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Commentary: Dumbing down media content undermines democracy. News media need to unleash the full power of investigative journalism. Every investigative story that goes in-depth and behind the scenes will actually strengthen democracy and the free press. The hope was that information technology would level the playing field and bridge the digital divide existing globally and within our countries. But, this commentary argues, technology alone is never the answer. Information technology is not value-free either and is not, by itself, going to provide answers to deep-seated structural problems of governance, social justice and equity.

The first article in this volume delineates the broad social & political backdrop to the What Next project by surveying some major contemporary problems & challenges & by tracing the development debate over the last thirty years. Coronel & Dixit start from a snapshot from the Philippine island Siargao that dramatises both global disparities & the utterly bleak conditions under which many people live today. With no other way to survive, some farmers & fisherfolk on Siargao are driven to sell their kidneys to rich buyers, exemplifying current trends toward commodification, whether of nature, the human body or genetic material. Cases such as that of Siargao, Coronel & Dixit write, are part of a wider movement of marketisation, privatisation & neoliberal globalisation, now being promoted as a 'single formula for all'. The world at the outset of the 21st century, they state, is marked by a paradox: 'despite increasing levels of global wealth & giant leaps in technological development, global poverty & inequity are at higher levels now than 30 years ago'. Moving back to the 1970s, when the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation's report What Now: Another Development (1975) was published, the article also describes how the development debate was then framed. Development was seen by many as a fairly straightforward process through which Southern countries should strive to replicate the economic structures of the North. Yet at the same time, Coronel & Dixit note, this conception was being questioned. Among the early attempts to envision another view of development was the What Now report, which stressed the need for pluralism, self-reliance & holism as well as ecological concern. With the benefit of thirty years of hindsight, Coronel & Dixit's article revisits the principles of What Now & weighs them against the development thinking of today, epitomised by the UN Millennium Development Goals. Adapted from the source document.