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138 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
questions become of common concern across cultures and societies. It is
not the case that issues of freedom of expression, human dignity, poverty
and the environment have not been of significance across the world.
However, at this particular phase of market integration and the process
of a perceived ‘globalization’, these issues enter a different political arena.
This is also the case because of the change in military and power dynamics
in the world after the end of the Cold War, perhaps not so much by
changing the dominant actors in the ‘game’ of international relations,
but rather because the context of and points of reference for this game
have changed. As we have seen, the technology has been identified as
the definite criterion for the governing of communications in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first century. As such, the coordination of an
international effort to address relevant issues, as we have discussed in this
chapter, has been directed towards the designing of the Information Society
or a certain version thereof. Again under the auspices of the United
Nations, but this time under the ITU and not UNESCO, a meeting of
international actors has been organized throughout the period 2003–5.
The World Summit on the Information Society is organized into two
phases of official meetings between participating governments, including
contributions from civil society and the private sector.
The significance of this summit is seen by some parts of the academic
and larger civil society as unique owing to the official inclusion of national
and international NGOs in the course of these meetings. The first
phase of the WSIS took place in Geneva (10–12 December 2003) and
concluded with the adoption of the Declaration of Principles and Plan of
Action outlining the participants’ ‘Common Vision of the Information
Society’ to ‘build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented
Information Society’ (Clause 1). Nevertheless, and despite the ‘unitarian’
language of these first declarations that were presented as common
visions and statements by a tripartite alliance – governments, civil society
and private sector – there has been a not insignificant delineation of the
difference in ‘visions’ between actors of civil society and those represented
by states and companies. The result was a separate and markedly differentiated
statement issued by civil society that reemphasizes the social and
political aspects of any future ‘society’. Notably, the Civil Society Declaration
issued after the end of Phase 1 states that its vision is information
societies and that it aims to create a communication society, where ‘every
person must have access to the means of communication and must be
able to exercise their right to freedom of opinion and expression’ (Civil
Society Declaration at WSIS-I). Although this declaration is the outcome
of a compromise on several early drafts among actors of the Civil Society,
the separate statement was created out of a sense of frustration with