BEYOND THE 'DIGITAL DIVIDE' ORTHODOXY
IT'S FASHIONABLE, it sounds good, and it's politically correct too. But this grandiloquent term 'digital divide' is just a catch-phrase, hardly touches the root of the problem and is -- to someone in the Third World -- so obviously hypocritical. Planet Earth suffers from so many divides. The food divide for one, and divides that relate to knowledge, power, resources, finances, fair-prices, gender, and what not. Yet, if you read the dominant discourse, it would seem as if only the Digital Divide mattered.
Why so?
In any case, a large chunk of our planet -- more obvious if you walk past Delhi, Johannesburg, Rio or Dhaka -- is forced to survive without a whole long list of items more essential than the Net.
Access to the relevant information could in the long run help people understand the roots of their deprivation, and why they remain in poverty at an age when we have all the technology to fight it. But fundamental political problems cannot be fought with technology.
Yes, IT can play a role in making development a bit less elusive. Yes, there's a whole lot of brain-power in this industry. And yes, particularly in regions like South Asia, most of those acting to make the affluent even more affluent seem ill-aware of how exactly they can contribute towards this.
So, what needs to be done is trying to spread the message that IT can be harnessed for development. We're not pretending that the Digital Divide is the foremost problem of humankind, or that this gap is at all bridgeable, or that some self-appointed saviours (ourselves included) can solve the problem.
Digital divides do exist. But how does one really define them?
Take planned obsolescence in IT pushed on us by manufacturers with their own selfish interest at heart. Take hardware (or software) that won't work with other hardware (or software) because the profit-before-people approach dictates that sensible open-standards and cooperation are values at a discount.
Take 'bloat-ware' in the software industry (particularly propriatory software, but increasingly creeping into 'Open Source' corporate-defined forks too) that causes hundreds of millions of computers to be junked (or worse still, shipped to the Third World with so many smug, smiling faces looking on), simply because perfectly working-condition hardware can't keep up with the unnecessarily demanding nature of the 'latest' software...
To those oblivious to the scores of other divides -- often matters of life-and-death -- losing sleep over the so-called Digital Divide is nothing short of hypocrisy. Let's get real, and look at the divides that keep thousands of million poor, hungry and illiterate. Or are we happy to just tilt our spears at imaginary windmills?
We can all contribute in our own way. First, perhaps, by not focusing on non-issues or simply good-sound phraseology.
Global seminars on the 'digital divide' could take us places. But will it solve basic problems at the grassroots? Will all those many neat-sounding statements really make a difference? Where should change really start?
One's heart goes out to that Chennai engineer who has understood that simply having cheaper computers will reach out to more, and went out to develop the Simputer. Or to that Boston student who realizes that not every needs, or can get, high-bandwidth solutions to reach out to the Net. Or the team in Bangalore that is working hard, without much government support other than tall talk, to make computing sharable and thus enhance its spread. To volunteers worldwide working for easily-replicable Free Software solutions in local language computing. Or to those enthusiasts out there in Italy who realise the need for trimmer and less-demanding operating systems that can avoid containers full of computers prematurely reaching the garbage-heap (Dyne-a-Bolic)!
Isn't the so-called 'digital divide' rooted in more fundamental divides? Isn't it a kind of Sisyphean task that gets more un-winnable all the time, thanks to the profits-at-all-cost approach of an industry that has created some of the richest people in the world? Even assuming the 'digital divide' could be successfully bridged, would that make less narrow any of the more fundamental divides that our agenda-setters have not cared about for some centuries now?
At BytesForAll (http://www.bytesforall.org), launched in 1999, our attempt has been to go beyond the 'Digital Divide' cliche. Our goal is more pragmatic: to charter those developments that do make a difference.
Frederick Noronha