MONTEVIDEO, Feb 1 (IPS) - Next year, when the World Social
Forum (WSF) is ”decentralised” and held in a number of
different and still undetermined venues around the globe,
the need to remedy the event's ongoing deficiencies in
communications, both internal and external, will be even
more pressing.

According to WSF organisers, there were some 155,000
participants at this year's edition of the giant civil
society meet, which wrapped on Monday in the southern
Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.

Of that total, 6,880 were accredited as members of the
press, but this impressive ratio of one journalist for
every 22.5 people in attendance did not resolve the serious
communications problems that have consistently plagued the
WSF.

Professional journalists from the mass media were forced to
adapt, once again, to the lack of a traditional ”press
office”.

Because the WSF does not have directors or spokespeople (or
even special guests, at this year's edition), there is no
specific structure for selecting ”main events” to be
promoted from among the plethora of activities (2,500 in
all this year) or for attempting to summarise each day's
happenings.

This gargantuan task falls to each individual journalist.
But even before tackling the daunting challenge of deciding
what is and isn't ”important”, they must first try to get a
handle on a general overview of events, a practically
impossible goal.

The WSF is not conceived in such a way as to facilitate an
overview of what takes place there, yet reporters typically
attempt to approach the meeting from this perspective, or
present it to their audience as if they had.

In today's world, and perhaps also in the ”other possible
world” that the WSF is aimed at creating, no one would be
interested in news reported by someone who admitted being
lost in a veritable whirlwind of events.

As a result, it is no surprise that a ”manifesto” presented
on Saturday by a group of 19 renowned personalities
attending the WSF was given preferential coverage by the
mainstream media, despite the fact that it was not an
official declaration by the Forum itself.

In the absence of actual spokespeople, journalists seek out
famous names and faces, particularly those that have been
associated with the WSF since its inception. And it is hard
to convince a major international news network that no
single person can be considered
particularly ”representative” of the multitude.

An extremely interesting segment of the world population
comes to the Forum, but the Forum has still not solved the
problem of how to reach the world - not even that portion
of the world that forms part of it. Participants wander
from tent to tent, attending a fraction of the activities
scheduled, and learning what happened in a few others
through word of mouth.

How many people heard about the harsh criticism of the
Brazilian-led military intervention in Haiti, voiced at a
press conference shortly after 4:00 p.m. on Saturday by
Joao Pedro Stédile, the influential leader of Brazil's
Landless Workers Movement?

And who should decide if this story, or any other
reflecting the heated internal debates within the Brazilian
left, is more or less important than, for instance, the
condemnation of the atrocities committed in Chechnya voiced
in the same venue, several hours earlier, by Chechen lawyer
Lydia Yusupova?

This year, internal communications were better organised
than in previous editions, due to coordination between
alternative media that agreed at the end of each day on
which activities would be particularly important to cover
the following day.

But there was no reason to consider these agreements as
representative of the broad diversity of the Forum, and
some may even complain that they imposed negative
limitations on the coverage.

Moreover, how many of the participants actually had access
to these alternative media? Connecting to the Internet in
the WSF ”territory” was not easy, not even for accredited
journalists.

While panellists spoke in the Forum of the new information
technologies and the challenges of the 21st century,
effective internal circulation of messages depended mainly
on paper.

Newspapers, leaflets, or simply handwritten notices tacked
up on a tree in the enormous WSF youth camp were often more
useful tools than the worldwide web when it came to drawing
attention and people to a specific event or activity.

If next year's WSF is to be a decentralised event held
simultaneously on several continents, rather than a series
of independent regional forums, the problem of internal
communications becomes absolutely crucial, especially in
terms of interactivity. And there will be no way to solve
the problem with paper.

As in the WSF that ended Monday in Porto Alegre, the crux
of the problem does not lie in technology, but can be found
at the crossroads between ideology and organisational
policy.

The means exist for linking up distant simultaneous
meetings. But there is no way to broadcast everything to
everyone at the same time, and someone, somewhere, will
have to establish priorities.

With respect to external communication on WSF events, the
first question is how much importance is really assigned to
this aspect. A local television channel in Porto Alegre
dedicated its air time almost completely to the WSF, but
the Forum's organisers did not appear to be very interested
in keeping a close eye on this coverage, which shaped the
host city's perceptions of the giant civil society
gathering.

Is it merely assumed that the alternative media present at
the Forum will take on the role of being a link to
the ”outside world”? Or is little importance put on the
public who only receive their news through the mass media?
The first idea seems impracticable, and the second would
exclude the great majority of humankind.

It is clear that the decentralisation proposed for next
year's WSF would open up spaces for new television stations
with an international focus, which are much closer to the
Forum than the large commercial networks, but do not
necessarily share similar characteristics with the WSF.

These broadcasters, like TV Brasil or Venezuela's TeleSur
(in which Argentina is also expected to participate)
are ”alternative” in the same sense as the Qatar-based
Arabic language broadcaster Al-Jazeera, with respect to the
major U.S. networks.

But media outlets with strong state support, like Al-
Jazeera itself, emerge from decisions adopted by
governments, and will inevitably be sensitive to their
whims, even if they share the intention of being a vehicle
for broadcasting the expressions of civil society, and
whether they have a political or cultural focus.

The WSF organisers and the countless groups and individuals
involved in the entire process thus have one year to prove
that ”another kind of communication is possible”. (END/2005)