Change means opportunity for those who are well prepared to manage it. But change can also be disorienting, particularly when it erodes the structures, values and symbols that have provided shape and meaning in a given society and culture.

It seems to me that societies which have invested less in old technologies have the potential to propel themselves even more quickly into new technologies, provided they have the commitment and resources to do so.

Catering to public voyeuristic curiosities, with little concern for the value of personal privacy, has become a way of life for some journalists around the world. The question as I see it is simply this - will our journalists write about what is truly significant for our societies?

We talk a lot about the rights of the press as an independent social critic, and that is very important. But it is also important to talk about the obligations of the press as a constructive social leader.

Someone has said that for any company to be effective, it must do three things. It must "yearn". It must "learn" and then finally it can "earn". But the yearning and the learning must come first.

Ceremonies give us a rare chance to look backward and forward in time - back on the path we have already traveled and forward down the road to the future.

Africans should not just be receivers of foreign news written and packaged by foreigners.

The cultural contexts in which over one billion Muslims have been reared and shaped are simply not understood in much of the world. Even the most basic elements of 1400 years of Islamic civilization are absent from the curricula in most of the world's schools. The subject is just not on the world's educational radar screen. And the result is an enormous vacuum

If the mysteries of ancient Samarkand or Turfan or Kashgar are relayed predominantly in Uzbek or in Uygur, then the sharing will be incomplete - and inconsequential. Global technologies imply the use of a global language - not to obliterate old traditions, but to rescue and revivify them .

We live in a time when the quantity of information has exploded in incalculable ways. Data flows in greater volumes, at higher speeds, over greater distances to larger audiences than ever before. And yet the result has not been greater understanding or enlightenment.