Does eContent talk to the heart?

ICT is stimulating changes in the way most people earn their incomes; altering the balance between our roles as consumer and producers; changing the way we educate succeeding generation and train ourselves; changing the fruition of world’s cultural heritage; transforming the delivery of health care; altering the way we govern ourselves; changing the way we form communities; altering the way we obtain and communicate information; contributing to bridge some cultural or physical gaps; and modifying pattern of activity among the elderly. In recent times the digital domain, once strictly populated by professional users and computer scientists, open up to former digitally divided. Technology is evolving toward a mature “calm” phase, “users” are overlapping more and more “citizens” and they consider technology and eServices as an everyday commodity, to buy a ticket, to meet a medical doctor, to access weather forecast even to initiate “social” relation. How such a new wave influenced cultural diversity and languages? Till what extent eContent and Services are available in local languages? Is the Internet a melting pot creating a new lingua franca the “Engternet”? After different waves jeopardising cultural diversity such as the different aspects of globalisation including global markets and infrastructures the Internet and related services are a potential silver bullet to kill diversities. This aspect takes us to carefully consider the importance to preserve “diversity”, especially in the digital age. Which is the real value of diversity? We all know that the world population today is bigger than the number of people that lived on the planet earth since the human race appeared, but incredibly today is easier to disseminate ideas and content through the planet reaching individuals. This is one of the effects of the global inter-communication in the digital era. Moreover global software tools are unleashing everyday creativity no regards about citizenship, language, gender or census. On one hand the digital age is enabling better opportunities to exploit local cultures and knowledge due to minorities, on the other hand such a “global village” jeopardizes minorities and local cultures playing the role of standardization agent. A kind of English language, the one generated by spelling and grammar checkers, and translators is still placed in pole position but very close we find Chinese language quickly improving its ranking. New devices and communication standards are inspiring new languages built on abbreviations, phonetic equivalences, graphic signs and emoticons, will the 140 chars tweet became the new structure of verses? Smart phones and tablets are breaking time and space barriers including formerly divided people in the emerging cultural phenomenon. This is true both for young generation but even for elderly people that find tablets and smart phones more user friendly than “old” computers. Digital technology is offering new ways to express creativity in different fields: music, images, videos, physical objects and more, enabling young generation to express their feeling and contribute to the creative industries. Content and services sometimes are built on top of existing data sets, more than ten years ago the European Commission created a framework to improve the added value reuse of public data sets. The recently emerged keyword “Open Data” represents one of the nowadays’ challenges. Institutions and companies are investing time and resources in order to turn such a concept into reality. Dealing with Open Data we must take into consideration, among the others, two main aspects: the public body can legally dispose of the processed data using them freely and eventually re-firing them as it may consider useful? How it can be wise to behave in managing their rights? These questions take us to directly refer to aspects ranging between the origin of the data set, the procedure activated in order to collect them at the time, the intellectual rights ownership and transfer, plus last but not less relevant the protection of sensitive data and related citizens’ privacy issues.