Telcos told to also give priority to content on culture, human civilisation

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KUALA LUMPUR: Telecommunication companies (telcos) should also give priority to content on culture and development of human civilisation, said Information Communica-tion and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim.He said this would further help stimulate the minds of Malaysians more so this in this era of sophisticated and borderless communication and was an aspect of content the telcos should address besides chasing profits.

“New applications like the short-messaging service (SMS), Blackberry, Yahoo Messenger, Twitter, ICQ, Skype and the like have made communications between humans easier and this has contributed to the development of human civilisation and changed the landscape of communication univer-sally, which before heavily depended on the telephone, telex, fax and the postal service,” he said.

He said this in his speech which was read out by his deputy Datuk Joseph Salang at the prize-giving ceremony for winners of the ‘Mobile Content Challenge 2009’ contest, here yesterday.

According to Rais, owing to the ease of communica-tion, certain aspects of culture, like language, might face challenges.

He said truncating spellings in using the SMS could jeopardise the integrity of Bahasa Melayu besides posing challenges to ethical issues in interpersonal relationships.

“There have been cases of consumers using SMS, MMS, chat rooms, Facebook and Twitter to spread rumours and with speed spread hatred among people,” he said.

He said abuse of these applications should be addressed together by raising awareness on the ethics and proper norms of using sophisticated communication tools in this ultra-modern age.

On the contest, he said it was a very good programme and should be continued in future.

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia’s team emerged the overall winner with their ‘Flyer:On-The-Fly Flash Composer And4 Community’ mobile content and walked away with total prize money of RM60,000 for the university and the team. — Bernama