Claudia Padovani

The World Summit on the Information Society Setting the Communication Agenda for the 21st Century? An Ongoing Exercise

The first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was held in Geneva, 10–12 December 2003. Over 10,000 delegates, from all over the world and different sectors of society, gathered in the spaces of Geneva Palexpo for three days of debates, conferences, formal and informal meetings, rituals of diplomacy and electronic story telling. Geneva was the end of an 18month preparatory process and an intermediate stage of the WSIS, as a second phase will be organized in Tunis, in November 2005. Governments, intergovernmental organizations, business entities and civil society groups have been involved in an exercise that can be read in different ways. It has been a political and a media event. It has made the connections between technology, culture and society visible. WSIS also offered an opportunity to redefine the conceptual boundaries of issues that are crucial to societal transformations at the beginning of the 21st century. It is therefore meaningful to attempt a critical evaluation, starting from some basic questions: where did WSIS come from? What really happened in Geneva? Did the Summit achieve anything at all? Do the final documents that were adopted, the Declaration of Principles and the Plan of Action, offer new insights and visions? What are the stakes in the second stage of the process? Finally, is WSIS relevant to communication scholars? To answer this last question we can start considering the WSIS as a communicative event. Its aims were the ‘definition of a common vision of the information society’ and the production of written documents that clearly state such a vision and the path to achieving it. These have been elaborated over time through political negotiation and stakeholders’ contributions, through discussions and consensus-building efforts. All negotiation, inside and outside the official process, has implied choices in terminology and topics: what should or should not find a place in the document, what should be mentioned and avoided, what definitions should be used, what meaning for concepts. In spite of the fact that the WSIS outcome is not a binding agreement among states, those documents are agreed-upon written texts that contribute to the creation of a semantic space, a ‘world of words’. GAZETTE: THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR COMMUNICATION STUDIES

From NWICO to WSIS: another world information and communication order? Introduction

Tunis, March 1976: the Non-Aligned Symposium on Information prepares a programme for safeguarding national cultures and overcoming global imbalances in information flows and communication systems in order to ‘obtain the decolonization of information and initiate a new international order in information’. The mandate came from the NonAligned Movement (NAM) Summit in Algiers in 1973 which had declared that ‘the activities of imperialism are not confined solely to the political and economic fields, but also cover the cultural and social fields’ calling for ‘concerted action in the fields of mass communication’. The Tunis Symposium’s call for a New International Information Order, with mechanisms such as the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool, was endorsed by the NAM Summit in Colombo later the same year. This NAM campaign, supported by the socialist countries, led to an historic media debate at the UN and UNESCO as well as in media professional associations and among communication scholars around the world. The concept of a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) became a central element in this debate, with landmarks such as the MacBride Commission (1980) and its well-known report Many Voices, One World. The great media debate and its historical experience is well documented in communication literature (Gerbner et al., 1993; Golding and Harris, 1997; Vincent et al., 1999; Carlsson, 2003), but an awareness of its relevance to contemporary communication debates is restricted to a narrow sphere of academia and some non-governmental organizations. Tunis, November 2005: information and communication issues are once again debated in an international forum. The second phase of the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), following the FROM NWICO TO WSIS

Debating communication imbalances from the MacBride Report to the World Summit on the Information Society: an analysis of a changing discourse

This article argues that it is important to position the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in a historical perspective to understand the roots of the current debate and how they relate to changes that are affecting the world today. A lexical content analysis of the words and phrases of three key documents – final Recommendations of the MacBride Report and WSIS final Declarations from the Geneva Summit (official and alternative) – enable us to identify continuity and change in international policy discourses on communication imbalances, the role of information technologies for development and their implications for human and communication rights. The discussion of the findings points out similarities and differences between the narratives of yesterday and today and how these relate to developments in the social and political environment.

INVESTIGATING EVOLVING DISCOURSES ON HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE DIGITAL AGE Emerging Norms and Policy Challenges

This article investigates how human rights in the digital age can be considered as an overall frame accommodating fundamental rights and freedoms that relate to communication processes, and related challenges, in societies worldwide. The article brings together different disciplinary backgrounds (communication studies, linguistics and sociology of networks) and complementary empirical analyses of the content, structure and relevance of evolving discourses concerning human rights in the digital age. In doing so, the article defines and adopts a constructivist and communicative approach to the study of world politics, and details its relevance in order to assess the evolution of normative standards concerning communication as a human right in the transnational context.

International Norms and Socio-technical Systems: Connecting Institutional and Technological Infrastructures in Governance Processes

This paper looks at the challenges posed by ICT critical infrastructures in their interaction with governance processes. The authors argue that, in order to develop better understanding of how (global) governing arrangements are made in a highly mediatised environment, adequate frameworks should be elaborated to study the interrelation between institutional and technological infrastructures. In this context, institutions are conceived as collections of norms - including a mix of rules and practices - while technological infrastructures are seen as instruments that transform governance processes, also enabling different actors’ participation. Adopting a constructivist approach, combined with a focus on governance networks, the authors introduce a multi-dimensional analytical framework to investigate governance processes where institutions and technologies converge to create socio-technical systems.

Digital constitutionalism: Fundamental rights and power limitation in the Internet eco-system:

During the 1990s, the Internet underwent a great transformation under the influence of a broad set of processes. Popularization was fostered by the invention of the World Wide Web, which opened cyberspace to the masses by providing it with an effective graphical user interface (hypertext markup language (HTML) pages) and an intuitive exploring method (hyperlinks). Internationalization of Internet usage was the long-term result of design principles created during the first decade of the network development process, such as the openness of basic protocols and standards, and their implementability on the least powerful equipment, which allowed interconnection and interoperability to heterogeneous networks, systems and devices all over the world (Braman, 2012). Privatization and commercialization of the Internet were triggered by specific public policies formulated and implemented by the US government, seamlessly between different administrations over a decade (Goldsmith, and Wu, 2006; Mueller, 2004, 2010). These processes, together, produced profound changes in the Internet architecture as well as in its governing arrangements, bringing about a political paradox. On one hand, the increasingly widespread and global dissemination of the Internet raised questions about how to protect users and their fundamental rights online, and how to enable them to participate in Internet policy-making. On the other hand, the transnational private regime running the Internet at the end of the transformation was structurally inconsistent with the traditional approach to these issues, i.e., modern constitutionalism, based on the sovereign authority of the nation-state and focused on