Equitable access to information is one of the most vital principles in the emerging global information economy, and there is perhaps no region of the world that epitomizes the conflict between the information haves and have-nots than Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). In addition to the more traditional forms of poverty, a new concept, "information poverty," has emerged that better explains the true nature of being a have-not in a world increasingly reliant on information and communication technologies (ICT). This article will take a holistic approach in discussing possible first steps towards evaluating user needs in SAA, exploring the need for information professionals from industrialized nations to take a more active role in international collaboration to help combat information poverty in the developing world. This article will also examine efforts in developing countries to help bridge the digital divide with the industrialized world.

There is much debate about whether a digital divide still exists within the United States. While some believe that Internet access is now widely available and affordable, others warn divides will continue to expand unless more government resources are made available to offset this recurrent social problem (Compaine 2001, Bertot 2003, Rowe 2003). The tension between these two oppositional positions lies within the broader issue of how speech rights are framed within the U.S. While the First Amendment guarantees freedom from censorship in some cases, it does not necessarily guarantee that the means to communicate are available to all citizens. Historically, the government’s role is to protect a “marketplace of ideas,” allowing conditions for the best ideas to prevail. However, there are differing ideas about how best to promote the marketplace. In relation to media regulation, Supreme Court rulings on speech rights focus on media specificity, balancing access, such as interpreting how airwaves should be used for the public interest in broadcast policy, and content, such as protecting commercial speech over individual speech as in the case of print media. Framing speech rights in this economic context fails to address why communication is a crucial component to democratic processes (Kairys 1990, Mensch 1990, Sunstein 1993). Since the 1990s, policymakers apply this ideology of the marketplace to address the digital divide. Funding for initiatives such as the E-rate program and public access centers assumes that providing infrastructure will necessarily lead to community development, with little understanding of why citizens should have the means to communicate. The technological determinism present in these policies not only overshadows the underlying role of communication in sustaining democracy, but also fails to make provisions for technological change. Trends toward media consolidation and convergence call for new frameworks for addressing media access (Stein 2003).

In this paper, I argue for a re-conceptualization of digital divide policy based on the emerging notion of the right to communicate which is present in international social movements. International efforts, including the United Nations sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) held in Geneva in 2003, incorporate a sense of collective rights into their initiatives. Collective rights broaden the notion of access to technology to an understanding of how communication helps sustain democracy, indigenous culture, and basic human needs (Hamelink 2004). Some communication scholars and activists, however, advocate adding the category of the right to communicate to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) to ensure that as access to technology is distributed, so is access to communication processes (D’Arcy 1969, Fisher 1982, Golding and Murdock 1989). Using a comparative analysis of international efforts that place communication rights, rather than speech rights, at the forefront of policy, I highlight some of the shortcomings of U.S. approaches to the digital divide. U.S. involvement in these projects is limited because of conflicting ideologies of how governments should intervene to develop media access policies. However, incorporating communication rights into U.S. interpretations of speech rights helps to reveal what is at stake in addressing the digital divide both nationally and internationally.

This article examines the intellectual history of the concept of 'publicity', originally defined by Immanuel Kant as the transcendental formula of public justice and the principle of the public use of reason, but later largely subsumed under the concept of 'freedom of the press'. The notion of the press as the Fourth Estate/Power was a valid concept and legitimate form of the institutionalization of the principle of publicity in the period when newspapers emanated from a new (bourgeois) estate or class: they had a different source of legitimacy than the three classic powers, and developed as a critical impulse against the old ruling estates. Yet the discrimination in favor of the power/control function of the press, which relates to the need of 'distrustful surveillance' defended by Bentham, clearly abstracted freedom of the press from the Kantian quest for the public use of reason. In democratic societies where the people rather than different estates legitimize all the powers, the control dimension of publicity embodied in the corporate freedom of the press should be effectively supplemented by actions toward equalizing private citizens in the public use of reason

This article introduces the idea of 'risk societies' to highlight how conventional views of the information economy are confounded by the productivity paradox, uncertain demand for new information and communication technologies (ICTs), and the heterogenous qualities of information. Confronting these realities, the communication industries are using monopolization strategies, surveillance, and technological design in their, often elusive, attempts to manage risk and turn the scarce resources of the media economy – time, money and attention – into economic value. These strategies erode the 'soft factors' of trust, confidence, social networks and privacy that are vital to people's willingness to embrace new ICTs and the legitimacy of the information society. Although these trends have created space for new privacy enhancing technologies and trust-brokers, the translation of socio-cultural norms into technology and market-based solutions renders communicative spaces more opaque than ever.

The terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001 demonstrated that we live in an interdependent, vulnerable, and fragile global village. This village, however, does not enjoy the intimacy of face-to-face communication among the villagers. We live in a largely mediated world ruled by government media monopolies or commercial media oligopolies that construct images of "the other." Promotion of particular commodities and identities are the main preoccupations of the two commercial and government systems. The two systems thus tend to exacerbate international tensions by dichotomizing, dramatizing, and demonizing "them" against "us." Is there an alternative media system to promote peace journalism for international and intercultural understanding? This article argues that ethically responsible journalism is a sine qua non of peace journalism. The locus of most media ethics has hitherto been the individual journalist. But the individual journalist operates in the context of institutional, national, and international regimes. In a globalized world, media ethics must be negotiated not only professionally but also institutionally, nationally, and internationally. Such ethics must be based on international agreements that have already established the right to communicate as a human right. However, ethics without commensurate institutional frameworks and sanctions often translate into pious wishes. To obtain a pluralism of content to reflect the diversity and complexity of the world, this article calls for a pluralism of media structures at the local, national, and global levels. The article concludes with proposals to promote peace journalism through greater freedom, balance, and diversity in media representations.

This article suggests that those interested in both welfare theory and welfare policy cannot afford to overlook the emerging interactions between online and offline environments. It explores the main parameters of the debate relating to cyberspace, in particular, and Information and Communication Technologies more generally. It argues that the pervasiveness of free market capitalism means that the negative consequences of the Internet for society and social welfare reform are those most likely to prevail at present. The task of the social policy community, then, is to contribute to a 'cybercriticalism'. The article outlines a concept of 'virtual rights', the purpose of which is to reinvigorate the traditional categories of rights in an information society to which they often appear unsuited.

In this book, Cees J Hamelink proposes an answer to - how should democratic societies organize cyberspace? - that puts human-rights, rather than profit, at the top of the agenda. He argues that conventional ethical approaches are all seriously flawed. There is a growing volume of moral rules, netiquettes and codes of conduct, but they are of little help in solving the moral dilemmas raised by the new technologies. In this book the author analyzes the inadeqacies of current global governance policies and structures that underpin them, and argues for standards which put justice, human security and freedom first.

A Global Information Infrastructure (GII) is inevitable going to evolve from existing technologies. The networks encompassed by the GII will be diverse, innovative and creative, in contrast to the seeming trend toward dominance by a few companies. Concentration of power should be avoided, and communications and information technology used to promote values conducive to democratic society. The interactive possibilities of networks could have a profound impact on political choices, in that communication networks encourage an active informed approach and connect the private and public realms via information and exchange. Developing the GII is a complicated undertaking involving global social, cultural, economic and political structures as well as technical challenges. Universal access, diversity of expression and the right to communicate must be established before a truly global network can be implemented.

Ethics of journalism (communication) has become an important issue because of the paramount role of the mass media in social life and their frequent bias. A vital aspect in this field is the ethics of political communication. This article analyses from an ethical perspective the main elements of the political communication process, e.g. the communicators, the receivers, the function of the mass media, the purpose and the content of political language. Any ethical analysis must take into account the law of communication and the fact that communication is a fundamental human right. The article concludes that it is difficult to set up a positive link between politics and ethics, nor, by the same token, is it feasible to conceive of political communication as being presided over by ethics.

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