Isis International Manila organised a panel discussion on "Globalised Media and ICT Systems and its intersection with Globalisation, Fundamentalisms and Militarism" to look at the implications of media and ICT in serving dominant forces and ideologies. The forum was held on 10 December 2003 at the WSIS held in Geneva, Switzerland.
Throughout the WSIS preparatory process, Isis Manila had been among the few organisations from the South to participate in and actively engage in the WSIS. The lack of critical voices representing the realities of Southern women within the WSIS process had led Isis to organise the Panel Presentation. Its overall objective was to facilitate the participation of feminist communicators representing various groups from the South to contribute in the discourse of emerging and cutting-edge issues such as globalised media and ICT systems, globalisation, fundamentalisms and militarisms.
The presentation invited a distinguished panel of feminist activists who have worked in the field of communications and media to discourse on the repressive trends in the information and technology industry, and on media that fails to respond to the real needs of women especially in poor and conflict-ridden areas.
The media as a distorted lens shaping public opinion was the main topic tackled by Lynne Muthoni Wanyeki, from FEMNET, a network of women's organisations in Africa. Wanyeki juxtaposed the way in which mainstream media covered the war in Iraq and how some women's organisations have already begun to document the real effects of conflict on people's lives. She recounted how mainstream media was so eager to show Arab and Muslim women as "shrouded victims" to serve the US government's effort to find a reason to go to war. On the other hand, she said the efforts of NGOs at documentation and information-sharing barely makes it into mainstream media. "The need for timely strategic information to enhance women's development, equality and other human rights is critical," she said, and it now falls on civil society, and women's organisations in particular, to ensure that relevant information gets out to where it is needed.
Echoing Wanyeki's call for strategic communications work, Ruth Ojiambo Ochieng presented how her organisation Isis Women's International Cross-Cultural Exchange (Isis-WICCE) had been documenting the experiences of women under armed conflict in Uganda. She reported how their video documentation initiatives have led to the creation of services to rehabilitate women survivors of conflict. Begun in 1997, the documentation involved video interviews of rural women who were hardest hit by the turmoil between government and anti-government military forces in Uganda. The videos caught the interest of physicians and psychologists who quickly organised support services for trauma survivors. Ochieng also said the videos was a "shame-them approach" to raise the awareness of government officials and even visiting ambassadors, who then mobilised resources to help these women.
Maria Suarez of Feminist International Radio Endeavour (FIRE) was also conscious of the hegemonic trend of media and militarisation in Latin America. In Costa Rica where FIRE is based, the media has enjoyed relative freedom as a public institution, but impending free trade agreements with the US will force it to privatise the telecommunications industry. Media activists are also increasingly alarmed by the US' plans to set up a military school in the country. She cautioned about how women have become not invisible but 'transparent" in mainstream media, where women's issues seem to be taken up but not really treated as significant. To counter these trends, FIRE was set up as an independent broadcaster and as a bridge for and within the women's movement. It has been providing a free venue for dissenting and alternative voices to be heard when it was first established as a shortwave radio station, and up to now as an Internet radio station. Suarez' colleague Margaret Thompson reported that based on an audience survey they conducted, FIRE has achieved wide audience reach in 34 countries in the past five years as an Internet radio station. She also shared FIRE's effort to train Latin American women in web development as a step in encouraging content creation in the region.
Anita Gurumurthy of Development Alternatives for Women in a New Era (DAWN) and IT for Change offered to look at ICTs through different lenses. The globalised IT economy has not benefited women, and the IT industry has refused to ensure worker's rights, and women IT workers are in the lower rungs of IT labor pool. Labor market segmentation, or which jobs go to which people, still occurs along gender and class lines. At the same time, the so-called "global cities" such as in Bangkok or Bangalore require large infrastructure, and competition is steep and small firms find it hard to survive. Trafficking of women and children has also been facilitated by the new ICTs. Knowledge is commodified in the new economy, through an intellectual property regime that takes previously publicly-owned knowledge, such as agricultural technology, and patents it for ownership by a few monopolies. Meanwhile, the homogenising trend of globalised media is such that the global has superseded the local. She cites how in South Asia, where 50 broadcast satellites beam content to 515 million potential viewers, the media does not reflect the diversity of peoples. Lastly, militarism as practised by the US is an imperialistic strategy forwarded by its glamorised depictions in global media and advanced technology and the use of economic clout. She ended by asking the audience what kind of feminist strategy is required in these different spaces to inform the global economy. "The bottom line is that we need to democratise the information sphere. We constantly advocate global commons, but what we actually need is local commons."
To further illustrate Gurumurthy's analysis, Kalyani Menon-Sen described the work of her organisation Jagori, which has been actively working on women's issues in India through communication work encompassing traditional and new media. By picturing the growth of ICT industries in developing countries, Menon-Sen recounted the existence of a new class of workers emerging as a result of global outsourcing trends. In India, college educated middle class women have become as "technocoolies," working at call centres, where their social lives are curtailed and they suffer bipolar disorders as a result of the unusual working conditions. She said these women run the risk of losing the skills they learned in college and restricting their social lives and their capacity to form supportive networks, but the government has not acknowledged these as problems. Menon-Sen also presented the interventions in media Jagori produced-two 30-second spots for television dealing with body image and domestic violence-part of their continuing campaigns to inform through mainstream and alternative media.
The views of these feminist communicators reflect the complex relationships of globalised media and ICTs, and how the process of subjugation, militarisation and repression need to examined and questioned. To sustain the dialogue, Isis will also be organising a panel of feminist communicators at the World Social Forum in India in January 2004. Details of this forum will be announced in the next issue of we!
Full texts of the presentations will be archived and be made available in January 2004 on the Isis website.
Report by Aileen Familara
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