The context of communication has changed with the advent of new technologies, and in particular with television and Internet. Now the question is: can we use these new media for education? And how? The new media have targeted mainly entertainment and advertising, leaving the old media to take care of the process of education. What is the result of this? Since communication has moved more towards new media and these have not taken much care of the educational and social aspects, the percentage of communication about education has shrunk so much, that now the result is that new generations are uneducated. Not in the sense that they are illiterate. But in the sense that they do not have cultural depth. Earlier, you could find people who were illiterate, but not uneducated. There was a popular folk culture based on religion, on oral traditions, on regional customs, which produced refined culture, though this culture was not written. In India, you have examples of refined poets who did not write their poems; they sang them, and oral tradition preserved them and they are among the highest production of the human spirit. With the new media we have the opposite: people receive a lot of information but they remain spiritually underdeveloped. Now youngsters see television, read newspapers and navigate in internet: but they are aesthetically and ethically unrefined; and this brings consequences in the political system, in social awareness, in human relationships, in the quality of music, films, and all arts.

So, the global problem nowadays is to get the new media to do the work that traditional media did. We would like new media to take care of education. We would like them to be used in order to bridge communities with their leaders. We would like them to take care of generating values and not just giving uncritical information. Such an urgency is felt more in countries where electronic media have more dominance. In India, the problem is still not so serious, because the state television makes bad programs, and so people don’t generally spend too much time in front at the TV. And language is often a barrier. Things are changing fast in India too. But our generation in Italy is much more TV-educated than you are here. You have had more family education, more exposure to reading, and your grandmothers told you more stories. We had TV to occupy our time instead of our grandparents; and our children are in a worse situation now, because they don’t even have their mothers to entertain them at home but only the TV. And when parents are at home, if they want to recover the relationship with their kids, they have to spend half the time fighting with their children to switch off the TV and talk to them. But normally, very little communication takes place between the different generations because both parents work and they are tired after work.