Media Education and New Technologies - III

The massive IT expansion plans of Indian Government has taken note of the multiplicity of languages, but the fears are that in spite of the facility to work in your own languages, the use of English would increase due to globalization and the Frankenstein dominance of English on Internet. The basic training of Computers and Internet in India still draws heavily from English. I am associated with an IT terminology bank project in Hindi which will be on the web by next month. There are a few books on computer, word processing and Internet in Hindi. There is already a respectable presence of portals, newspapers and web sites in Hindi. But what happens when a user has to learn at an advance level, he switches to English and the dominance continues. It is also getting reflected in the new love for radio in various countries. It is in the domain of FM/XM radio that the notion of Public Broadcasting is going to suffer the most. Indian Experience tells us that in last 10 years or so FM has not significantly contributed in the democratization or in preservation of local cultures and languages. As the process of bastardization of languages is going on every where in the society, the masses in various areas are also getting the same messages in their FM. The world over the communities are worried by these trends and it is here that the media education can play a very vital role of educating the masses, the media professionals and the media educators as well. It can do so by analyzing media and its relationship with political and economic process, the social and cultural environment and the people at large. In the jet set integration of nations and small communities in the global village, the market has no time to ponder about these issues. There are indications that the market is also going to exert pressure on the education in general and media education in particular to fall in line with it. It is encouraging to note that those media practitioners who have Indian audiences in mind are working hard to create localized portals and web sites. There are many problems in web localization like the absence of standardized Indian language keyboard though the Department of Electronics and the Bureau of Indian Standards have acknowledged that the Gist (Graphics and Intelligence based Script Technology) based phonetic keyboard is the standard for Indian Languages. But today, there are as many keyboards as the software companies dealing with Indian languages.

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