Latin America's Democratic Opening. What was the role of media and what should be the role for new media?
When: Thursday May 14th at 7.15pm
Where: The Perseverance, 63 Lamb's Conduit Street. Nearest tube Holborn. Map here.
What: Pub meeting. (Small) oD tab.
The room can hold about 30 people. Email Julian Stern (julian.stern@opendemocracy.net) if you'd like to come.
Discussion led by Juanita Leon and Ivan Briscoe.1 hour of seminar-style discussion followed by social.
Juanita's intro:
Colombia has changed a great deal in the last 30 years, in no small part because of the great social mobility created by drug trafficking. The entertainment, the business and the political world have evolved and democratized in ways that have surprised even the more skeptical in the Left. The media world, instead, remains one of the last trenches of the old elite.
There is a huge media concentration, which creates a high-level entry barrier for other competitors, so the idea that it is ‘impossible’ to create an alternative successful media has gotten hold of my generation. New Media, and specially the new open-source platforms, create the opportunity to break that monopoly with new information sources that are not linked to the economic or political elite of the country.
The biggest challenge is to develop a sustainable economic model for this new media because at least in Colombia - although I bet it is the same in other countries of Latin America - the weight of government in the market is huge and a lot of advertisers don´t want to have their ads in media critical of government.
Ivan's intro:
Latin America's democratic opening has come at one remove from the media: while certain outlets chipped at dictatorship, they certainly did not fell them (this was largely an elite enterprise). Indeed the "democratic" media have been marked by privileged relationships with power, maintenance of a hysteric agenda of crime and insecurity, selective use of information and blatant political meddling (Mexico, Central America, Argentina stand out). For the new left, the creation of alternative media spaces has been combined with attacks on the major conglomerates (Venezuela, Nicaragua). The end result is hardly the establishment of a real independent sphere of debate.
Obviously the new media has immense potential here, though yet to be realized. Segmentation of society and opinion is the prevalent norm, patrolled by extraordinary flexible and self-justifying discourses; the established Latin American commentators operated at a stellar distance from ground-level. That ground level expresses itself as threat - political or criminal. Real purposive exchange of experience is vital.
