Dubai, United Arab Emirates – Digital disruption and change management will be key to reshaping our future, including that of the global media which is already going through a challenging phase, a top global expert told delegates at the Arab Media Forum.

Globally more than 2 million pieces of content are uploaded on Facebook every minute and every day of the year.

“It took the telephone industry 75 years to penetrate households after invention. In 2007, there were a few smartphones in use. Now, 3 billion smartphones are in use globally and this is going to rise to 6 billion by 2020. As we speak, 200,000 videos are uploaded on YouTube every minute of the day and every day of the year and 2 million Facebook posts are created every minute,” Afshin Molavi, Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute, Johns Hopkins University, said.

“If Facebook was a country, say Facebook-istan – then it would have been the world’s largest country with a population of 2 billion!

“Where are we going? I don’t know. However, what I know is that wherever we are going, we are going too fast.”

The speed at which the world is changing could create a problem, if people are not ready for it. Quoting American boxer Mike Tyson, who said – Everyone has a plan, till you get punched – Molavi said, “We don’t know where the punch is going to come from.

“A few years ago, if I had told you that the American real estate tycoon Donald Trump will be the US President, you’d have laughed at me. If I had said, Britain will leave its biggest trading partner, you would not have believed it. If I had said a few years ago that an unknown prince will change the face of Saudi Arabian society, you would not have believed me. But all of these are reality and we can see that.”

Pointing to the rise of China and India, he said, Asia and African economies will dominate the news headlines globally.

“People living outside North America – 85 percent of the global population – are going to dominate the news in the future,” he said. “By 2030, Asia will add 600 million people, while Africa will add another 500 million people – the major growth area.”

US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, and India’s economic growth will dominate global news narratives, he says.

Quoting a CNN news headline, Molavi said, “[US] President gets 2 scoops of ice cream a day, while the rest get 1 scoop! – that’s the type of news breaks you might be seeing on leading news channels, instead of the humanitarian crisis in Syria.”

Pointing to the global changes, Molavi says, urbanisation will be a key challenge as cities are increasingly been seen as the economic engines for countries.

“South Korea is the 11th biggest economy in terms of the size of its GDP. However, the country’s capital city Seoul represents half of its economy,” he said. “The world’s urban population is increasing very fast, putting pressure on the infrastructure and economy.

“The other aspects to dominate the news media will be the expansion of the global middle class. By 2030, the size of the global middle class will be 5 billion. The problem is that the technological disruptions, automation and robotics will take most of the traditional jobs. Asian middle class will represent two-thirds of the global middle class by 2030.”

However, the good news is that more than half of the global population is under 30. “So the world is young and young people can change fast and adapt to changing circumstances,” Afshin Molavi says. “So, we have hopes.”

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© Press Release 2018