After the book fair in Riyadh and Jeddah, the Saudi Media Forum will be held in the capital: There is a common denominator between these activities.
All I saw on these trips, compared to dozens of trips I’ve taken in the past, was “mega”. Jeddah mega airport, Riyadh mega airport, and the forum is a thousand invitees and dozens of participants, issues and interventions.
On Monday, I participated in a symposium on the digital age. And when I was informed of the address, I said, Muhammad Fahd Al-Harthy did it. He wants to provide the best model for the backwards who still do not know about numbers except that they are an arithmetic table. Of course, I started by apologizing to the audience and telling them that I was invited to the dialogue in my capacity as a representative of the pre-digital age. It is a time that some call beautiful, and this is true, but it has also become distant and strange. And the cover of “Time” magazine in its latest issue is that issues that used to take years to solve are now solved in seconds. We may not have to change the scale of time in our lives, and adopt the minute instead of the hour.
The course of the forum, in and of itself, is an image of what I am trying to express. Or about what we see around us in this renaissance, which has far exceeded the stages of the “vision” set by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, announcing the Kingdom’s entry into the race of development and prosperity.
The forum was not just a discussion about the essence of life, but it also turned into a national platform from which headlines and explanations of the great renaissance emerge, both internally and externally. From this podium, the Minister of Energy, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, addressed the Saudi youth, about what he had experienced during three decades of working in the oil field, that commodity that still moves the whole world. And here he is, thirty years later, witnessing how “black gold” is used to diversify and enrich other sources of wealth. It is not possible to rely on a single source in the strategies of nations. Therefore; Crown Prince Mohammed announced the formation of the Strategic Planning Council to include all aspects of work for the sake of a secure and guarantor state, adopting past values and future prospects.
