Thursday, October 23, 2008

Media Workshop Ahead of 2009 Election in South Africa

By Karen Lotter
I recently contributed to a workshop organised by Marlan Padayachee for Greengold Africa for the Democracy Development Programme.
The Three Day workshop was a multi-party one for representatives of political parties in KZN and one of my inputs was on the role of so called new media - ie Internet, e-mail campaigns, Facebook, Youtube etc in political campaigns.
Smartxchange gave me a few goodies to hand out and I encouraged the politicos to come to the Smart City Conference and wise up on all e-stuff.
I know that the masses are not yet online, but every day more people are “connecting to the grid” and with eThekwini’s broadband roll out it is only a matter of time before the statistics in our city go crazy and Internet becomes the communication medium of choice, especially for the poor and those in the outlying areas.
And the politicians - well they’d better be a few steps ahead, or the people are going to leave them behind!

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