This past week, Rhodes University’s School of Journalism and Media Studies and the South African Broadcasting Corporation hosted a conference called Highway Africa. The theme this year was, “Citizen Journalism, Journalism for Citizens”. According to the website, “Over the past few years the world has witnessed a surge in the use of new media – especially those based on the World Wide Web – by ordinary users across the globe. Parallel to this upsurge has been the development of the semantic web. The emergence of social networking websites such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and ubiquitous use of instant messaging technologies such as Skype, Yahoo and MSN has marked the shift in the utility of the internet. Time magazine’s 2006 decision to name “you” its person of the year at once acknowledged and publicized the prevalence and utility of content generated by ordinary internet users”. So that’s pretty awesome.
The conference also gives out three awards every year, one in the non-profit category, one to a student or individual, and one in the corporate category. African Women and Child Feature Service based out of Nairobi is a finalist in the non-profit category – my fingers are crossed that they’ll win!
All in all, there wasn’t too much emphasis on women, gender issues, ICTs or human rights. Granted, I wasn’t there and so I can’t speak with 100% assurance, but the website showed a real lack of concern for this stuff. Citizen journalism, media and communications are important parts of human rights and activism. Maybe next year the focus could be on social justice…?
