COMMUNICATIONS-LATAM: Forum Calls for Greater Connectivity

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Andrés Cañizález

MERIDA, Venezuela, May 31 2001 (IPS) - Latin America is facing the challenge of broadening access to the Internet and promoting the on-line use of Spanish and Portuguese, communications experts meeting in the Venezuelan city of Merida said Wednesday.

Participants in the fourth seminar on “Web Technology for Latin America and the Caribbean” underlined the need for putting in place public policies capable of bringing about “social usage” of the global information superhighway.

The five-day forum of academics and experts opened Monday at the University of Los Andes (ULA) in Merida, some 800 kms southwest of Caracas.

The coordinator of Community Telecentres of Mexico, Scott Robinson, told IPS that the Internet “is a global phenomenon that still has no owner, and over which no government or consortium yet exercises conclusive control – a fact that gives us the enormous responsibility” of exercising citizen oversight.

Robinson, a professor at the Autonomous Metropolitan University of Mexico, coordinates a non-governmental programme that is setting up telecentres where the public can hook up to the Internet, in the south-central Mexican state of Morelos.

“The big questions facing Latin America today are: What uses are we to give the Internet? and Who is to use it?” said Robinson, who underlined that “technology is never neutral, because it is always inserted in broader scenarios involving projects, patents, licenses, money and power.”

He pointed to two essential aspects of Latin America and the Caribbean’s ties with the new technologies, such as the need to be “literate” in the digital world and in cyberspace, and the widening of the “digital divide” between rich and poor countries and within nations in the region.

A report by the firm Accenture, belonging to Spain’s Santander Central Hispano Bank, estimated that the number of Internet users in Latin America, a region of over 520 million, would rise from last year’s 14.8 million to 44 million by 2003.

“Latin America’s elites undoubtedly form part of the first generation of web users, and the use of the Internet as an instrument of work and communication is being consolidated” among those sectors, said Robinson.

But he warned that “the growing concentration of the global and regional market of providers of digital technologies services” posed a risk for the democratic use of and widespread access to the Internet.

Sylvia Cadena with the Colnodo association, which promotes web connectivity among social organisations in Colombia, said the strengthening of civil society in her country had led to “the appropriation” of the Internet.

Cadena is involved in research on the relationship between women and technology, in the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), of which Colnodo is a member.

She said web pages that targetted women still focused on “cosmetics, diets, family and kids” – a situation that “does not necessarily respond to the reality” of today’s women in Latin America.

Studies have shown that women, as mothers and in many cases as the heads of households, play an important role in questions of food security, health and access to education, “but information on such issues does not appear on web pages aimed at women,” Cadena lamented.

Daniel Pimienta, with the Dominican Republic Foundation of Networks, said it was not true that English was the universal language of the worldwide web.

According to data compiled by his organisation, as of last December 60 percent of web sites were in English, 20 percent less than in 1998, while 4.85 percent of sites were in Spanish – a full 95 percent higher than the proportion documented two years earlier.

Pimienta added that 4.39 percent of web sites were in French, 2.77 percent in Italian and 1.97 percent in Portuguese, which was the language that registered the greatest increase in the two years covered by the study: 162 percent.

Civil society and communications experts in Latin America are facing the challenge of continuing to boost the number of web pages in Spanish or Portuguese. “In this region, we are in need of public policies on the Internet,” Pimienta stressed.

He added, however, that search engines played a key role, and that each user must know how to employ them, because some seven million new web pages were posted on the Internet every day.

Several pilot projects in which the use of the web has fuelled academic or development initiatives were discussed this week in Merida.

One of the most outstanding was the Pulsar Information Agency, a World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters project that involved the creation of an information-sharing network among hundreds of community radio stations in Latin America and the Caribbean, which is coordinated from Ecuador.

Another was the Alejandria project developed by the University of Los Andes, an Internet-based academic network with more than 100 servers considered the most successful teleinformation system in Venezuela, which has received ample international recognition.