EUreka!
Among the time-honoured techniques used by large bureaucracies to justify their existence are: claiming pre-existing trends as their own initiatives and making statements of intent with few, if any, concrete commitments.
The European Commission today announced what it called a "new information society challenge," the challenge being to become "literate in new media".
Among the insights provided by information society and media commissioner Viviane Reding were: "Interacting with the media now means a lot more than writing to a newspaper," and "We must make sure everyone is media literate so nobody is left out".
To pre-empt this looming new-media literacy crisis, Reding and the EC barely paused for breath before adopting "...policy guidelines calling on EU countries and industry to promote media literacy across Europe..." If that doesn't do the trick, nothing will.
Funnily enough, the UK is being hailed as a pioneer of this kind of Web 2.0 mentoring. The EC points to the KidSMART website, created by Childnet international to advise children and their guardians on how to stay safe online, as an example of the sort of thing it has in mind.
The EC was probably also impressed by the montage of new state agencies, further vague aspirations and, of course, increased revenue opportunities for the bureaucracy proposed in our own Digital Britain report, published earlier this year.
So don't delay: get a PC, get online and get web savvy before it's too late. Oh, hold on, you already have.
