as 51 online newspapers, 23 newspapers are online in
Central America and 36 are online in the Caribbean. Europe is
the next most wired continent for newspapers, with 728 online
newspaper sites. After the United Kingdom, Norway has the next
most - 53 - and Germany has 43. Asia (led by India) has 223
online newspapers, South America (led by Bolivia) has 161 and
Africa (led by South Africa) has 53. Australia and other
islands have 64 online newspapers."

The online versions of these newspapers brought us a wealth of
information. The web provided not only news available online,
but also a whole encyclopedia to help us understand them. As
readers, we could click on hyperlinks to get maps, biographies,
official texts, political and economic data, photographs, and
audio and video coverage. We could easily access other articles
on the same topic with search engines sorting out articles by
date, author, title, or subject.

1997: MULTIMEDIA CONVERGENCE AND EMPLOYMENT

= [Overview]

More and more people were using digital technology. Previously
distinct information-based industries, such as printing,
publishing, graphic design, media, sound recording and film
making, were converging into one industry, with information as
a common product. This trend was named "multimedia
convergence", with a massive loss of jobs, and a serious enough
issue to be tackled by the ILO (International Labor
Organization) by 1997. The first ILO Symposium on Multimedia
Convergence was held in January 1997 at ILO headquarters in
Geneva, Switzerland, with employers, unionists, and government
representatives from all over the world. Some participants,
mostly employers, demonstrated the information society was
generating or would generate jobs, whereas other participants,
mostly unionists, demonstrated there was a rise in unemployment
worldwide, that should be addressed right away through
investment, innovation, vocational training, computer literacy,
retraining, and fair labor rights, including for teleworkers.

= [In Depth]

As explained in the introduction of the symposium's
proceedings: "With the advent of digitalization, technological
convergence has been set into motion. Today all forms of
information - whether based in text, sound or images - can be
converted into bits and bytes for handling by computer.
Digitalization has made it possible to create, record,
manipulate, combine, store, retrieve and transmit information
and informati