unlike hardcopy information like books, digital information has the potential to be copied, modified and disseminated millions of times a second.

Changing intellectual property models has a significant impact on freedom of expression and information. For example, musicians who re-sample sounds, a very common practice over the past decade, could be prosecuted under intellectual property laws, even if such music was created in their bedrooms and heard by only five people.

People have responded to such attacks on digital creativity with new democratic models of protection. Creative Commons, a widespread licensing system, is used by many organisations - including ARTICLE 19 - and on major websites like Flickr, Wikimedia and YouTube. 

 http://www.article19.org/pages/en/icts-new-media-more.html