Cyberspace: Walk first and then surf
Attempting to level the cyberspace playing field without addressing poverty, illiteracy, disease and unfair trade practices is an exercise in futility.
The Internet has acted as a great equaliser, allowing millions of ordinary and marginalised people to access alternative sources of information and make their voices heard. In fact, cyberspace has helped people living under dictatorial and semi-authoritarian regimes find a way around government controls and reach each other and the outside world, while citizens in freer countries have used it to overcome the bias built-in to mainstream media systems.
Nevertheless, the World Wide Web closely reflects the real world in its stark divisions. It is a telling fact that less than one in 10 people in the world has any access to the Internet, with the vast majority of those who do living in the United States, Europe, Japan and other industrialised countries. In some ways, this figure is easy to explain: according to UNESCO statistics, one in every five people in the world is illiterate.
One of the aims of the recent World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), held in Tunis in November, was to extract a commitment from world leaders, industry and civil society to bridge this digital divide. It was the UN’s largest ever summit, drawing 18,000 people from 176 countries, including 44 heads of state, mostly from Africa. Participants pledged “to build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented information society” so that “people everywhere can create access, utilise and share information and knowledge”.
In many parts of the world, information has become a vital tool and many post-industrial countries are navigating a route to the so-called knowledge-based society. However, coverage of the summit overlooked several important issues. Developing countries may well be on the margins of the Internet but surfing the web is a luxury untold millions struggling to subsist can ill afford and from which they can hardly benefit. People in such situations need to bridge the diet and disease divide before they can think about crossing the digital one. Development and humanitarian assistance is already scarce as rich countries continuously fail to meet the modest target of devoting 0.7% of national income to aid.
What use is a computer in, say, a sub-Saharan African village where people have no electricity or communications infrastructure, not enough food, and where a large proportion of the productive population is dying of AIDS and other diseases?
Even if the $100 wind-up laptop designed by an MIT whiz does sell the predicted 100 million units by the end of 2006, there is still the question of software. Clockwork computers are all very well but what about the more than 860 million people who are illiterate and the millions more who are functionally so, i.e. they do not possess enough literacy to make their way in the digital world? Then there are the hundreds of millions who do not understand English, the dominant language in cyberspace which, according to various sources, represents more than half the web’s content.
Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade underlined this bizarre situation when he remarked in Tunis: “In Manhattan there are more telephones than in the whole of Africa. Africa is still disconnected from the world and it’s not because a few people have computers that anything will change.”
Although efforts to level the electronic playing field might help narrow the gap between rich and poor countries in aggregate terms, it will probably succeed in broadening the already wide internal wealth and educational divisions within developing countries by providing the privileged with even more knowledge and the relatively few jobs such investments provide.
Even showcase developing countries, such as India, are seeing a mixed bag of returns from the IT explosion which has created a wealthy and upwardly mobile knowledge class but done little for the population as a whole. “It’s a shame that we in India have so many IT professionals whose skills get used so much for the export-dollar but hardly at all (except in a spill-over manner) in tackling the issues that a billion people seeking a better life deal with daily,” admitted Nitin Desai, a special adviser to the UN secretary-general, in an interview in India’s Financial Express.
In addition, wealthy countries have indicated that no new money will be available to promote WSIS goals and principles. “A growing proportion [of EU aid] goes to developing country governments directly to support their own development plans and budgets and they choose how much to allocate to ICT,” Alun Michael, the UK‘s minister of state for industry and regions, told the summit on behalf of the EU.
Given this limited largesse and suspicion over the motives of the private sector for getting involved in the WSIS movement, the international community needs to help the world’s least privileged citizens crawl before they can surf. Massive investment is needed by developing countries if they are to tackle unexceptional issues, such as promoting basic education among the 100 million children lacking access to schools, access to clean drinking water, proper sanitation, and functioning healthcare, and combating communicable diseases and resolving festering conflicts. Only then will efforts to help developing countries click their way out of poverty pay off.
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This article appeared in the 8-14 December 2005 edition of Al Ahram Weekly.
