‘It is not good for the person to be alone’: The capabilities approach and the right to communicate
For decades, attempts have been made to define a ‘right to communicate’. The rise of media technologies, which are characterized by abundance of channels and information, interactivity, mobility, and multimediated messaging, has allowed to rethink this right in a context converging traditional media and telecommunications and referring to communicating as an essential human capability. Applying Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach to communications, we argue that communicating is a capability required to realize such functionings as participating in political, cultural, social, educational, and commercial life and is essential to promote belonging to a collective. The ‘negative’ right to free speech should be replaced by a positive right to communicate, which should include free speech, access to information, privacy, and utilization of communications in order to belong to a community.
Amit M Schejter, ‘It is not good for the person to be alone’: The capabilities approach and the right to communicate, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (28, 6) pp. . Copyright © 2022. DOI: 10.1177/13548565211022512. Users who receive access to an article through a repository are reminded that the article is protected by copyright and reuse is restricted to non-commercial and no derivative uses. Users may also download and save a local copy of an article accessed in an institutional repository for the user's personal reference. For permission to reuse an article, please follow our Process for Requesting Permission.
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Work Title | ‘It is not good for the person to be alone’: The capabilities approach and the right to communicate |
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License | In Copyright (Rights Reserved) |
Work Type | Article |
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Publication Date | August 3, 2021 |
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Deposited | July 31, 2023 |
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