While there is a tremendous amount of interest in all societies as to how those with the tools and instruments to access the new global networks, e.g. modems, computers, software, telephone or cable lines, boxes full of interactive intelligence and the skills to understand and handle them, will be empowered, there are generally few political agendas addressing how accessible these networks will be for the sizable populations who will not have easy access to these tools. The impact of exclusion both on the haves and the have-nots, and the extent to which such a discrepancy changes each group’s assumptions about the world, looks like being left to market forces to mould and then control. It has ever been the case that the affluent in any society have always had new discretionary wants created for them by the market while the economically hard-pressed simply tend to adjust their wants downward to cope with new conditions.
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Free-market capitalism has no system for identifying common human needs (as opposed to wants) and provides no way of fostering community forms of provision. Attempting to sell needs is never very profitable. Needs are by definition low or nonmargin services required to achieve the lineaments that we style a ‘minimum quality of life’. The very sophistication of the information handling and processing options available to rich corporate environments, their ability to pay over the top for quite mediocre information solutions, and the strongly emerging imperative that all information should be regarded as a market-driven commodity, has had a deleterious effect on current perceptions of publicly funded sources of information. Thus the kind of values that accompany a subscription to Reuter’s news and financial services by a profitable commercial concern are now nearly always used when politicians and civil servants address the issue of community- based information provision outside the corporate domain. The loss of cheap paper sources of information as the build-up of digitisation accelerates is a little considered issue in the context of wide public access to sources of information. But without institutions to mediate digitised information to economically deprived groups, their access to something that was often relatively easy via a public library, law centre or citizens advice bureau could be severely impaired.
The growth of networked access to information by the middle ground of citizens who nearly always vote, i.e. a public library of their own via a modem, is unlikely to encourage them to vote for the continuation of public institutions which provide information on a community basis. Although many optimists see the widespread access to computer-linked networks as a way of spreading information and knowledge to many more citizens and thus sharing political and economic influence even more widely, others believe that access to these networks will simply be laid over the same old patterns of geographic and economic inequality. For these pessimists the network as a marketplace of ideas will move from metaphor to reality where established patterns of consumer detriment, the compounded disadvantages of low-income groups, are replicated in digital form. Such groups could become the victims of a powerful triumvirate: a developing cocktail of selfish technology for the economically stable, a propensity for the middle ground to adopt a more reactionary political stance with regard to public investment in information infrastructure, and the continuing invisibility of the social and economic value of public information sources in the information- knowledge chain. The self-sufficiency of the ‘wired home’ is becoming a high-tech icon of the ‘there is no such thing as society’ politics of the late 1980s, a situation where everyone should take individual responsibility for the economics of getting online. If they don’t then they must just accept that they will be left out!
Although all technologies trickle down, particularly those capable of pollinating new forms of accessing revenue-producing entertainment, few have revolutionised the way in which the majority of citizens have been able to understand and then influence the variety of political, social or cultural options available to them. Power structures continue to remain distant (parliamentary involvement in UK government long ago gave way first to cabinet and then to special committee government), the fibres of US government remain largely untouched by the existence of a White House e-mail number, economically limited citizens continue to remain limited in their access to higher education and the effective manipulation of the higher-level technologies that comes with it. The integration of higher-level communicational computing into everyday life—other than that found in washing machines, the TV remote control and cash machines—has remained the exclusive preserve of Robert Reich’s elite ‘symbolic analysts’, i.e. that 20 per cent of a developed nation’s population who work for enterprises with disposable cash to spend on the technology or who believe that their business will benefit from the investment. Although the one-person design, translation, editing, consultant-type of small enterprise might easily invest in such connectivity as the cost of the technology falls, by far and away the majority of users will still be members of large public or private closed systems. Social divisions and distinctions have remained largely untouched by the massification of a whole range of computer- based technologies, and the Internet will be no different. It owes its existence to the desire of info-rich actors to talk and share information and knowledge with other info-rich actors, and whatever their altruistic motives may or may not be, neither will have the power (though some may have the desire) to extend membership of the club. Contrary to current Internet folklore, the users do not own the ‘means’.
They have great freedom to communicate but they do not have the freedom to decide who else may communicate with them. That decision will remain with the ‘investors’, be they individual or corporate, and will thus exhibit all the disparities of access that characterise existing technologies. Such questions lie at the crux of the info-rich/info-poor debate across the world as well as within individual countries. Most developing countries, except Singapore and Hong Kong, have an average income per head (as measured by the World Bank at purchasing power parity which takes account of international differences in costs of living) at well below the OECD average of US$20,110.
India comes bottom with below $1,000 per head; Poland and Brazil lie seventh and eighth from the bottom at around $5,000 per head. The GDP per head in Africa has grown at only 2.6 per cent over the past ten years, which given its rapid population growth was insufficient to lift real incomes at all (The Economist 1997:138). The disparities between sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world are so great that comparisons seem almost meaningless. There may be eight million documents available on the World Wide Web, but 70 per cent of the host computers are in the US and fewer than ten African countries are connected to the Internet (see Holderness, this volume). A modem in India costs about four times as much as it does in the US, and Internet access can be twelve times more expensive in Indonesia than in the US. While developed nations will gradually increase the range of socio- economic groups that can access global networks, Internet users in developing countries are likely to be confined for many years to a much smaller privileged elite. As in developed economies, this group will naturally increase their awareness and extend their grip on the ‘deep understanding’ and ‘knowing’ which is such an important part of economic differentiation. As those with the deep knowledge dig deeper they inevitably extend their hold on the developing sophistication of systems. Employing the latest and most satisfying version of networking technology requires ongoing, hands-on know-how to maintain its benefits as well as the disposable income to invest in it. Lack of opportunity to access this know-how, as well as lack of cash, will forever keep large populations on the edge of the networking revolution. In developed nations they will get some trickle down as corporations seek outlets for their content, but as observers rather than as richly engaged participants. In poorer countries the ‘superhighway’ is more often than not a long and tortuous dirt-track miles from a made-up road which itself is miles from the nearest medical centre or school. Slow trickle down in some countries will be a matter of policy. Governments such as those in Singapore, Vietnam and China face the paradox of wanting more and more access to the world of WWW documents and images for use by their governing elites, while at the same time seeking ways to stifle or limit the free flow of information which might change their citizens’ view of the political and social system that they currently belong to. The oft-promoted universal virtue of global networks pales somewhat before the private affluence and public poverty that look set to coexist within the noble aims of the Internet movement. In developed economies, Are you on the network? could become as big a social and economic differentiator in the late 1990s as Are you employed? has been in the early 1990s; indeed, the answer to either question might now well depend on your access to the other.
This need not be so. If both nations and supranational bodies like the European Union or The World Bank can find ways of stimulating access to non-profit-purposeful information, information that fuels curiosity and self-education, and encourages animated and involved citizenship (including dissent) in tandem with stimulating the conditions within which private enterprises can better use information to be more competitive, then global networks would indeed be on the road to a ‘universal virtue’. However this would require levels of political commitment and social priority which none of us have seen yet.
The world has always been a place of haves and have-nots and I can see no way that internetworking is going to change this very much. Indeed it has the decidedly ominous potential to increase the sense of alienation that has always made it more difficult for the economically deprived to cross over into higher levels of economic activity. Although the technology trickle-down factor may operate differently in different economic systems, with those systems that favour a mixture of intervention and market forces1 facilitating the liberation of serious benefits to a wide range of citizens, it has always failed to deliver its promises in the UK. Opportunities for the economic liberation of wider population of citizens via technology in the UK have been lost in the mishmash of laissez-faire economics which has passed for public policy since 1979. The United Nations Human Development Report, published in July 1996, shocked us all by showing just how fast inequality has been growing in the UK over the last twenty years. It showed that the poorest 40 per cent of Britons now share a lower proportion of the national wealth—14.6 per cent—than any other western country: this is only marginally better than Russia, the only industrialised nation east or west to have a worse record. The gap between rich and poor in the UK shows a similar degradation, with the richest fifth of Britons enjoying on average incomes ten times as high as the poorest fifth. The poorest fifth of Britons have an average per capita income which is 32 per cent lower than their equivalents in the US and 44 per cent lower than in the Netherlands. During the same month Forbes Magazine in the US highlighted the plight of the worlds 447 dollar billionaires (up from 147 in 1986), the burden of whose combined wealth is now worth more than the annual incomes of at least half the world’s population.
Over two hundred years on from the world’s first iron bridge, technology has failed to deliver the levels of release from poverty and drudgery that its proponents anticipated, and among the developed economies the UK has performed worst. Only the most demented of optimists can expect internetworking to challenge the basis of this kind of society. The differentials run deeper than the deepest cable and they stand every chance of being made worse by the tendency for the ‘haves’ to observe the world from insulated, screen-based cells rather than in among the community outside their front door. The opportunities that easy access to information can bring have never been distributed evenly among the members of any community, rich or poor, large or small. What is probably more important is that despite the convergence of whole range of new technologies, easy access to the information that can really empower and liberate people still looks likely to be the preserve of an affluent minority. Unless the economic sharing of all kinds of information becomes commonplace this discrepancy could occur to such an extent in the future that it will become impossible for the inhabitants of info-rich and info-poor communities to communicate with each other using similar assumptions.
From : From : Loader, Brian D. (ed.). Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency and Policy in The Information Society. Routledge. (page : 21-26)
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