[GKD] Re: Overestimating the Digital Divide

[Richard Heeks]

Chinese to dominate Web traffic by 2007?  Unlikely and, even if
true, it doesn't mean we're all going to be learning Chinese.

The printing press has been global for a few hundred years.  Yet go
to China and you'll find lots of books in English.  I'm hard-pressed
to find any Chinese textbooks in my local UK bookstore.

There is an explosion of English language training and English-
medium education in China, recognising the current and future
reality of English as the global language: of business, of politics
and, increasingly, of culture and education.

Global linguistic hegemony isn't about how many people speak a
first language, it's about economic power, it's about military and
political power, it's about cultural power, and it's about first mover
advantage.

We can celebrate the net as a means of supporting diversity and
we can moan about monolinguism, but we can also recognise the
reality - even the benefits - of linking peoples from around the world
through a common technological medium and a common language:
English.

Richard Heeks


On Wed, 28 Feb 2001 22:11:27 -0500 (EST), Donald Zhang Osborn wrote:

  >
  >Re John Lawrence's reference to Chinese on the web, the following
quotable by
  >NY Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman from his article last week entitled
"Hype
  >and Anti-Hype" may be of interest
  >(http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/23/opinion/23FRIE.html ):
  >"The measure of what's happening with the Internet today is not Buy.com
or the
  >Nasdaq. It's what is happening in China, where Internet deployment is
moving so
  >fast that Chinese will be the most popular language on the Web by 2007; in
  >India, where AOL just announced a $100 million investment; and in Europe,
where
  >the net economy is expected to grow twentyfold by 2004."
  >





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[GKD] Re: Overestimating the Digital Divide

[Rhianna Tyson]

In response to Don Osborn's posting that read:

"Improving connectivity infrastructure and telecom policy in Niger may
permit such little Internet outlets to increase in number, decrease in
cost, and expand services, but that will be juxtaposed alongside
illiteracy (basic, not to speak of technical) and poverty in many more
places. This both opens possibilities and poses problems."

I think it is important to remember that we are past those stages of
"development" that regard it as a linear process, by which the South must
catch up to the North, following the same steps that they did.  Sophia
Huyer said that "technology is so flexible and advancing at such a rapid
pace that Africa need not play catch up- it can actually leapfrog many of
the stages in the information revolution."  I believe that ICTs will allow
the South (certainly not only Africa) to leapfrog many of the "stages" in
development as well.  Why should literacy be regarded as a necessary
FIRST, to come BEFORE ICT implementation and use?  I think it is extremely
important to continue to develop audio and visual usage of ICTs, to not
only include the illiterate, but to perhaps even serve as a literacy tool.
(Like, for instance, VoicePilot's HearSay system).

-Rhianna Tyson


*
Rhianna Tyson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Society for International Development
Via Panisperna 207
00184 Rome, Italy
Tel +39 06 487 2172
Fax +39 06 487 2170
http://www.sidint.org/won/about.htm




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[GKD] Re: Overestimating the digital divide

[Grant Boyle]

Robert Krech  wrote:

 >This is not
 >to glorify indigenous culture, but the complex question of culture,
 >cultural change and impact cannot be ignored when considering the 'digital
 >divide'.
 >I think IT technology should be explored for its use in development work,
 >and efforts by those in the North or the South to overcome technical
 >obstacles with workable solutions should be supported.  What I am urging is
 >a balanced perspective that retains questions of equity and culture along
 >side of the technical, sustainable, fundable, researchable, etc., so that
 >development really works >
 >

Agreed. I wonder though, whether the idea of THE 'digital divide' itself is
a construct of a universal modernity that could be counterproductive.  Is
the point of the digital divide to outfit the Third World with the
technology (broad bandwidth or otherwise) in a universal sense or is it to
apply technologies to local problems. If it's the first, then we're
probably setting up to construe culture as a barrier, which is unworkable
and inappropriate.  I think the problem is to disentangle effective
applications from universalist, techno-modernist aspirations.

I am not very familiar with the theory of the digital divide. One question
I have is whether the digital divide means "having technology" (one side of
the divide) or not having technology (other side of the divide)? If it is
this simple, then is the problem of  "overcoming the digital divide" a
sufficiently sophisticated or "localizable" development problem?


Grant Boyle
UBC School of Community and Regional Planning





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[GKD] Re: Overestimating the Digital Divide

[Donald Zhang Osborn]

Another perspective on Richard Heeks' comments on the "digital divide" is that
its replication on ever more local scales make the now routine references to
the global North-South "digital divide" less and less meaningful. Of course
there are real and important differences, but their complexity can easily be
blurred.

It is now possible for instance, to do e-mail at a small commercial "cabine
telephonique" in Maradi, Niger. Most people in the nearby shops and homes don't
use the service, may not have a very clear idea of what it's about, and have
more pressing concerns to address with limited resources anyway. Improving
connectivity infrastructure and telecom policy in Niger may permit such little
Internet outlets to increase in number, decrease in cost, and expand services,
but that will be juxtaposed alongside illiteracy (basic, not to speak of
technical) and poverty in many more places. This both opens possibilities and
poses problems.

Re John Lawrence's reference to Chinese on the web, the following quotable by
NY Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman from his article last week entitled "Hype
and Anti-Hype" may be of interest
(http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/23/opinion/23FRIE.html ):
"The measure of what's happening with the Internet today is not Buy.com or the
Nasdaq. It's what is happening in China, where Internet deployment is moving so
fast that Chinese will be the most popular language on the Web by 2007; in
India, where AOL just announced a $100 million investment; and in Europe, where
the net economy is expected to grow twentyfold by 2004."

IMO, outside the "net economy" and in the countries where most of the world's
population lives, one will hopefully see some of the most interesting
applications of this technology as it moves out of boxes, gets free of wires,
and becomes more affordable & less dependent on mice & keyboards (basically the
directions Margaret Grieco and some of the traffic in the thread on software
for illiterate users indicate). Who knows what will pop up from under the
radar, as the "measure of what's happening" in the Internet, in a few years'
time?

As with everything else relating to the new ICTs, our calculations and
terminology will have to adapt quickly.

Don Osborn
[EMAIL PROTECTED]




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[GKD] Re: Overestimating the Digital Divide

[Dr. Perry Morrison]

Richards's point about "better than measured" e-mail access
in the developing world is valid, however it doesn't diminish
the extent of the Nth-Sth gap. E-mail may be the bread and
butter (the killer "app") of the Internet, but real broadband
connectivity is a true multiplier of productivity and better
decisionmaking.

For example I installed Internet connections in remote Aboriginal
clinics in Australia more than 5 yrs ago. Email from a Dr. to a specialist
was great but the bandwidth to have a decent database like Medline
available in a browser in the middle of Arnhemland blew them away.

I'll probably be involved in installing some v/conferencing systems out
there soon. A 2" thick A4 box with a PC camera on top plugs into
a 6" portable TV getting power from the car's cigarette lighter. The
satellite antenna folds flat  6" x 6". The sat phone mobile dials up
the satellite and you have portable 128K videoconferencing with something
that weighs only a couple of Kg. A long way from the CNN reporter's
moon dish in Baghdad!

This bandwidth will allow research experts to be in NY while helping live
with the fieldwork/observations of people in the field. Community residents
who are unhappy with a bureaucracy can dial them up and lob a meeting
rather than a letter- how's that for a quantum shift in accountability? We've
already had virtual prison visits, interviews, parent/teacher nights and
judicial hearings etc are just a step away.

Being able to email anyone in the world is amazing, but being able to almost
stand in their presence will make for a very different world (one day).

Perry Morrison





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[GKD] Re: Overestimating the digital divide

[Robert Krech]

Dear GKD members,

As a graduate student studying education and development issues, and as
someone who managed a computer science education project in Nepal recently,
I have been reading the latest GKD e-mails with interest, especially around
the issue of the 'digital divide'.  I am excited by the prospects of what
IT technology can do for development practice, and to that end I have two
comments that pick up on John Lawrence's question "is this the only, or
even the major dimension on which we should judge the so called divide?
.  In my observation in Nepal, the logistics of reaching people, as Peter
Knight says, "located in remote rural areas, with limited or no access to
formal educational systems, health care, potable water, electricity, or
jobs related to the new information economy" are formidable but are not at
the core of " what has been described as the 'digital divide'."  If the
problem of the 'digital divide' is framed in terms of technical
considerations alone, this potentially limits how IT technologies could be
useful in development efforts.  I would encourage us to widen our thinking
about the 'digital divide' in two ways:

1) Apart from bringing electricity, phone lines, literacy and numeracy
among other things to villages in Nepal that have not changed for likely
over one hundred years, IT technology will only be used and abused by those
who are already privileged as is from what I can tell the general trend
within development.  This usually means those living in urban centres,
males, high caste, those already educated, those with higher incomes and
those with access to institutional forms of political governance or the
elaborate patronage system.  Margaret Grieco mentioned there were political
and economic consequences to individual access, and this should be
emphasized to a greater extent.  Though Richard Heeks cites a study from
Trinidad and Tobago suggesting more people had access to the Internet there
than what household connections indicate, this may not tell us the nature
of this access, such as who actually has access, which households these are
or in what parts of the country they are.  A useful question is 'Who has
access to IT technology, who controls that access and to whose
benefit?'  Caution is needed to guard the 'digital divide' from occupying
the same spot as other socio-economic and political divides, as is
certainly the growing case within Nepal.

2)  Remote villages in Nepal are decidedly not Western in culture, but are
culturally typified by collective-identities, extended kinship structures,
flexible notions of time and are generally more integrated in cultural
composition.  The emergence of IT technology in a cultural milieu that is
not information centred but agrarian, and is not part of the new economy
because it is barely a part of Nepal's national economy, requires more than
a phone jack regardless of how subsidized it is.  IT technologies could
represent another means of bringing Western culture and its forms of
modernity into as of yet unreached regions of the developing world, a
process that has been sometimes beneficial but often ruinous for indigenous
culture, knowledge, social, economic and political structures.  This is not
to glorify indigenous culture, but the complex question of culture,
cultural change and impact cannot be ignored when considering the 'digital
divide'.

I think IT technology should be explored for its use in development work,
and efforts by those in the North or the South to overcome technical
obstacles with workable solutions should be supported.  What I am urging is
a balanced perspective that retains questions of equity and culture along
side of the technical, sustainable, fundable, researchable, etc., so that
development really works because it is liberating and empowering for everyone.

Robert Krech




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[GKD] Re: Overestimating the Digital Divide

[John Lawrence]

This is a good point. We found many occasions in our early UNDP
experimentation with e-LISTS where southern access was through northern
servers. This included ex-pat nationals who were studying/posted
temporarily to northern countries, as well as those using northern dialup
services from southern sites.

But is this the only, or even the major dimension on which we should
judge the socalled divide? Other factors where enormous variability
exists between countries/continents include costs of telephone or other
access, connect reliability, service backup, not to mention cultural
inhibitors, censorship, and other government delimiters (e.g. routine and
invasive surveillance) one of  the biggest dividing issues is the
dominance of the English language... I went through JFK airport in New
York earlier this month and saw a billboard in the American Airlines
Terminal proposing  that Chinese would be the most used INTERNET language
within a decade, and (said the announcement) `that's when it gets
interesting'.



Richard Heeks wrote:
 >
 > The global digital divide between North and South - the
 > industrialised and the developing nations - is undoubtedly great.
 > But it is also overestimated.
 >
 > Why?  Because we tend to use invalid models of connectivity in
 > the South: models that rely on Northern notions of one email
 > account serving one individual; and pre-global notions of
 > Internet hosts and accounts merely serving their host country.
 >
 >




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[GKD] Re: Overestimating the Digital Divide

[Margaret Grieco]

Models of connectivity: time to rethink

Richard Heeks e-mail on the need to rethink the models of connectivity 
applicable and operating in the south makes an important and critical 
point. However, we should be a little careful in thinking about this in 
terms of an overestimation of the digital divide.  Personal, individual 
access has both political and economic consequences and we should be alert 
to these. For me, Richard's contribution re-raises the issue of developing 
and promoting appropriate and sustainable digital arrangements for the south.

To bang on an old drum, we have to be thinking about the importance of 
solar powered, hand held, satellite linked mobile technologies.  The 
importance of the new information modes in the context of the disaster in 
Gujarat is clear: when centralised information structures collapse as they 
did in the wake of the earthquake, the rapid use of distributed information 
arrangements and coordination through global technologies increasingly take 
centre stage.

More attention needs to be given to thinking forward on how to meet 
information needs and whilst recording existing patterns of usage is 
critical it is only a starting point.

Margaret Grieco
Professor of Transport and Society
Napier University
South Africa




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