DEVELOPMENT-COMMUNICATIONS: Third Wave Hits Third World

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Peter Costantini

SEATTLE, Oct 9 1995 (IPS) - Deep in the Sierra Madre of southern Mexico, small coffee farmers can – at least in theory – electronically harvest information on agriculture, biology and markets from around the world. But they need about 1000 dollars- worth of computer equipment and a phone line, items to which few have access.

So the executives of telecommunications firms in California’s Silicon Valley have a problem in monitoring their economic seismographs for faint pulsations of interest from the Mexican farmers and millions of other farmers worldwide.

What the executives want to communicate may, or may not, be what the farmers want to know. And the question is: whose interests will shape the burgeoning sprawl of cybercommunications?.

According to Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, a U.S. non-governmental organisation (NGO), “Today, with the number of worldwide users estimated at up to 30 million, the Internet has been construed, alternatively, as a means for providing universal access to the world’s knowledge, as a powerful new marketing and retailing tool, as pluralistic information commons, and as a pipeline for pornography into the playroom.

“The soul of a democratic net is still up for grabs.”

The global tangle of computer networks known as the Internet has extended its copper and fiber-optic tendrils into most countries of the developing world.

Although the number of connected computers (known as hosts) in poor countries remains small, they are growing – up by 48 percent in Central and South America, 51 percent in Asia and 53 percent in Africa in the first six months of 1995, according to a survey by the research firm Network Wizards.

Iran, Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Panama and Indonesia all had growth rates of greater than 75 percent while the world-wide increase was put at 37 percent.

The total number of “hosts” installed globally at the end of August was estimated at 6.6 million — double the figure of August 1994. Of these machines, roughly 6.2 million, or 94 percent, were located in North America, Europe or Japan.

Some 106 countries had connections to the Internet, a yearly increase of 15 countries, with nearly all of the newcomers in the developing world. Most of the nations remaining without links were in Africa.

Most nations of the South with significant numbers of connections, however, are partly industrialised. South Africa had virtually all of Africa’s hosts, Taiwan had the most hosts in Asia (outside of Japan) and Brazil led Latin America.

While the Internet was long devoted primarily to sharing scientific research, its current explosion is fueled by private citizens and businesses seeking everything from electronic-mail (E- mail) connections to marketing data to entertainment.

Rapidly dropping prices and growing power of computer hardware and software, along with the ubiquity of cheap telephone connections, have brought Internet access to large sectors in industrialised countries.

Even within the United States, however, consumer and civil rights groups have charged that access to computer communications is bypassing poor communities, worsening an already growing economic and racial polarisation.

Sniffing vast market potential, U.S. businesses of all sizes have stampeded onto Internet. Major computer and financial firms are jockeying to establish standards for electronic funds transfer. As advertising begins to appear on Internet, critics fear that the network is transmuting from a space for the free exchange of ideas into a vast electronic shopping mall.

The Fortune 500, jockeying to dominate Internet access, is beginning to intrude into content as well, according to Benjamin Barber, political scientist and author of ‘Jihad Versus MacWorld.’ “He who owns the gate to the Internet can control to a large extent what’s on it.”

“Technologically, the Internet is a potentially decentralising medium,” says Barber. “It’s interactive, it provides a lot of horizontal citizen-to-citizen, group-to-group communication possibilities. It’s a kind of old-fashion Western frontier of telecommunications.”

But by the time the information-poor of the world get connected, he says, “they may find that the Internet is a wholly owned subsidiary of the News Corporation or Time-Warner, at which point it may be a lot less useful for whatever purposes they want to put it to.”

In contrast, Anthony Rutkowski, executive director of the Internet Society, sees the Internet ultimately helping to reduce gaps between rich and poor in the world. “One of the more useful features of Internet technology is its ability to be used over virtually any underlying infrastructure,” he says.

On the Net, interchange among developing countries and with industrialised ones appears to be germinating. Electronic versions of many newspapers, including la Jornada of Mexico and la Nacion of Costa Rica, can now be read anywhere in the world the same morning they appear on newstands.

During the recent Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, women’s groups from Sri Lanka to Tunisia used the Internet to coordinate their work and make information available to members at home.

In Africa, the Natural Resources Institute (NRI), a British NGO, uses the Internet to share agricultural information with projects in countries including Zimbabwe, Uganda, Malawi, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa.

But an NRI evaluation raises a critical issue: “Are the most appropriate people in developing countries getting connected? Personal experience indicates not.

“New technologies follow the money (often from donors) and so the information-rich get richer even within Developing Countries,” according to the NRI paper which nonetheless concluded that, on balance, E-mail makes “a positive contribution to information flow.”