People in the third world countries do not have equal access to technologies. The technology tends to dominate by its mere presence. Alfonso Gumucio Dagron is perhaps right when he says "Technology is overshadowing values. The Internet is accessible to less than 1% of sub-Saharan Africans. While telephony is growing very rapidly, it remains accessible and affordable to a very small proportion typically less than 10% - of people in developing countries. So the technological 'bang' is only relevant to a minority of the world. The vast majority doesn't even realise the widening of the gap."(Alfonso Gumucio, 2000, In Search of Communicators) The ownership of the media is another dominance which reflect in its use. Earlier, the media was owned or controlled by the governments in many developing countries. It was used by the powers that be to perpetuate their rule, but it also had the responsibility of entertaining, informing and educating the masses. However, the media fought this dominance. The only way to do so was by giving media ownership in private hands. Now, the market dominates through its power to sustain media efforts by way of financing them or through advertising revenues. Robert Hooper in his paper Education in the Developing World has raised the issue of dominance while discussing the relationship of Western media with the media of developing nations. He writes, "Internet technology also provides the means for powerful media organizations to exploit and dominate the small, indigenous media outlets of developing nations." The Technology has brought many changes in media specially because the media technology influences the communicator's main faculty of message generation. Think of those who were efficient in writing with their pen. When typewriters came they took their time to adjust with this new machine. Same is happening today where those well versed with the earlier system of Newspaper making are faced with the challenge of doing it with Desktop Publishing. And now, it is not only DTP but doing it on the Web what they were doing on DTP. The Web journalism is picking up and this time it is not only a question of learning a new machine, but it is a question of competing with those who have got their entry in media because of their knowledge of technology. There are serious concerns expressed about the online pages of many newspapers being simply the true copy of their broadsheet version. It would be worth listening to George Thottam who his paper Journalism Education in the age of the Internet would deal with the dominance of Technology in the domain of journalism. He says:
Go To Page: 1 2
