I attended a panel discussion about the evolution of the global civil society, yesterday. Sounds rich, I know. Initially, it promised to be a series of prepared (no doubt) speeches by the panelists who come from all walks of life.
The mediator happened to be a Brit professor who was not in the least bit stiff upper lipped. On the contrary, he turned out to be a witty chap with twinkling eyes and a crooked smile who managed to diffuse the air of formality with his timely retorts.
And suddenly we had young people, old people, activists and yuppies, men and women, Indians and people of other nationalities diving into the Q&A session with a vengeance, striving to have their say. The discussion took an impassioned turn about the meaning of ’globalisation’, media ethics, ethics in general terms, corruption, et al. Such discussions always run the risk of turning into slanging matches. But the speaker did manage to diffuse the tension, though not the tangential twists it took.
Post the event my pal Altaf, who with his fabulous networking and organisational skills help put the event together, nudged me (rather maternally) to ‘go mingle’. So, I spoke to the speaker who was still in high spirits. He seemed to have this natural curiosity to know what people were thinking and why.
Our conversation turned to a comment by one of the panelists, a head honcho from one of the broadcast news channels. He did not mince any words when he mentioned that his job was to ‘create maximum economic value for the stakeholder of his company‘. I appreciate his candid nature, because it was a refreshing departure from other media houses who merely pay lip service to the fouth estate, when indeed there is no integrity in their brand of journalism. On the other hand we can’t real blame them. Editors are pressurised by the marketing heads. Marketing heads are pressured by the majority stakeholder. Majority stakeholders want to be rich and influence people. When editors rebel they get the boot.
So, the Internet is probably the best place to start telling the truth. It allows us to analyse, connect, communicate, propogate, et al. One just needs to know how to tap it’s true potential.
Altaf is one such fellow who exploits (and I mean this in a good way) the Internet very effectively to connect people, network, create audiences and participants for all sorts of events, forums, messages and causes. In fact, he’s the go-to person of Internet networking and communication.
My friend Alan does not bother reading the newspapers or watching broadcast news channels, because he thinks they mostly report a load of crap. He gets his political information from private blogs (Example: Crooksandliars.com), videos forums and a few television shows he swears by (like the Bill Maher‘s Real Time), et al. Ultimately he draws his own conclusions about world events and perceptions, after a sifting through various sources of information he considers to be reliable.
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