The Latin American Communications Conference was held from April 27-30, 2010, in the city of Foz de Iguazú, Brazil. The conference was sponsored by the Brazilian Ministry of Education, the Center for Public Policy Studies (Fundación CEPP), and other notable organizations, and brought together key members involved in different areas of the communication media, regional governments and experts in order to debate on the communication of educational policies in Latin America.
Sebastian Tedesco, Business Development Director at Paginar.Net, took part in the round table discussion on the use of digital media and communication technology. Focusing on the Social Network phenomenon, Tedesco provided a dimensional framework for this phenomenon, stating that the Web 2.0 revolution is "comparable to the revolution that occurred with the invention of the printing press." "The massive and '2-way' communication that the new digital societies allow are going to destroy all traditional communication models, such as television, radio and print media," he explained to an audience who received some of the remarkable information with amazement.
There is a certain consensus surrounding the fact that the appearance of new information and communication technologies has generated a profound change in the methods of communicating and interacting. As Tedesco maintains, the appearance of the internet, and primarily the phenomenon of web 2.0 (YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter) has changed the basic logic of communication and the way we interact. The user has ceased to be a mere receiver of information and has become a participant in the generation of content. These new tools generate a more participatory dialog that "positions all of us to communicate on a more horizontal level." The argument is that this architecture of the media itself must be translated into the message, the very horizontality of the web, which conditions what we are going to say.
Some accept that the conditioning exists, but not because of the type of discourse but rather because the social relationships are no longer based on a pyramid structure but on a network, a "spider web" in which the State has ceased to have a privileged role and has become just another user. What the ministries have difficulty accepting is that they no longer hold a monopoly on the information that they used to. In the midst of these transformations, the question is: what can they do to turn themselves into a source of information, in order to have privileged discourse that allows the communication of a message that commits, generates belonging, identity, illusion and hope?
* In Argentina, there are 20 million internet users amidst a population of 40 million. In Brazil, there are 90 million internet users out of a population of 180 million. In Argentina alone, the annual growth rate of internet users is 40%.
* 80% of internet users belong to a Social Network. 60% visit it daily.
* Facebook is the most popular Social Network, with more than 500 million users worldwide.
* The United States Library of Congress has just decided that it is going to archive a copy of all messages from the Social Network Twitter from the year 2006 on as a historical record.
In this context, "The user is the journalist," declares Tedesco while demonstrating that the new digital communication tools allow the user to generate content and share it with their network of contacts in an extremely simple manner.
"In addition, as an audience they have different information consumption habits that undermine the traditional media models:
they read three or four newspapers at the same time, preventing their attention from being monopolized and they are more conscious of the difference between news and opinion; they deactivate attempts at editorialization when seeing the treatment of the same news by different media, etc."
As the discussion drew to an end, the conclusion of the round table debate was the need to adopt these new social communication tools for the communication of educational policies; and to give the role of the State an increased presence in this area.
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