There is a story of a farmer whose horse ran away. That evening the neighbors gathered to commiserate with him since this was such bad luck. He said, "May be."When a global human problem presents itself with no immediate solution, sometimes a story is the way to make sense of it. The yin-yang view of this Taoist tale reveals an ancient and familiar pattern cast in terms of our modern dance with technology. Society and information technology seem to co-evolve and change one another in dialectic fashion. Faced with a significant problem, modern man naturally turns to technology for the solution. And in the technique of the solution emerges yet another problem with direct social implications. The cycle repeats, and with each repetition, a solution is adorned with greater technical elegance, yielding yet another problem with increasing complexity.The next day the horse returned, but brought with it six wild horses, and the neighbors came exclaiming at his good fortune. He said, "May be."
And then, the following day, his son tried to saddle and ride one of the wild horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. Again the neighbors came to offer their sympathy for the misfortune. He said, "May be."
The day after that, conscription officers came to the village to seize young men for the army, but because of the broken leg the farmer's son was rejected. When the neighbors came to say how fortunately everything had turned out, he said, "May be."
Alan Watts (1973)
The next thirty years was a time of metamorphosis for the digital machine. After the war, John von Neumann (1946) proposed a stored program model where the computer's logic would reside on removable media such as punch cards. The logic program could now be altered with relative ease or completely replaced to fit each new application. This added flexibility to the machine, setting the stage for the digital era. Transistors replaced vacuum tubes, making the machine run cooler and more trouble free. Punch cards and paper tape led to magnetic and optical media. Transistors led to solid-state logic devices, and these led to integrated circuits, which in turn led to large-scale integration, which produced microprocessors, leading the way to microcomputers. With each transformation, the machine emerged smaller, faster, more capable, more reliable, easier to use, and less expensive.
Intel's Gordon Moore (1965) noticed a consistent trend associated with the design and manufacturing of digital technology. Like clockwork, the functional power of the processing machine appeared to double with each 18-month cycle. At the same time, the cost to produce more capable machines continued to decline. The trajectory known as Moore's Law has extended computers from the citadels of military and corporate power into the laps of the larger middle classes. And the trend continues to this day (Fallows, 1991; Levy, 2003), extending even more sophisticated digital tools into a wider range of applications, and into the hands of ever-increasing segments of the population. People are gaining new powers as quickly as they are discarding old methods, retiring old skills, and loosing old freedoms.
Like the computer itself, the Internet was a product of wartime technology. In the midst of the Cold War, the U.S. Airforce launched a research initiative to create a robust communication network that could withstand a massive nuclear attack (Baran, 1964). The result was ARPA Net, a broadly distributed network of packet switching nodes (Kleinrock, 1961). The locus of control in this network was not to be centralized, but distributed throughout every node connected within the system. When the Internet passed completely into civilian hands by 1995, it was seen as a marvel of electronic democracy where individuals connected to any network node could freely share knowledge and information with all others. As the World Wide Web had come of age, computing technology had become widely adopted by the middle classes in America, Europe, Australia and the Asia Pacific.
Exchange and distribution of knowledge on the World Wide Web began to undermine traditional factors that influence the sociology of knowledge. Information that is shared by any individual on the Web is available free of charge to anyone else by means of a simple query from a powerful search engine. Where the modern world of information was once maintained by gate keepers (editors, publishers, special interest groups, and peer committees), postmodern authors and readers are in direct communication (Landow, 1992).
Use of the Internet requires skill. Users must discern value, using criteria of their own design. But the amount and quality of new information available to students and serious researchers on the Internet far outreaches the capabilities of any traditional knowledge repositories (Ryder and Wilson, 1996). Information is dynamic, abundant, it is easy to find, and free. The World Wide Web is a human structure. It is a socio-cultural artifact of multiple, mind-constructed realities. It is a complex structure, but it is essentially human, and it immediately reveals its secrets to those who make intentional inquiry and who extract meaning from signs they encounter, constantly building new knowledge with each logical connection. The Internet is a technology that amplifies our ability to borrow what others have done and build on it.
And herein lies the central problem posed in this volume: the Digital Divide - the cultural disparity that results between those who are highly connected into this global information interchange and the rest of the world. There are more Internet Service Providers in New York City than in the whole of Africa (Adam, 2002). In today's world where 80% of the population lack access to basic telecommunications facilities and where nearly half the people have never made a telephone call, there is a small, highly connected segment of us who are creating rapid changes that impact the lives and habitat of all the rest. The industrialized countries with only 15% of the world's population represent 88% of the Internet user population. South Asia, home for 20% of humanity, makes up less than 1% of Internet users. At the present time, a greater plurality of the world's population remains isolated, disconnected, and uninvolved with regard to the multiple changes that affect them, their habitat, and those who will follow after them (UNESCO, 1998).
Posing the problem in this manner leads us toward a proposition that technique is the best hope for a better future and the most likely means of making the world more humane. We view technology like education to the extent that it enables people to lift themselves out of poverty. One recent study (Trujullo-Mendoza, 2001) concluded that a computing and networking infrastructure is a strong indicator of human development. Stopping short of suggesting that technology is the key to such development, Trujullo-Mendoza found that access to computers and the Internet made a significant difference in the progress of human development.
Socio-technical problems posed in the context of progress are tainted by cultural relativity. The concept of progress is applied in terms of what the First World has already achieved and which is not yet available to the rest of the world. This paradigm tends to dominate our consciousness. We see progress posed in terms of something for which the developing countries should strive by simply copying the forms and mechanisms through which the rich world had reached its affluence (Khubchandani, 1996). Such developing discourse has succeeded in making the hope of catching up with the West the principal aspiration Third-World peoples.
One significant Western achievement - the free flow of information - has been declared a basic human right, a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations (UN Resolution 217, 1948). The UN Resolution, known as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights contains three articles that are significantly relevant to the present discussion:
Article 19: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.Article 27. (1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
Article 28. Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
To summarize, the ability to access and exchange information is a basic human right.
Furthermore, the UNESCO Constitution (1945) was founded on the principle of free exchange of ideas and knowledge between the peoples of the member states, resolving to increase the means of communication between their peoples and to employ these means for the purposes of mutual understanding and a "truer and more perfect knowledge of each other's lives".
In 1976 UNESCO commissioned a massive research project, organized under Irish journalist and Nobel laureate Sean MacBride, to study global inequalities in media and cultural production. The resulting MacBride Report (1980) issued a number of conclusions and recommendations for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO). The debates surrounding the NWICO provided the means to recast longstanding problems of global culture, media, information access, cultural sovereignty and literacy. That report particularly aimed to restore some of the balance and equity to world communications dominated by Western news syndicates and media transnationals.
Unfortunately, neither the UN Declaration nor the UNESCO Commission Report has the force of law. The closest international law in this regard is Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly in December, 1966.
Par 2: Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.
Lowering the cost of computing by any or all of these means will be necessary to make world-wide Internet access a reality for all peoples and nations. But the social, cultural, and economic realities in the world today do not immediately yield to such technical possibilities. Internet access for the average user in Africa, India, China, or Indonesia is much more expensive today than it is for the average user living in the United States or Europe. The entry costs to secure equipment and to set up services are far beyond the means of most third-world communities. Startup costs recur every three to five years, as rapid obsolescence forces the frequent replacement of hardware and software. Additionally, ICTs compete for peoples' time, skills and attention, taking resources away from essential human activities like food production, health services, and basic education in third-world countries.
International peace scholar Johan Galtung (1971) prefers to use the terms Center and Periphery over First World and Third World when describing matters of information flow between and within the world's communities. The world according to Galtung is made up of Center and Periphery nations in which the Center nations gain a disproportionate share of power with respect to economics, culture, and political influence. The Peripheral nations loose disproportionately in any relationship with the Center. At the same time, there exists within each nation the center elite and the peripherally marginalized people. All societies are stratified with political and economic ruling classes and worker or peasant classes. Galtung suggests that where imperialism is the order of international relationships, there is a harmony of interests between the center elite of Center nations and the center elite of Peripheral nations. The ruling classes in both rich and poor countries are structurally connected. But, according to Galtung s model, there is a general disharmony of interests between the Center and Periphery, because workers and peasants tend to be the victims of imperialism.
Where development of ICTs in Peripheral nations exists today, the costs of such services are shared by a very small segment of the population and the services themselves are limited to an elite few that is to say, by those in the Center. In South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa where more than 40% of the people live on less than 1$ per day (World Bank 2000/2001), the discussion of ICTs and lower costs seems absurd! Where access to food, clean water, public sanitation, and literacy education is a daily struggle, discussions of Internet access seem out of place, insensitive and blatantly naive. Nevertheless, piece by piece, computer technology continues to find its way into the Center regions of impoverished countries, and occasionally into the Periphery. The Western model for ICTs has been the personal computer, but when applied to Peripheral peoples, this model does not hold logical possibility in most developing countries. Because the ICT infrastructure is so expensive, the effort to set it up presents an opportunity for collective pooling of resources by an entire community. Once the infrastructure is set up, the facility can then offer universal access, charging only enough to maintain good quality service and provide for future requirements (Verzola, 1999).
We can choose to do nothing. By choosing this route, do we condemn the already marginalized to a permanent niche of poverty and isolation? Do we rob ourselves access to the diverse richness that once-isolated peoples and cultures might offer to our collective knowledge base?
We can renounce our technical advances, holding back the future until such time that greater portions of the world's population can participate with us in these advances. But this is no real choice since the developed world has long discarded the tools it once used and has forgotten the methods it once employed before the age of computing. The developed world's dependency on computers seems irreversible. A breakthrough in one field brings solutions on all sides, like the internal combustion engine, the laser, or the computer; "these solutions in turn create even more problems which in turn demand ever more technical solutions." (Benello, 1981). The further that we forge a path into this technical forrest, the more difficult it becomes for us to return to the point of departure.
We can resolve to erect all of the bridges necessary to span the global digital divide, plugging all the world's populations to a common network. Western Capitalism today has the means to do this. It is not an unrealistic task to tie every nation, every tribe, and every community, no matter how isolated, into a common interconnected information infrastructure. It is within our technical means to manufacture low-cost, durable computers for wide distribution. It is within our fiscal means to distribute these devices to places where computers are most lacking. And is within the reach of our current technology to implement machine translation capabilities between every codified language (and dialect) and a common universal language.
If we should choose the option to connect every living sole into our world-wide network, and if we should complete the task with success, will we then congratulate ourselves that we have nailed the last spike into the coffin of the pre-modern world? Will we celebrate the achievement of a common, universal language? Will we embrace our monolithic culture with enthusiasm? Or will there be a time of mourning when we realize the permanence of what we have done, when we acknowledge the loss of a pre-modern consciousness, where the direct connections between nature and humanity had once manifested themselves in authentic, unmediated cultural expressions?
Determinism portrays technology as a driving force that leads to far reaching effects or consequences, regardless of the social context (Smith and Marx, 1994). Such narratives view technology as an independent entity, a virtually autonomous agent of change. Human agency is not a factor. People are given the choice to ride the waves of change or to face the prospect of marginalization. Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity. Technique implies universalism. It promises solutions where there is no apparent problem, and everyone wants it, from the richest to the poorest nations. Where it was once a small component in the larger picture, now it encompasses the whole. Marshall McLuhan suggested that technology has reduced us to the "sex organs of the machine world" (McLuhan, 1964: 46). Determinist writer Jacques Ellul warned, the most dangerous form of determinism is the technological phenomenon. It is not a question of getting rid of technology, but, by an act of freedom, of transcending it. By grasping the real nature of the technological phenomenon, and the extent to which it is robbing him of freedom, he confronts the blind mechanisms as a conscious being. (Ellul, 1964).
Smith and Marx (1994) provide us with a continuum on which we can place various theories of technological determinism between the extremes of "hard" and "soft" determinism. Hard determinists believe that technology itself has the agency (the power and the will) to affect social change. An example of hard determinism in a positive sense is the belief that by bridging the digital divide we can advance human understanding to the point that we can avert war and needless international conflict. An example of hard determinism in the negative sense is the belief that indigenous people, by passively accepting new technology into their villages, will ultimately loose their own identity. Soft determinists do not assign direct agency to technology, but neither do they locate agency entirely in the hands of humans. Soft determinism will explain the presence of technology as a gating factor in social change, but they will not suggest that it is the root cause of change.
Beyond technical determinism is a related notion of linguistic determinism. Alastair Pennycook (1994) is among those who would warn us of unintended consequences of a common dominant language in the universal world of the Internet. Using Galtang's center-periphery model, Pennycook describes how English media from the Center nations have penetrated, even dominated the media of developing nations. He describes how English has become the language of power and prestige in many countries to the extent that it has become a gating factor for social and economic progress. The use of English in particular domains, especially professional, influences power relationships, placing such domains out of reach for many people. The English language has been postured as an international gatekeeper, regulating the international flow of people. New forms of national and non-national cultural expression are linked to the English language, even in areas where English is rarely spoken. And English has become a dominant factor influencing multiple aspects of global relations, including spread of capitalism and aid to national development (Pennycook, 1994, p.13).
Yukio Tsuda (1997) suggests that in the English-dominated communication, English speakers are in a position to control communication to their own advantage. Tsuda cited the infamous example (Coughlin, 1953) in which the word 'mokusatsu' was used by the Japanese Prime Minister in response to the American demand to surrender in August, 1945. The word 'mokusatsu' literally means 'no comment', but the Americans took it to mean 'reject'. With no apparent desire for clarification, the Americans responded by dropping atomic bombs on Heroshima and Nagasaki. Tsuda raises this example of linguistic hubris in the context of the linguistic privileges that allow Americans to dominate Internet discourse. Robert Phillipson (1992) coined the term linguicism to mean linguistic imperialism, a concept he perceives to be as significant as racism. Linguicism, for Phillipson, is an assembly of ideologies, structures and practices which are used to legitimate, effectuate and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources (both material and immaterial) between groups which are defined on the basis of language. English commands monumental financial, official and popular backing in parts of the globe where its role is dubious. As a result indigenous languages, according to Phillipson, are not accorded enough resources to develop so that the same functions could be performed in them.
From a constructivist point of view, social actors make the final choice among several technically viable options. If one option is closed, an agentive actor selects another route to accomplish a critical task. In the real world, the problem-definition often changes in the course of solution (Feenberg, 1992).
A good example of agentive activity by marginalized people is the so-called Radio Defiance Campaign that emerged in South Africa in the late 1980s (see Michaud, 2003). It was a time when the radio airwaves were strictly controlled by the white ruling class. What black South Africans heard on the radio was white-owned and white-controlled programming. In the black townships the programming promoted the notion that apartheid was good, that it was natural and inevitable, and that any expression of resistance amounted to nothing less than terrorism. Attempts toward community controlled programming in broadcasting were strictly out of the question, and black South Africans had become generally alienated from the medium of radio.
During this period, tape cassette players were becoming popular in black townships. Under the leadership of the African National Congress, people began to produce their own programming, mostly music with news and community interest productions, using the medium of magnetic cassette tape! These produced 'radio' broadcasts were passed from hand to hand in small communities. In time, a sofisticated distribution network emerged, where tapes and copies of tapes found circulation into the tens of thousands. In townships where official radio programming was completely ignored, the cassette distribution system developed into a vibrant phenomenon. A complex actor network had been created, connecting human and non-human agents into a viable, coherent, collective organism that was capable of translating the absence of community radio into a force of social change. The Radio Defiance Campaign was a small but significant factor in community organizing that eventually toppled the apartheid regime.
It has been argued that communication technology is a critical factor for influencing social organization and change. But technology is simply one factor among many. Social change is too complex and too subtle to be explained in reductionist terms of media and message. Grand theories tend to ignore the socio-historical contexts. Social change involves an interaction of social, cultural and economic forces as well as scientific and technological influences.
One grand theory about the digital divide suggests that the marginalized will remain silent until they have direct access to the Internet and they have mastered the skills necessary to use the technology effectively. But the example of the Zapatista Movement in Chiapas Mexico suggests otherwise. The manner in which the Zapatista rebellion was covered on the Internet has become one of the most successful examples of the use of computer communications by grassroots social movements. Local Zapatista support was well established in Chiapas. And the human connections with multiple communities outside Southern Mexico was a growing phenomenon. There was no sophisticated ICT network in Chiapas. There were no skilled technicians to wire these connections. There was no government grant or NGO benefactor to underwrite this project. According to Harry Cleaver (1998) it was a simple matter of making person-to-person contact:
Initially the Mexican state tried to restrict the uprising to the jungles of Chiapas, through both military repression and the limitation of press coverage (most Mexicans get their news from the state controlled TV network, Televisa). Those efforts failed. First through written communiques and personal interviews with independent journalists which were flashed around the world by fax and electronic mail, then through more detailed reports by Mexican and foreign observers circulated in the same manner, the Zapatistas were able to break out of the state's attempted isolation and reach others with their ideas and their program for economic and political revolution. As vast numbers of Mexicans responded with sympathy and mobilized in support, the Chiapas uprising kindled a more generalized pro-democracy movement against the centralized and corrupt Mexican economic and political system. Inspiring many others outside of Mexico, the Zapatista uprising set in motion a new wave of hope and energy among those engaged in the struggle for freedom all over the world.Being at the bottom of the national and international wage and income hierarchy does not make the people of Chiapas either primitive or backward, only oppressed and exploited. Being part of that hierarchy --no matter which part-- means that their work and their struggles can only be understood properly within larger contexts, as the Zapatistas have so properly insisted.
Moreover, as part of their struggles to resist exploitation and oppression and to develop their own ways of life and community structures, they have developed their own forms of self-organization which turned out to be complementary to the computer systems with which they would link up. "Access", unfortunately, is not "given" to most people in the world. Indeed, most people are excluded from direct participation in cyberspace because of lack of access to The Net. This problem is particularly acute in rural areas and among the world's indigenous peoples who often lack even electricity or phone lines, much less computers or the skills to operate them. Many, many communities in Chiapas, for example, are in this situation and their ability to connect to the wider world through computers depends entirely on their connections with a limited number of possible intermediaries who are connected.
Zapatista messages have to be hand-carried through the lines of military encirclement and uploaded by others to the networks of solidarity. Similar problems of access exist within those networks. Many who might be sympathetic to the Zapatistas, e.g., various rural and urban communities of Native Americans, Mexicanos and Chicanos in the U.S. and Canada, have few means to plug into The Net. There too, access for most people must be mediated by groups of humanitarian or political activists who download EZLN Communiques and upload expressions of solidarity from off-line organizing.
Moreover, even accessible computer communications don't magically produce collaboration --all the usual obstacles to mutual understanding and solidarity must still be faced by those involved in struggle, e.g., differences in language, politics, background knowledge, experience, national identity and relative position in the global wage/income hierarchy. The Net provides new spaces for new political discussions about democracy, revolution and self- determination but it does not provide solutions to the differences that exist; it is merely a means to accelerate the search for such solutions.
(Cleaver, 1998)
As with the Radio Rebellion in South Africa, Zapatista model is a rich example of agentive activity that circumvents natural and unnatural constraints to accomplish a goal, using human and non human agents. It reveals an elegant actor network (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987) that employs both human and non-human actants to translate a situation of isolation into one of world-wide support. The fact that the people of Chiapas possess neither the infrastructure, nor the equipment, nor the knowledge of ICTs seems not to matter. What matters is the human connecton.
The Internet is the ultimate human achievement, not because it reveals humankind's high technology, but because it reflects the ancient human tendency to communicate, to make connections, to create networks, to exchange ideas and to share information. These are the activities that make us distinctly human. All humans engage in these activities - with or without technology - just as we have done for centuries. To suggest that a marginalized group will somehow become less human because they don t have the technical assets that we enjoy reveals more about our modern dependencies than it does about thier impoverishment. To believe that information and computer technology has the power to make us more human or super human reveals the distorted nature of our own sense of human identity.
Where people are starving, or deprived of clean water, or plagued with disease, or alienated from a safe, sustainable habitat, or stripped of their essential human rights, the immediate problems these people face cannot be resolved with computer technology. To respond to such human crises with technology alone is a cruel and insensitive gesture. Nevertheless, we know that in the places where Internet access abounds, there is very little hunger, there is ample water, adequate health care, a safe, sustainable environment, and a political atmosphere that allows people to reach out and communicate to others. Does it logically follow then, that technology must be the driving force that leads to these humane conditions? Perhaps with all of the intelligence that we derive from our ICTs, we may be able to answer the question without difficulty.
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