The World Summit on the Information Society

The first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was held in Geneva, 10–12 December 2003. Over 10,000 delegates, from all over the world and different sectors of society, gathered in the spaces of Geneva Palexpo for three days of debates, conferences, formal and informal meetings, rituals of diplomacy and electronic story telling. Geneva was the end of an 18month preparatory process and an intermediate stage of the WSIS, as a second phase will be organized in Tunis, in November 2005. Governments, intergovernmental organizations, business entities and civil society groups have been involved in an exercise that can be read in different ways. It has been a political and a media event. It has made the connections between technology, culture and society visible. WSIS also offered an opportunity to redefine the conceptual boundaries of issues that are crucial to societal transformations at the beginning of the 21st century. It is therefore meaningful to attempt a critical evaluation, starting from some basic questions: where did WSIS come from? What really happened in Geneva? Did the Summit achieve anything at all? Do the final documents that were adopted, the Declaration of Principles and the Plan of Action, offer new insights and visions? What are the stakes in the second stage of the process? Finally, is WSIS relevant to communication scholars? To answer this last question we can start considering the WSIS as a communicative event. Its aims were the ‘definition of a common vision of the information society’ and the production of written documents that clearly state such a vision and the path to achieving it. These have been elaborated over time through political negotiation and stakeholders’ contributions, through discussions and consensus-building efforts. All negotiation, inside and outside the official process, has implied choices in terminology and topics: what should or should not find a place in the document, what should be mentioned and avoided, what definitions should be used, what meaning for concepts. In spite of the fact that the WSIS outcome is not a binding agreement among states, those documents are agreed-upon written texts that contribute to the creation of a semantic space, a ‘world of words’. GAZETTE: THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR COMMUNICATION STUDIES