WARNING: THIS IS LONG
I thought there might be an interest in this talk that I've been giving in various forms around the US for the last couple of months (School of Planning at UCLA, Kennedy School at Harvard, UN Conference on the Aged). I'm interested in comments or disputes as it is a (research/policy) theme that I and I would hope others will likely be pursuing in other formats over the next while. All the best, MG ------------------------------------------------------ Beyond the Digital Divide: Enabling the Community with Information and Communications Technologies Michael Gurstein, Ph.D. (Visiting) Professor: School of Management New Jersey Institute of Technology Newark, NJ [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] I�ve been asked to speak today about Community Networking and Information and Communications technologies and at the same time I�m thinking about one of the classes that I�m teaching on the �Digital Firm�. Recently in my class we had a discussion on one of the most digital of contemporary digital firms�a pharmaceutical firm that has put its vast resources behind becoming the most digitally enabled pharmaceutical firm in the world and it has done so. It is now possible in the US to order a prescription via a web-site and to have that prescription instantaneously and robotically dispensed and mailed thousands of miles away without any direct human intervention. This firm is dispensing 8000 prescriptions an hour as compared to the average 8000 prescriptions a week for a more typical pharmacy. The discussion around this firm reminded me of my uncle who had a small independent pharmacy in a small city on the Canadian prairies. He would have filled perhaps 8000 prescriptions a month. But more than filling prescriptions, in the days before Medicare, he was the only medical person most in that farming community ever saw. He dispensed medicines certainly, but he also prescribed for a lot of the minor aches and pains, and probably most important, he provided comfort and re-assurance to otherwise fearful people without the resources to seek out and pay for medical expertise. My guess, is that if my uncle were alive today, his very small pharmacy would not have been able to survive. There might now be in that small town, one or perhaps two pharmacies in the malls run by corporate interests, and his would have been one of those thousands of small pharmacies that would have been put out of business as uncompetitive by the mega-digital-on-line ICT enabled pharmacy I mentioned earlier. And with him would have gone the comfort and ministering to the minor complaints and his contribution to the life and well-being and caring of that small community. With his going and the going of his equivalents in the schools, the lawyers offices, the hospitals, the insurance offices and so on�unable to compete with the digitally enabled enterprises�would be going a lot of the caring in those small communities and particularly for those less mobile, less able to jump in the car and travel the 40 miles to the next pharmacy and for those more dependent on the local community for their social and often physical well-being. The word seems to be coming down from Washington these days to be fairly quickly followed one would expect by the word from Ottawa and Brussels and even from in this (UN) building that its time to declare victory in the war on the Digital Divide and find new targets for our public policy discussions and interventions. The folks who are saying this are looking at statistics in this country the US, that are showing that well over half of all households have access to the Net, that the proportion of minorities and low income people who have access to the Net is increasing overall and that the cost of Net access including the cost of the computer to enable the access seems to have come down to a level affordable by most. Parallel developments are I suspect happening in many other parts of the world. Also there is in the US numbers that are showing a rising numbers of minority and lower income populations using the Net have relieved some of the early anxiety that existing social inequalities would be aggravated in this new and rapidly expanding sphere. Meanwhile the DotCom debacle has diluted efforts to extend the seemingly �magical� wealth creating capability of Internet-enabled commerce to social as well as business goals. Public authorities are being urged to relax and let the market continue what appears to be the inexorable drive to more or less universal Internet access (with all those wanting �access� having access). Thus there is no need for funding for development of local technology projects or for what is called in the US, Community Technology Centres and which in other countries would be called Telecentres, Telekiosks, Telepublicos and so on. In light of this, the broad public discussion and policy commitment in support of the public use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT�s) seems to have stalled. We wait for similar developments concerning similar �victories� elsewhere and similar arguments in Developing Countries with the spread of access to wireless systems and very low cost PCs affordable at least to the middle class. Nothing wrong with any of this of course, maybe it is time to turn our attention to other things, with Internet access for shopping and sending the occasional email to one�s friends and family now being more or less accessible to most anyone with the economic capacity to participate in the market and in Developing Countries as well. I don�t want to get into the discussion around the realism of these observations, how this position seems to exclude the 30 or 40% of the population even in this country still without Net access, let alone the tens of millions in Developing Countries who don�t even have electricity or telephone let alone Internet access. All of this however, is occurring at the same time as throughout the entire US economy and among leading elements of the global economy, the use of the Internet is quietly and inexorably triggering a �Digital Revolution� with the transformations brought about by introducing digital systems and Internet enabled business operations being as profound, sweeping and disruptive as anything that were achieved in the heady days of the early Industrial Revolution. Digital technologies continue to introduce new operating efficiencies, speed and flexibilities as well as unprecedented access to customers and suppliers that are reshaping the competitive structures of whole industries virtually over-night. The result can be seen in rapid run-ups in market concentration and dramatic rises (and falls) in market capitalization. Associated with this are unexpected changes in local, regional and even national labor markets and accelerated concentrations of wealth, and political, cultural and social influence. Dramatic changes that are taking place in supply chains, customer relationship management systems, value networks with suppliers and strategic partners and accompanying this are startling reallocations of social position and wealth. These in turn are masking deep and fundamental shift in opportunities and life chances for many intra-nationally and internationally as the demand for skills and experience and local resources evolve rapidly in response. Again one might look to the types of changes which occurred during the Industrial Revolution, many of which only became visible in their scope and significance generations later. Perhaps of greatest significance is that the productive benefits that are currently being brought about�in efficiency, productivity, speed of response, scope and breadth of market influence�are accessible only to those with the resources and the quite considerable knowledge required to take advantage of these opportunities. Overall, it is primarily the corporate sector and even only certain elements within the corporate sector who have been in a position to take advantage of the revolutionary potential presented by ICTs. Others, those without such access�small or more conservative enterprises, those with lower capitalizations or access to investment funds, enterprises in developing countries, and perhaps most important whole strata of those who are not financial beneficiaries of the corporate sector�not for profits, the local public sector, those outside the market and beyond the enabling technology networks�are clearly falling ever further behind. These have been left, where there has been attention at all, with the efforts to bridge the �digital divide� for Internet access, as though simply achieving access was a substitute for acquiring the means of making effective use of the technology. And importantly the attention of the technology designers and implementers�the hardware and software developers, the consultants and the Venture Capitalists�has been focused ever more intensively on the corporate sector and on the commercial and corporate applications of ICTs, with other uses such as those by lower income communities, the marginalized, the small and micro-businesses being left largely unattended. Now let�s go back to the Digital Divide� The people living in communities such as that prairie town, or inner city communities, or even medium size service centers in developing countries are finding themselves newly or at least very shortly bereft of their local pharmacists and local librarians and local insurance agents and increasingly their local banks and even local schools as more efficient digitally enabled enterprises provide services and goods "from cyberspace" locally, against which local enterprises and service providers cannot compete. And there is the dilemma�the digital pharmacy can cut 20/30/40 % off the cost of dispensing the prescription and much of this can be passed on to the consumer, cutting the costs of drugs and thus enhancing access to health care. But as the costs tumble with them also disappears the contribution that pharmacists (and here one could substitute any number of other local service or goods providers) make to local communities and to their capacity to care for their citizens. What has not been done and why the declaration of victory by those concerned with the public good is short sighted and ultimately destructive�is that the opportunities for achieving public goods using the same digital technologies�opportunities for enabling and supporting the creation and recreation of caring communities but now in a digitally transformed environment, has only barely been recognized. We see experiments and pilot projects in on-line support groups for seniors or those with medical conditions, in providing information systems to tertiary care givers, in training and public access centers for those with financial or other constraints to achieving individual access. But as the money for experiments runs out and the volunteers lose their steam, the projects disappear and the Net is left as a marketplace and access is for those with the resources and the interest to use these electronic malls. The diversion of interest and resources away from developing the electronic equivalents of caring communities in the name of victory over the digital divide is the equivalent of building the community center and then not providing the resources to keep the doors open, or to plan and develop the programs that can make effective use of the facility, and then when no one shows up, deciding to turn the community center into a mini-mall selling electronic goods in one corner and adult videos in the other. Most of my work is in something that�s called Community Informatics�that is attempting to think through, develop and implement approaches to the use of ICTs for communities, and for enabling community activities�social, economic, cultural, and political�equivalent to those that are being developed and made available to the corporate sector. Where every reputable university in this country and probably in almost every country in the world has a faculty teaching and researching Management Information Systems, so far as I know there is not one department anywhere in the world at the moment devoted to Community Information Systems nor is there (private or public) funding available for systematic research or development of strategies, programs, technology developments, business models which would enable local communities and local citizens to compete (or participate) effectively in the digitally enabled world which is emerging. We are not going to digitally reintroduce my uncle the pharmacist into communities anytime soon�nor should we, the efficiencies of the digital pharmacy are both inevitable and to my mind desirable. What is not inevitable nor desirable is that effectively none of the social resources freed up by the dramatic increases in efficiencies through such developments as the digital pharmacy are being redirected to be used for enabling local communities and those concerned with local care and care-giving to extend their services. Where are the digitally enabled community uses of technology equivalent in social value to the digitally enabled corporate uses that are creating economic efficiencies and wealth within the corporate sector. To be clear�the world is being transformed with ICTs. However, the early promise of the Internet as providing an alternative to centralized concentrations of power and wealth and as a means for widely dispersing economic opportunity has faded to be replaced first by the DotCom bubble and then by the current drive to make the Internet an adjunct to existing to the shopping mall. The early vision of the Network as an enabler of communities; of the isolated; the disabled; those excluded because of location, income or physical capacity; seems to have disappeared along with public efforts supporting the Net as a tool and a resource for all, a democratizer and an equalizer. I believe that there is now more than ever a need for those concerned with the public good to intervene and ensure that the opportunities presented by ICT�s are made as available to enriching the capacities of local communities as they are in enriching the range of consumer choices and corporate efficiencies and that this is perhaps the most important public task of the coming decade. Widespread availability of Internet access is only the beginning. Enabling the use of these technologies to achieve local benefits�economic, social, cultural and political to provide foundations for local communities�caring communities--substitutes for my uncle the pharmacist�will require the concentrated efforts of technologists, researchers and community practitioners and overall, a political will to provide resources for these purposes. ___________________________________________________________ hosted by Vancouver Community Network http://www.vcn.bc.ca
