It is difficult to take responsibility for your life when the information you need is beyond your reach. A decision about work, a child’s education or the place you live may depend on something you cannot find, cannot understand, or cannot distinguish from a confident piece of nonsense. Yet you still have to decide. The consequences arrive whether you were properly informed or not.
That is one reason to take an interest in the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights’ reported call for contributions to draft guidelines on public interest content in the digital era. The announcement appears in the supplied Google News listing. Without the draft itself, we cannot say what its provisions would do. But the invitation opens a worthwhile question: how much room should people have in deciding what counts as information that serves them?
“Public interest” sounds reassuring. It also leaves a great deal unresolved. Who describes the public’s needs? Who gets to challenge that description? Something can be widely available and still be practically useless to someone trying to make a difficult decision on a small screen between shifts.
There is a reasonable objection here. Expertise matters. We cannot settle the reliability of information by asking whether everybody likes it, and an invitation to contribute does not make every contribution equally sound. Some claims need checking; some disclosures can expose people to harm. Making information available involves judgement.
But expertise becomes less useful when it has no means of hearing what it has missed. People living with the consequences of a decision may know where an explanation fails, which question has gone unanswered, or why a supposedly accessible resource remains inaccessible. Their experience does not settle every dispute. It can reveal the dispute that nobody in charge thought to consider.
For ordinary life, the consequence is quite practical. When we share information, explain a decision or speak on someone else’s behalf, we can leave a route back into the conversation. A way to ask, correct or disagree.
Any eventual guidelines will need scrutiny on their own terms. For now, the call for contributions deserves attention because a definition of public interest can quietly become a definition of what other people ought to need. Those people should have a chance to answer.