Changing perceptions

Since the first time I participated in the ITU Youth Forum in 2002, I’ve been lucky enough to help organizing a number of other ITU Youth Forums.  When I say “lucky”, part of it is because I get to read essays that the young people from various parts of the world submit as part of the selection process.  The essays usually deal with a question of how ICT can help solving socioeconomic problems.  After reading those essays for a few years, you start noticing patterns and this is where it is getting really interesting.

After having a chance to look at the latest batch of essays from the Asia-Pacific region, I have a couple of observations:

• There is more similarity in the way young people describe social, political, and economic problems, and more so the information and communication technology.  In previous years, there was less unity in the way people addressed the question of the essay.
• In the past, when young people wrote about ICT, they always wrote about the internet and sometimes about mobile communication (a more recent trend).  In the current batch a noticeable amount of people placed TV and radio in the same basket as the internet and the mobile.

Of course, these are very preliminary observations and in order to derive more robust or generalizable conclusions, one needs a more systematic analysis.  I haven’t done that (yet), but I do find those early observations interesting.  What do you think?