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Media Education & New Technologies - I

© Prof. Hemant Joshi

The beginning of the new millenium has thrown open a completely new debate about the relationship of media technologies to media studies and training. The rapid growth of Internet has allowed us to spread the message of media education in every corner of the globe by creating numerous web sites. Various courses of media education are being offered in virtual university or classroom mode. Information Technology has created a very powerful media where the controls are going to be largely in the hands of those who would specialist in information technology and computers instead of the Mass Communication studies. The balance would be brought only by promoting inter disciplinary studies which gives equal importance to both.

Some of the questions arising out of the emergence and expansion of the Internet and its subsequent use as an interactive multimedia are the following:

1. Will the Internet be a means of Information or will it be the part of entertainment industry?

2. Will it become a media of democratization or will the forces of dominance subsume it?

3. What kind of challenges it has thrown to the media educators and practitioners?

4. What relationships it has established with the values of journalism in particular and the culture and languages of the society in general?

These and many more of such political and sociological questions are being raised, day in and day out, by media educators and professionals. The perspectives of answers to these questions are as many as there are difference among the citizens of this globalised world that is being created with the help of the New Technologies. The craftsmen of these technology are overwhelmed by their perpetual creation and the politically conscious section of the global populace is increasingly worried by the creation of this new "Information Bomb" which is being used as a mere tool for marginalisation of the poor.

A few years ago in a seminar on Globalization held at Aurangabad (India), Professor Hodges, an American Professor of Journalism who had come to India as Full bright Fellow, said that the age of Darwinism has gone. The natural law of survival of the fittest no longer holds good. In this age of Informatics, it will be the survival of the wisest. Of course, he was absolutely correct as in the global competitive market the wisest would survive. It is for this reason that only a few think about what would happen to those millions and millions of people who may not even be the consumers. This itself shows the wide gap of perspective between west and east, between the elite and the Masses.

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