 | Issue: | Global-ICT 2009 |
| Article no.: | 8 | |
| Topic: | Digital citizenship in a hyper-connected society | |
| Author: | Roberto Irineu Marinho | |
| Title: | Chairman and CEO | |
| Organisation: | Globo Organizations | |
| PDF size: | 172KB |
About author
Roberto Irineu Marinho is the Chairman and CEO of Globo Organizations, a leading media and entertainment conglomerate of companies. The Globo Organizations, owned by the Marinho family, includes O Globo, a daily newspaper, Radio Globo and Globo TV in Rio de Janeiro. Globo TV is the largest network in Latin America, covering 99.99 per cent of the Brazilian territory. Globo Organizations comprises over 80 companies employing 24,000 people, in Brazil and abroad. Roberto Irineu Marinho began his career at O Globo serving in a variety of assignments, from linotype apprentice to reporter, until becoming, in time, its director. Mr Marinho was later appointed Executive Vice-President of Globo TV and then Executive Vice-President of Globo Organizations. After his father, Roberto Marinho’s, decease, he became the Chairman and CEO of the Globo conglomerate. Mr Roberto Irineu Marinho studied Business Administration at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas.
Article abstract
Technologies, even information and communications technologies, are often disruptive in direct proportion to their importance. The risks, which like those that caused the recent economic collapse, are little noticed until the reckoning comes. In Brazil, broadcasting and the Internet have had an enormously positive impact upon business, personal affairs, upon customs and society as a whole. Nevertheless, there is great need for serious public discussion about the risks inherent in these technologies and about measures needed to protect public welfare.
Full Article
From time to time the world undergoes technological impacts that cause profound changes in habits, lifestyles, and the way in which society is organized. It was so with the invention of the first practical steam engine by James Watt in the eighteenth century, resulting in the first Industrial Revolution. The spread of electrification, the propagation of the automobile, and the use of oil as a source of energy marked the first half of the twentieth century, promoting urban concentration on one hand and personal mobility on the other, and radically changing the way in which people live and work. The massive use of the radio during the first half of the twentieth century and of television beginning with the 1950s brought society immediate and varied, information and entertainment, furthered knowledge and modified habits of consumption and forms of leisure. Another breakthrough began with the UNIVAC in 1951, the first computer made and marketed in the United States. It continued with the personal computers of the 1980s and the popularization of the Internet at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. This new wave of changes added to the earlier ones, with many consequences that are not yet clearly understood. Dr Koji Kobayashi, the renowned president of NEC Corporation, had foreseen in his writings and conferences during the 1970s, well before the advent of the Internet, the evolving convergence of communications and computer technology, in a scenario that would bring enormous benefits to humanity. However, his forecasts did not reckon the swiftness and the impact of these technologies on human relations, on citizenry, on social communication, on learning habits, and on many other dimensions. One impressive aspect is that these changes, which occurred in a linear form and over a longer period of time in developed countries, arrived in developing countries in an accelerated and, often, superimposed form. With this, stages in the evolutionary process were skipped, but some weaknesses were also created that require certain measures so that their effects are not disruptive. As always, changes generate risks and opportunities. It behoves us to take advantage of their beneficial effects in the best way possible and to create conditions to lessen the harmful ones. A good example of the beneficial effect on the popularization of a technological innovation in developing societies is that of broadcast television in Brazil, which today is considered to have been one of the most important modernizing instruments of Brazilian society during the last forty years. A recent study by the Inter American Development Bank (IDB) shows that the reduction of the average size of the Brazilian family during this period was in large part due to the models observed in TV series, which featured nuclear families of two or three offspring. Questions as diverse as hygienic habits and the entry of women into the professional workforce have been treated on TV screens throughout the country, facilitating social changes. Such effects demonstrate that society clings less to traditions than had been imagined, and is ready to accept innovations that bring improved living conditions. This same phenomenon is occurring now with the arrival of new digital communication technologies and the Internet. Still using Brazil as an example, between 2002 and 2008 cell phone subscribers grew from 35 million to more than 150 million in a population of 190 million with a big, recent, evolution of 3G models. Forty million people have Internet access at home, and much of the lower-income population has access to the Internet through LAN (local area network) houses, which are small digital community centres. Brazilian users are among those who most dedicate their time – twenty-three hours a month – to the Internet. Brazilian terrestrial digital television, inaugurated in 2008, has more advanced technological characteristics than the digital TV systems now available in the majority of developed countries, as it has taken advantage of the experiences of other countries. Accordingly, Brazilian digital TV allows direct reception by cell phones – free and completely mobile – and can be viewed in public transportation and automobiles. The utilization of these technologies by the poorer classes creates hitherto unimagined opportunities. Small service providers, who often do not have fixed-line phones, can now be reached by their clients and get work simply because they have a cell phone. Government and banking services are becoming more efficient and save people time. For example, 25 million income tax returns are sent to the government each year via the Internet, a much more simplified process than before. The LAN house phenomenon is particularly interesting in relation to the habits and behaviour of poor youths. For one to two dollars, a young person can spend an entire afternoon in one of the thousands of small digital community centres. These centres have spread throughout the country over the past three years, the fruit of a happy combination government subsidized cheap computers, the availability of broadband links and the efforts of local entrepreneurs. There are 20 million Netizens, Internet citizens, normally young people, who do not have a computer at home and use these centres regularly. There, they wed the global with the local and the virtual; navigating through virtual communities, they find interactive contact with the world and motivation for kinship in local communities. Parents encourage their children to frequent these centres, as a way to learn technological tools and keep away from drugs and idleness. As one young person from a favela (shantytown) in Rio said, “The Internet is my window to the world; whoever is not on the Internet is out of the world.” Digital inclusion is synonymous with social inclusion in Brazil. Besides the change of habits and the creation of opportunities, the new digital technologies are causing large transformations in the ways and means of mass communication. Broadcast television, for example, becomes much more participative, through a permanent dialog with its users who enter live on the programs via the Internet, produce news and information, vote, and make choices. Interactivity and dialog with users becomes commonplace. It is becoming increasingly common, mainly among teenagers and young adults, to use both technologies – television and the Internet – at the same time. Soon completely interactive television will be available for all. One of the projects that most pleases me is a monitoring portal that allows the participant to accompany and report occurrences of deforestation in Amazonia, using the Internet and satellite-surveillance technology. This accompaniment gathers and generates information for a television program that analyzes deforestation and broadcasts practices to reduce it. Within twenty-four hours of its inauguration, this portal, called Globo Amazonia, already had more than a million contributions from interested citizens. This new, not yet completely known, world raises questions and brings some challenges: • How can we guarantee freedom of communication and expression and maximise public participation while, at the same time, restraining digital crimes of every sort including rampant pornography, promotion of illicit activities, violation of intellectual-property rights, false representation, and discrimination? • How can we promote competition among different players in the audiovisual market while avoiding the formation of monopolies and the complete control by mega businesses of the value chain – from production and aggregation of content, to its distribution and onward to control of the end client relationship? • How do we promote the value to the public of journalism that guarantees credibility and trust in the treatment of information, in an environment in which everyone, in the open or under the mantle of anonymity, discloses information of all sorts? Until now, we have been living the euphoria of a libertarian cyberspace, with extremely positive consequences. We can make an analogy with financial markets, which in recent years was sustained by a state of laissez faire that seemed stable and beneficial for all. The contradictions and deficiencies of the financial market burst like a bubble in 2008, causing generalized damage to society and creating international pressure to rethink its premises and the most adequate forms for its constructive regulation. We observe the same thing in the digital world. We see various initiatives in different countries that display a pendulum swing between establishing some kind of regulation for the digital world and for the Internet, while eliminating the negative effects and maintaining the freedom and autonomy of the responsible citizen. An international, high-level dialog that includes an understanding of the benefits and the perils of digital laissez faire is fundamental, to avoid the occurrence in the digital world of a social crisis similar to what happened in the financial markets due to lack of adequate regulation. It is the role of the State to promote this dialogue in a democratic way, in order to build a regulatory framework that avoids distortions, guarantees responsible freedom, and maximizes opportunities for all.
