Princess Rym Ali

What if the tool that frees you is the same one that binds you?

The media age was hailed as a most promising era for freedom of expression. But it doesn’t always quite feel that way. It also feels like we no longer know who really decides what is OK to publish in today’s media. There are so many media outlets, and so many media platforms, it can be dizzying to make sense of the reality around us, who is really expressing themselves behind a screen and whether they are talking freely.

We were told by many that Facebook and Twitter were bringing democracy to the Arab world.

As a former journalist, Princess Rym Ali is acutely aware of the role that the media plays in a democracy. As the Founder of an NGO that depends on funding for projects, she also hears the word democracy thrown around at almost every project proposal, aimed at “building democracy.”

As an educator, Princess Rym knows that democracy doesn’t happen in well-intended projects, or over Facebook, or Twitter. Democracy comes as the result of having built a culture of democracy. And that begins in school.

Princess Rym Ali stepped into the newly designed control room, an entire wall panel of little screens, each showing a different video. Her host proudly explained to her what the future of news was going to look like – and his company had the technology: the personalization of information and programs has been coming to us for years. On your own TV, at home, you will no longer be subjected to content dictated by editors anywhere. Based on your likes and dislikes, you can be shown only things you like to see. But what does that mean for humanity when we no longer share information or certain interpretations of this shared reality? How do you make the case for Climate Change and urge fellow humans to do what is right by Mother Earth if part of the world’s population doesn’t share the same awareness about the issue?

As Princess Rym Ali watches today’s teens juggle learning and sharing through their fingertips, she can’t help but wonder how their understanding of the world compares to hers at their age.

They can, if they want, access the same amount of information Princess Rym can today, as quickly -maybe even faster because they are more digitally literate: before she even steps out of the house, she has read a variety of news articles of her own choosing and opened links sent to her on various topics that have to do with everything from how to be a parent to how to make a given recipe to why the price of fuel is up again and who is winning in the war in Ukraine – courtesy of the great algorithms that rule her on-screen life.

In many ways, that means our teenagers and we are just as wise.

But among all that information her brain downloaded, how much of it has she truly absorbed so it is useful? Maybe being wiser is about knowing how to use that information. Have her teens learned that too?

If the Pandemic taught us anything, it is that we do not exist as individuals in a vacuum.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights tells us we have rights as individuals, and we do, of course.

The African Union’s Charter of Human and People’s Rights reminds us that the enjoyment of our rights is tied to the performance and duties of all our fellow humans.

Or, as Nelson Mandela famously said, that none of us are free until all of us are free.

That is Ubuntu.