The New Media for a New World conferences grew out of a sister- city relationship between Tashkent and Seattle, Washington. During the 1990 Goodwill Games in Seattle the Art Pattison Communications Exchange organized a conference to acquaint Soviet journalists with US media practices and to discuss issues of East-West communication. In an effort to keep in touch with the conference alumni a quarterly bulletin, Glasnews, is issued. Readers can also access it through the World Wide Web. And the social issues are basically the same in the US and in Russia, in terms of access to telecommunication resources, access for a variety of people from different economic walks of life.
Language is another major issue in global communications.
And if privacy and government monitoring of communications are thorny issues in the US, they are even more so in Russia, with its history of state censorship and repression of the freedom of expression.