Business
Mobile Phone To Outshine Other Media – Don
Mobile phone has been described as“ the next greatest brand of information technology” set to outshine other media of mass communication.
Prof. Kshitindra Shrivastava, Head, Indian Institute of Mass Communication made the remark on Monday in New Delhi at the inauguration of a two-week training programme for a select group of African journalists.
Using India as a model, he noted that out of its 1.2 billion people, roughly 800 million of them had access to mobile phones.
“The biggest media growth is going to come from the mobile phone. It is the world’s largest market and young people who are our future are at the centre of it.
“We (Indians) will use human resource for the development of the mobile phone media platform, which could be a game changer for Africa as well,’’ he said.
Shrivastava explained that news either in audio or video clips could be transmitted through the mobile phone platform to recipients in the remote localities.
Apart from using mobile phone as a news dissemination medium, he said that it could also be effectively used to deliver welfare services to the rural poor who did not have access to other forms of mass communication.
He said if media houses utilised the mobile phone for gathering their reports, they would have a more efficient service with wider and faster coverage than the television, radio or the print media.
Shrivastava maintained that the use of mobile phone as a mass communication tool would boost information dissemination and encourage the expansion of journalism as a profession.
He urged African nations and media professionals to key into the emerging technology by engaging in multimedia journalism to expand their media coverage and reports.