Institutionalised presence needed in social media: Manish Tewari

Information and Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari has asked state governments to have an institutionalised presence in social media.

“The social media is the largest ungoverned space, and never before in the history of mankind has there been so much power in the hands of the people concurrently located in so many places,” he said addressing a function to commemorate the 69th anniversary of Meghalaya’s leading local English daily The Shillong Times here Tuesday evening.

He added: “Media is too precious (for its) freedom to be left in the hands of a regulator.”

He said state governments and district administrations should have an institutionalised presence in social media, and for this to materialise, he promised that his ministry would offer the best practices on how to go about having an institutional framework.

He said his ministry has already established a new media wing, which would address the communication and dissemination requirements on social media platforms.

Tewari said the wing would integrate the communication tools horizontally and vertically through various social media stages.

He said though there was danger to the democratisation of information space as its common rules of engagement have not emerged.

“The common rules of engagement in modern virtual space are unfortunately not emerging, and my apprehension is that if these rules do not emerge swiftly and agreed to by nations, we will also see the vulcanization of the web, as we saw the emergence of the world wide web,” he said.

He said: “Nations need to agree to the common rules of engagement in the virtual civilization, to prevent any cataclysmic impact it could have on the physical world.”

-IANS