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Social Changes & Internet Access In The Third World
Posted by
Cliff
on Thu Mar 09, 2000 12:00 PM
from the social-changes-through-technology dept.
from the social-changes-through-technology dept.
DiZNoG asks: "I'm curious about the social acceptability of Internet access and use in third-world countries such as Pakistan and Ethiopia. I realize that actually starting an ISP in these places would be difficult technologically, but what are the social implications? We here in the U.S. have become accustomed to the Net, but what about those in less-developed countries? How would society react to such technology? And how about those countries' governments? Do any of your readers have any information?" In addition to monetary reasons, there seems to be some degree of "cultural friction" when it comes to adopting Internet access in many regions of the world. Your thoughts?
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Social Changes & Internet Access In The Third World
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They Can Do It, They Do It (Score:3)
In Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela (and probably other Latin American countries), it is common to see phone centers for making long distance calls: room full of small booths, with on-site operators to connect the calls, which are paid for at the time of the call. (An odd side effect of the phones centers is that in certain Latino/Hispanic communities in the US, you still see these phone centers, even though people may have phones at home; they're used to them, and the aggregate billing rates are cheaper).
Not everyone has phones in these countries not necessarily because the individuals can't afford them, but because it may be too cost prohibitive for the state phone company to install the lines. The same applies to Internet: it's cheaper to aggregate the service in order to reduce costs per capita.
Now these phone centers are playing host to Internet services as well, used to communicate with relatives in other countries as well as intra-country. And since, as so many Americans seeme to forget, even developing countries all have wealthy and technologically advanced citizens, they are applying the technologies as suits their culture. These are the people, whatever their politics or precarious position at the top of the heap, that lead the advancement into new technologies. It is also common in tourist areas to find Internet cafes, usually run by First Worlders of the broadest definition.
As odd as it sounds, an advantage to being an underdeveloped country is that a nation can skip the outdated interval technologies and jump straight to the latest. They can, for example, skip land lines, POTS, hard wires. The move to cellular phones in Ecuador and Colombia, for example, has leaped in such ways as to help circumvent the irregular and inconsistent land-line services. In parts of Latin America (which is largely my only area of experience) it has been tradition for radio stations to send out personal messages to listeners in their broadcast area. Not "Feliz Cumpleaños" but "Pedro, please meet us on Tuesday in Riobamba" or "Maria, your sister is sick. Could you come to take care of her for a few days?" Cell phones now help circumvent the pecularities of geography that had cause problems with laying physical lines.
Assuming costs can be consolidated, I see a huge market for wireless Internet in underdeveloped countries, particularly in mountainous regions like the Andes. This is their future.
Re:Check out Grameen (Score:3)
www.grameen.org [grameen.org], Grameen Bank, a microlending bank in Bangladesh
wlink.com.np [slashdot.org], an affordable ISP in Nepal
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.01/barlow.htm l [wired.com], a Wired article by John Perry Barlow about his travels in Africa and Internet access availability there
Re:Fresh water, food, and the Internet. (Score:3)
I don't know, I think it's interesting for geeks to talk about the technological infrastructure in other countries.
But I do agree that the idea that somehow internet access is gonna revolutionize the world is ludicrous. So many people in countries like the US assume that the third world is the way it is because the people living there don't know any better. People aren't as stupid as Americans tend to think they are.
Still, I think it makes sense to have a slashdot article where people talk about how much internet access people have in various parts of the world, and why.
How would access to medicine, food and water effect social change?
Yeah; that statement says it all, really.
the internet is in Nepal (Score:3)
Last night I was caught off guard when she wrote me an email from her own dialup account (hosted by wlink.com.np) She now has, for ~US$20 a month, 10 hours of full internet usage that she can use from her house (20+ hours by bus from Kathmandu). I did notice that the ping times were up near 900ms for their web server, but still, it is in Nepal (and just to note, it is using Linux according to netcraft [netcraft.com].
Since alot of the technology workers in the US take trips to Nepal, many of you might know, just how amazing thinking about the internet in Nepal actually is.
Some information... (Score:3)
Actually, "starting" an ISP in such a country is not that hard technologically speaking. Please remember that's what Open source is for: any third-world country can benefit from Linux/BSD (as well as SendMail/Apache/etc...) projects. These are, after all, proven OS, with a good track record, lots of sources of information and so on and so forth.
Also remember that PC is pretty much commodity hardware these days, which means it's fairly unexpensive, as long as the country you are working in has low import duties on these machines. In the worst possible case, I have known people (in Africa, for instance) who will smuggle (smaller) portable computers or even whole disassembled computers bought cheaply elsewhere in the world.
Thanks to the optimization done by open-source volunteers all over the globe, even low-end machines can handle pretty heavy workloads -- even ultra-cheap "obsolete" machines such as 486 and low-end Pentiums.
The real problems therefore are:
Also, please remember that in most of these countries, as sad as it is to say, you have very little (or none at all) legal recourse if you don't like what the government is doing. Democracy, even in the best of cases, is still, unfortunately, a very remote concept to the day-to-day life of most people in the Third World.
Finally, there is the little question of profit -- few individuals or corporations are wealthy enough to be able to afford a PC, let alone a 'net connection.
Just my US$ 0.02...
Internet in Pakistan (Score:3)
Pakistanis have had Internet access for many many years. There are dozens and dozens of ISPs in every major city. Unlike the US and some other countries the govt. has not tried to control the Internet. There are no laws for Internet censorship.
Situation is far from perfect but it is better than some of the developed countries.
Encryption is outlawed in Pakistan. But almost everybody uses software that has some sort of encryption built-in and I have never heard of a case where govt. tried to crack on use of encryption. The encryption law is very old and is mostly the result of a hostile neighbour India.
Ignorant Slashdotters (Score:3)
Yes, there are poor people in Ethiopia (I use Ethiopia as an example because my family lived there for about 4 years).
Yes, there are poor people in London, New York and Paris who couldn't give a shit about the net.
During my time in Africa I met a huge number of educated, open-minded (and some reasonably wealthy) people who embrace advances in technology.
For those slashdotters who paint a picture from 15 years ago - constant famine, country-wide warfare, etc. -let me dispell a myth.
They are not all poor, uneducated, starving and homeless.
They watch tv at the local bar (where they drink beer or whiskey). They live in homes and eat food.
In other words, they live there lives as a complete human being and not just a 2 dimensional character you watched on LIVE AID!
Welcome to the melting pot (Score:3)
But before we go forward and laugh at these groups and those that will surly follow, lets take a moment and look at their fears. Recent history is riddled with stories of cultures that have all but been removed from existence because they got in the way of "progress". In the United States alone we can point to the Native American's and the Inuit's. They have found that there is little to no room for their culture in our "modern" world.
I believe that many will see the internet in much the same way that the native inhabitants of the US saw the settlers. The fear is justified; over time the continuous exposure to dominant foreign cultures will likely erode many of the facets of other cultures that make them unique.
Is this bad? It has the promise of allowing more people to be able to hold a dialog to share ideas and philosophies on a scale that has never before been possible. Yet I have to admit that I can understand the sense of loss that a proud nation may feel as they discover that slowly cease to exist, one keystroke at a time.
all persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental. - Kurt Vonnegut
quite mixed results (Score:3)
Just look at the Net access numbers. Less than 0.7 percent [www.nua.ie] of the Arab world is online. South Africa and the Seychelles are the only parts of Africa with more than one percent penetration [www.nua.ie]. The numbers aren't all that much better for South America [www.nua.ie], and, significantly, the world's most populous countries, China and India, lag behind the rest of Asia [www.nua.ie].
These percentages are not all that revealing, though. The important thing is the percentage of new Net users is climbing. In all those areas, the number of people with Net access is small, but the rate of increase is impressive.
Because of the infrastructure problems, only those who can afford Net access in each country spend money getting online. That means that only the very wealthy can reap the benefits of interconnectedness in those places - so, to answer your question, one of the early effects of Net access in many of these countries has been (and will continue be) the exacerbation of class disparities. We can only hope that will change, as Net access gets cheaper - but it will be terribly cruel for years as the impoverished around the globe see the fruits of the Net dangling in front of them, just beyond grasp.
There are other interesting implications, like the effects on cultural understanding. James Burke commented in an interview some years ago that he hoped the Internet would have the effect of forcing Americans to see how different the rest of the world is. I haven't noticed the kind of cultural broadening he imagined, but it may be forced upon other nations. So much of the Internet is in English, and so many important services and products originate in the English-speaking world, that late-comers to the Net may find their cultural identity under attack. One hopes that cultural-specific Net services will arise to meet their needs.
And, finally, there is little evidence as yet of the Net's liberalizing political influence. In fact, we are still in the awful early stage, where countries like China are placing stringent restrictions on Net access and are deciding which Web sites are acceptable for their population. Hopefully, this will diminish with time, but it is possible that these regimes may just grow more desperate as their control of information wanes - and desperation can lead to dangerous unpredictability.
We've got some more articles posted on our Equity page [tecsoc.org].
A. Keiper
Re:An example (Score:3)
The adage that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (at least relatively) applies in the digital world. We can advance by using the web because we have the computers, the electricity, and the telephone infastructure. The Indian people still have to figure out how they are organize their economy so that they have infastructure to underlies using the internet. After they solve that problem, they can worry about the social implications of exposure to who knows what on the web.
E-Mail (Score:3)
This is sort of silly (Score:4)
I am not sure it is really worth going into too much depth on this topic. This seems like the kind of thing someone brings up at a party just to start conversation. However, I will throw in my own 2 cents.
One major issue I think worth mentioning is the leap-frog effect. Under-developed countries are able to jump into to a new market with the best technology, passing by outmoded forms. The example I am most familiar with is Brazil (although large and rich as third world countries grow, it still has large numbers of very poor, starving, and barefoot people). It is far cheaper in Brazil to get a cellular phone than a regular phone, and I have never seen so many cell phones in my life as in Brazil. Taxi drivers and maids alike all had them. This is because it is cheaper to put up a cell-tower than it is to lay hundreds of miles of regular land line. Since, the telecommunications infrastructure is lacking in the boondocks, they have just adopted cellular technology. I saw a man driving a donkey cart talking on a cellphone. Talk about culture shock. Third World countries that do invest in internet technology, will at least have the fortune of avoiding many of our (in the US) mistakes.
As far as the social impact, I think that certainly depends on the government and the culture of the country involved. It will always turn out that that freedom of information will win in the long run, despite growing pains along the way. China should learn from this, and their focus on their manned spaceflight program shows how far behind the United States they are.
Taking another example from Brazil, a country known for its sociable people, I would mention the popularity of IRC. It is huge with Brazilian young people, and it is becoming increasingly so with people from 2nd and 3rd world countries around the globe.
People in other countries will end up doing the same things people in the US do. They will use the Internet to talk to each other. This is what the average user does. Maybe they will look at a little porn, maybe buy some stuff from eBay or whatever is the analog in the language of their choice, but in the end it will popular for the same reason AOL is popular, things like Chat Rooms. Just like the Internet is, in the end, popular because of things like /.
Check out Grameen (Score:4)
The relevancy to this topic: Grameen has gotten into telecommunications and the Internet lately, but maintained a focus on the classically impoverished portions of society. Witness the "cell-phone lady", who is a woman in a village who owns a cellphone and charges others a small fee to use it to call other villages, where another "cell-phone lady" provides a similar service.
Incidentally, wireless networking is a very good solution in third world countries, where landlines have a nasty habit of being torn down, possibly for use as scrap copper...
see www.grameen.org for more.
excellent topic, by the way.
nathan
Freedom Of Speech (Score:4)
A Nigerian Perspective (Score:5)
In Nigeria the government sanctioned minimum wage was recently (actually about 1 year ago) increased to about $50 a month. Even though there is great wealth in the country it is disproportionately distributed with a few being mega-rich, some living at subsistence level and millions living below UN poverty levels. In countries like Nigeria the Internet is far from being a social phenomenon and is seen more as a business tool for those that can afford it (banks, oil companies, etc.) or as a plaything for the rich. The average individual has little access to potable water, electricity and telephones let alone a high bandwidth connection and a PC. Most people who need to use the internet go to business centres (places like Kinkos) and pay per minute to check their hotmail or send email to relatives who live too far away to call.
The internet may be ubiqituos and a way of life here (i.e. the US) but this is a far cry from what is happening in third world countries.
India is a good example (Score:5)
developed world, but also most of Asia for getting
net technology out on the streets- they have some problems like a severely overregulated telecom industry however, bascially crippling the infrastructure (they keep saying this will change in a few years, but I have not seen any real progress).
Socially speaking, the uneducated and to a large extent, the older generation in any country
will take a very long time to derive the full benefits or realize the full impacts of (liberating) technology- this is as true in the U.S. where the dribbling milksop masses are still thinking of the net as a replacement for the Home Shopping Network. The same holds true for much of India- the majority of the middle and upper class think of computers and the internet as something for their young.
On the other token, where it has caught on, it has caught on like wildfire- Bangalore (India's equivalent of Silicon Valley) is a good example of it. Bangalore used to be a smallish dusty town in South India. It has now expanded into an economic tiger, with streets lined with Indian intelligentsia, and internet cafes and hardware shops crammed in nooks and crannies in slum-ridden alleys in a expanding radius around M.G. road (Bangalore's equivalent of El Camino Real, or the Chelsea district in Silicon Alley). It is now one of India's more progessive cities in terms of attitudes towards women, religion, inebriants, etc. On the same token, the increase in wealth has caused questionable materialism to popup- the only American style malls in India (last I visited).
On a large scale, the net effect in the current economic situation is kind of a hyper-globalization: You can see this by the amount of American influence in Bangalore and the Indian influence in say, Santa Clara or Cupertino in Silicon Valley.
This globalization is kind of a new Cambrian explosion of memes that are not geographically centralized- its unlike colonialism or imperialism in which there is a controlling authority and a predominant meme, but rather, many similar attitudes on what was previously on the "fringe" of a culture (in terms of sexuality, religion, politics) now pop up in disparate regions. In other words: A San Francisco geek probably has a lot more in common with an Calcutta geek than a San Francisco geek has in common with a Kansas City non-geek. Whether this is good or bad- whether our global diversity level is declining or whether there is an explosion in individual choice- has yet to be seen IMHO. One thing I can say for sure is that the phenomena of people who are wired breaking political, cultural, and economic boundaries is not an American phenomena (all the more reason we need to fight tooth an nail to keep expanding our freedoms).
Economically, India is experiencing an upsurge due o the expansion of technology in its borders. This is leading towards a burgeoning middle class, and a general hope for the next generation.
All in all, the impact of tech on India is straight out of a William Gibson novel- its a country in which 5000 years of history is not going to go away, but instead is marrying the the modern world, and producing something truly weird. It is definately a trip hanging out in a net cafe in New Delhi, when you see several cows wandering by the window, alongside the beggars, sanyasis, businessmen, all choking in the same haze caused by the coal driven smokestack power plants in the center of the city.
The parental units in India are enthusiastic for their children- they see the Internet as a way for their children to start getting out of poverty. The government is taking the same attitude. This is probably unusual for most third world countries at large, since India has always had a high degree of respect and tolerance for diversity and complexity (things that the internet bring along with it), and generally has an anarchistic attitude on life.
I am definately interested in hearing what other people have observed so far in this process- in particular with religion: How are strict Hindhu, Christians, and Muslims handling the internet and its open views on the world? This question applies particularly to more closed off countries like Pakistan and Myannamar.
... Just some random thoughts.
Sorry, the US is not accustomed to the internet (Score:5)
Yes I think it is safe to say, the US of A definitely can not handle what's going on - and if anything goes down - it will go down here first. In fact, it is almost frightening, because many large corporations have bet over a trillion dollars on the assumption that copyrights are a basic right, they're not, they're not sustainable, and they're not enforcable. It's only a matter of time before all hell breaks loose.
David