Information Devolution

By Kunda Dixit

As new technologies make it possible to move more information faster
than ever before, we are dazzled by the millions of gigabytes that move
across the world in nanoseconds. We are infatuated by bandwidth, digital
television by gadgets and gizmos. Yet we hardly ask questions about the
quality of the information: what is it that we are communicating? Is it
relevant? Will it make the world a better place? And does all this
information add up to knowledge?

The challenge is to get the information to where it is needed through
the most cost-effective method possible. Only when information helps
people communicate, participate and allows them and their rulers to make
informed choices does that information become knowledge.

The growing gap between the world's have and have-nots is today
reflected in the gap between the know and the not knows. If we want to
turn information into knowledge, and give the developing world a chance
to take a short-cut to prosperity the knowledge gap needs to be bridged
urgently. Here we are not talking about the top of the line computers in
each classroom in India, we are talking about a teacher who is trained
and motivated, a classroom that has a roof, school children who have
enough to eat so that their brains are not stunted by low calorie
intake.

The scriptures are right: "Knowledge is a sword, and wisdom is a
shield." Perhaps nowhere is the raw power of knowledge as relevant today
as it is for the two-thirds of the world's people who live in the
countries of the South. And yet in the developing countries of the
South, the holy trinity of the Information Age (television, telephone
and computer) is present, if at all, only in its cable and satellite
telelvision incarnation. South Asia, where one fifth of the world's
population lives, is today within the footprint of at least 50
broadcast satellites. In India, Pakistan and Bangladesh alone there are
more than 70 million households with television, giving a viewership of
300 million. By the year 2007, there will be 550 million television
viewers in these countries, and half of them will be hooked up to cable
and able to watch 350 channels that will be available by then.

Advances in information technology are supposed to shrink distances, but
they don't necessarily bring people together. Better communications
through satellite may give people a wider array of programming to choose
from, but it does not guarantee that they will be more tolerant of
diversity. In fact, more information seems to mean more ignorance, and
better communications intially at least tends to highlight the
differences between peoples.

Knowledge may be a sword, but it double-edged. The delivery mechanisms
for knowledge are today in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
Globally, media ownership reflects the supranational ownership patterns
and mega-mergers with other worldwide businesses. More and more of the
message therefore propagates a global consumer monoculture that is
wasteful, unjust and environmentally unsound. It is when this culture is
put forward as the only one to aspire for that it helps perpetuate
economic disparities and unsustainable lifestyles.

It also leaves more and more people out of the knowledge loop. They have
lost the knowledge they had, and what has replaced it is no longer
relevant or useful. Ultimately, this provokes an extremist backlash
against an uncaring elite and a soulless global culture.

In a lot of ways, it is just like the loss of genetic diversity.
High-yield hybrid seeds have replaced a rich variety of local cereals,
improving harvests but also making the crops more susceptible to
disease, and needing expensive inputs of agrochemicals to make them
work. Globalisation of media subliminally spreads information that eats
into traditional knowledge bases and indigenous processes best adapted
to deal with local conditions.

Internet may offer a chance for South Asian countries to leapfrog
technology, to level the playing field, to democratise information by
giving a voice to diverse groups so that a new age when better
communications will spread useful knowledge will be ushered in. But
going by past examples, the chances of this happening are not good.

Before its November 1 launch, Iridium has launched a media blitz. The
latest commercial beamed via satellite television to millions of homes
across the world shows the Himalayas and Kathmandu, while the voiceover
talks of how you can now wait for the dial tone at the ends of the
earth. But who really grabs satellite phones first? It is the war
correspondents, the Osma bin Ladens, the businessmen or dying
mountaineers on the summit Mt Everest making their last call home. The
poor will be the last to use them, or benefit from them.

How do we ensure that Information Technology will succeed where all
earlier previous panaceas have failed? First, by knowing its
limitations. Let us not recklessly promise that this will "level the
playing field" or "democratise information" but do little do-able things
with it which will add up to change. A lot of this already happening. It
takes more than an hour to log on to the government-owned ISP in New
Delhi because of dirty phone lines and although only India's information
elite have private phone connections or can afford a computer and the
ISP fees, but Internet in India has become a vigorous parallel
information universe. Activists and media have found this to be an
efficient and fast way to counter the mainstream agenda, especially in
the dangerous age of nukes and religious jingoism.

In places where official information is controlled like in Indonesia,
Malaysia and China the Internet has brought the only available means of
spearheading the truth. Across the world, non-governmental organisations,
human rights activists, trampled minorities, suppressed democracy
supporters are bonding via email. The Internet's inherent anarchy, its
decentralised nature and freedom from official control has ironically made
a globalised Internet the most ideal medium to take on the ravages of a
globalised economy.

If history has taught us anything, it is that technology by itself is
never the answer. The corporate values that drive the Information Age are
the same ones that drove the Industrial Age, and things will be no
different with the Internet or Iridium. it still depends on who gets to
control it, who gets to use it and how they use it. Unlike the computer's
binary codes, it is not going to be either/or, plus/minus. The outcome of
the Information Age is going to be a messy analog mishmash.

Parts of the world will be enslaved by Information transnationals, others
will be liberated. Some will cash in on a commercialiased Internet, others
will do just as well without it. Some will be smothered in an avalanche of
information overload, others who yearn for freedom will use it to bypass
tyranny. The degree to which South Asia can benefit from the Internet's
potential for democracy, bring about true decentralisation, or spread
knowledge will on how much support the information-poor get to log on.

In the final analysis, Information Technology is like a tiger. You can
either ride it or be eaten up by it. You may be eaten up anyway, but at
least get to ride it for a while.

(Kunda Dixit is director of Panos South Asia and co-publisher of Himal
magazine. He is also author of the book, Dateline Earth: Journalism As If
The Planet Mattered)