|
The Third EAVI International Conference took place in November in the National Senate House in Madrid.
The focal point of the Conference was citizens participation by way of the media.
The media, and media literate citizens, provides information, content and facilities by which citizens may participate with institutions, civil society organisations and each other appropriately and responsibly. They may work in coordination with other citizens and civil society organisations towards achieving their goals. For this reason, the EAVI conference was pleased to welcome representatives from the Spanish Senate, the European Commission, the Council of Europe, UNESCO, Nordicom, Ofcom, Strasbourg ICT&S Centre, Oxford University, the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University of Cairo. There were submissions from national and international governments, educational institutions and civil society organizations.
Among the many conclusions drawn from the Conference, the importance of media literacy was reinforced as the dependence of democracy on citizens who know where and how to look for information through the media, who understand what they are being told and why, who creates content and participates with institutions and each other appropriately and responsibly. The importance of being capable to coordination with other citizens and civil society organisations via the media was consistently reinforced, as a mode of civic engagement and empowerment, to affect change.
The role of national governments was explored, and the importance of a coordinated and coherent national and European approach was stated in order to promote media literacy, and its promotion of studies, alliances, initiatives, awareness and diffusion campaigns and to general lead the charge towards a media literate citizenship. This will facilitate better and higher quality discourse between institutions and organisations, which in turn will encourage democratic participation. UNESCO highlighted the importance of information literacy coupled with media literacy, by reason of the recognition of the convergence of these two fields – information, freedom of expression, Internet, electronic, video games and digital literacy all come down to the individual capacity to evaluate the quality and reliability of the content. Because the one is inextricable from the other, they may be taken as a unit therefore, particularly in the approach towards education and policy.
However, an as is typical of this debate, the onus of responsibility was placed on the individual using the media – therefore the efforts of policy makers are focused towards ensuring that individuals are educated to be media literate. Therefore, the role of media education played a key role in the conference, particularly in relation to young people, although the value of life-long education was also emphasised. As the largest demographic of new media users, as well as the individuals who will inherit whatever system or progress is made in this key time in the development of media literacy in Europe, the role of young people is of particular significance to this debate. Most children and young people have access to the internet at home and all children have internet access in school, it is considered by teachers to be primary educational and developmental tool, and children therefore must be protected and must be able to protect themselves from inappropriate content, and young people from inappropriate participation and content creation. Suggestions on this subject included that Media Literacy should be made the 9th Key Competence in the European Union and that national governments should lead the charge towards increasing media literacy levels among their citizens.
The “Dialogic Loop”, which citizens now benefit from, affects almost all parts of modern life and increasingly is affecting the processes of democracy. Communication which was previously uni-lateral, from governments and organisations to individuals, is now omni-lateral. The conference looked at the various repercussions of this. One of these was citizen journalism, and the impact, negative and positive, that it will have on journalism. The panel was overwhelmingly supportive of the current crisis that the print media currently faces, and although it acknowledged the value of citizen journalism in times of catastrophe or in a system that does not provide or protect the free press, in Europe this is, for the most part, not the case. It remains an unavoidable fact that quality journalism is expensive, and must be paid for. The role of advertisers in this context was discussed, and although it was agreed that some funding for the news should be provided by advertisers, it should not be the case that they are the sole source of revenue. It was a conclusion of the Conference that citizen journalism should not be prohibited, but nor should it be allowed to subsume or replace professional journalism, rather, it should compliment it.
A further consequence of the dialogic loop which was discussed was the importance of interactivity and participation in order to build a functioning knowledge economy, and the aspects which are of crucial importance – civic education, citizen’s media such as community media and multimedia centres, participatory communication and user generated content, should be addressed by all participants of the media debate. It is the goal of the European Union that all citizens become media literate in order to facilitate, and to be capable of participating with and benefiting from, the knowledge economy. This includes, when considering the statistic that up to 70% of information online is unreliable, the capacity of individuals to be able to spot and respond appropriately to false or misleading information, including how to avoid it and how to assist in its eradication. If new media is effectively going to user-regulated, those users must be equipped with the skills to do so.
Following the lively discussion and debate following the five panels, there were several proposals for action that emerged. The first, and most exciting of which, is the utilisation of the Lisbon Treaty’s 1 million signature clause. This states that, should one million citizens be collected from a significant number of Member States, then the matter is to be addressed by the European Union. Because the signatures must be collected from the beginning of 2011 onwards, the exact nature of the petition EAVI and its partners will put forward, but it is expected that it will concern media education. There was a strong consensus that the role of civil society organisations should be strengthened in this context, and that there should be increased dialogue between civil society and the European Institutions.
|
|
José Manuel Pérez Tornero
