The Challenge of Developing a Social Agenda in Communication (Burch, 2003)

The development of a social agenda in the field of communications is one of the challenges of the World Social Forum (WSF), as part of the on-going process of searching for and constructing alternatives. Since the 2002 WSF, ALAI, together with other groups committed to democratising communication, have been putting forward a proposal to meet this goal, with two core areas of concern.
The first concern responds to the fact that communication, being a cutting edge industry and sector of financial speculation, is at the centre of the very economic model that is being questioned here. For this same reason it is an area where social resistance and the proposal of alternatives become strategic. The second concern relates to the need for the process of social coordination itself to establish mechanisms of intercommunication and information flow in order to enable the building of bridges between different sectors and struggles, to raise awareness among new social actors and also to gain opinion spaces that can counterbalance the hegemony of dominant thinking. (see link for entire paper)