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Social Changes & Internet Access In The Third World
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?
This is typically of two things, nerds with a very narrow focus on what is important in life, and secondly an incredible belief in change through technology. The majority of people living in 3rd world countries, want to fulfill the basic human needs. Food, Security, shelter, surviving yet another day. How removed from the real world can one be, when one is worried about spreading the Internet to these countries? Should the money not be spent to try to make (at least small) improvements for the majority rather than putting a computer or 10 in a village somewhere. Give them clean water, basic healthcare, minimum foodstuffs, that would mean millions would live, instead of die. Internet? Computers?.... I dont think so. For the price of a computer, you could feed a lot of ppl for a long time.
With an 8086 and a floppy disk you get a beautiful dumb terminal. Imagine how many people could benefit if all those old, mostly-dead computers could be hooked up with a modem (or for places without modem access, some sort of cheap ham radio packet network or other cheap networking). Anyone could get email and use lynx for web browsing.
I guess the biggest problem is the infrastructure though... if there are no land lines for phones in everyone's living space (or even no electricity!) it's hard to have any sort of computer stuff. Perhaps a cluster of dumb terminals in the center of a community? You can run lots of dumb terminals pretty well off of a single reasonably-fast modem...
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I don't know about you, but if I lived in a third world country, I would be much more concerned about feeding my family, finding work, and dealing with oppressive governments than with finding internet access.
There is simply no need for the Internet in these countries yet. First we should concentrate on helping these other countries "catch up" to our ecomonmic and social prosperity before we go telling them that the Internet will solve all their problems!
India has the one of fastest growing software tech industries in the world (possibly the fastest right now).
There's a whole lotta people living in India, it doesn't take a large fraction of them to be technically competent, on the net, or have degrees in astrophysics before there's a lot of people who do all those things. And they have their own space program (which is more than can be said of my own country, despite the fact we have scads of space industry).
We have to hire whole bunches of Indian HW and SW engineers, 'cos the Indian Unis are churning them out by the bucket load, and we can't afford the ones that are available in blighty.
-- At rest in the information super layby.
Ah yes, the French and their Lingua Paranoia...
Here in the US we're working to outlaw the use of the words sushi, pasta, canapes and every word that ends in '-tion'. The English language is on the verge of extinction (whoops)
**>>BELCH
Most religious leaders (more like pigs) see the internet as the work of the devil -- a source of pornographic materials.
What they fear, of course, is not the porno. They're probably eating that up quicker than the rest of you. It's the uncontrollably broad perspective that is immediately available on the 'net which would (will) threaten their hold on the minds of citizens, and threaten their ability to manipulate people with their fearsome admonitions.
ALL religions abhor freedom of information, for their 'truths' very quickly sound inane in the company of saner views.
Good luck to your friends back home!
**>>BELCH
Folks,
The question in regards to Internet access outside of North America should be asked in this term--can even middle-class people in foreign countries even AFFORD to have Internet access?
We in the USA and Canada are very lucky, because for calling people 12 miles (20 kilometers) or less away, we are not billed by the minute. (Note: the distance may depend on your local telephone provider). Because local calls aren't billed beyond your normal monthly phone bill, this encourages rapid development of computer connections over standard telephone lines, and of course this has resulted in VERY rapid development of Internet access that costs for unlimited usage anywhere from US$21.95 per month all the way down to free! Also, in the USA we can in many parts of the country get broadband ADSL and cable modem access for between $40 and $50 per month unlimited usage.
Most of the world have state monopolies running their telephone systems (the PTT model), and they charge even by the minute for local calls. Because of the "always on" necessity of accessing the World Wide Web, this means that even if your POP is very close you still pay the equivalent of two to four US cents per minute, and when you multiply that by several hours, no wonder why Europe and Japan haven't taken to the Internet like North American users have.
What I find interesting is that Europeans and Japanese are essentially using short time access to the Internet to primarily exchange text messages via cellular phones, essentially reducing the Internet to its pre-World Wide Web stage. Even the advent of "G3" cellular phones with its 384 Kbps bidirectional access in the next few years is not going to improve things in Europe and Japan as they are still forced to pay per minute charges for air time.
Hopefully, with Europe and Japan now warming up to the idea of flat-rate local telephone calls, this may spur development of the Internet to US levels.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
It's a matter of degrees. I don't have any reason to think the US government is any more efficient than the Indian government, but it is less relevant. A lot of things which are handled by private enterprise here are government function over there (such as telecommunication, if I remember correctly).
BTW, that doesn't mean America isn't promoting them. Foreign aid is usually given to foreign governments, which in many parts of the world (not India) simply mean the ruling group of gangsters. It just helps them oppress their people and stay in power.
Hmm I guess a few centuries of colonial rule, overopulation and western greed have nothing to do with it.
How rich was India BEFORE Colonialism? Blaming Colonialism is the simplest trick in the book, but that's often just an excuse. Take Israel, for example - a country which used to be a British colony.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Abraham Maslow, see this page for a description of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
www.grameen.org, Grameen Bank
wlink.com.np, an affordable ISP in Nepal
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.01/barlow.htm l, a Wired article by John Perry Barlow
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
if people are ignorant of the world around them or if they just ignore it. In America there are few people alive that remember a time of true disparity. We have individuals in the country that have personal bank accounts that are larger than the GNP of some countries. Even poor people in this country are more prosperous than the middle-class of several countries. People living on welfare aren't forced to drink from the same water they forced to shit in. The pompousness bred by this country makes me sick at times, people are dying from the common cold and we're wondering how they can get internet access. Every generation since those born in the 1940s has known a level of prosperity never seen before in the history of human civilization and they let this prosperity cloud their thought processes and colour their opinion of the rest of the world.
Besides the fact that most people on the planet have absolutely no use for the internet, how would they use it if they could? The internet is predominantly English, ASCII isn't exactly designed for non-roman character sets. Don't mention Unicode please, until every web page in the world is written with Unicode rather than ASCII it is a moot point. There is the technological language barrier and a literacy barrier, many people in the world have no formal education so they don't even read their native language well if at all. How in the hell are these people supposed to read a webpage? I say if you're going to give anything to poor nations to benefit them how about fresh drinking water and some healthcare, efficient housing and a way to be self sufficient wouldn't hurt either.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
if people are ignorant of the world around them or if they just ignore it. In America there are few people alive that remember a time of true disparity. We have individuals in the country that have personal bank accounts that are larger than the GNP of some countries. Even poor people in this country are more prosperous than the middle-class of several countries. People living on welfare aren't forced to drink from the same water they forced to shit in. The pompousness bred by this country makes me sick at times, people are dying from the common cold and we're wondering how they can get internet access. Every generation since those born in the 1940s has known a level of prosperity never seen before in the history of human civilization and they let this prosperity cloud their thought processes and colour their opinion of the rest of the world.
Besides the fact that most people on the planet have absolutely no use for the internet, how would they use it if they could? The internet is predominantly English, ASCII isn't exactly designed for non-roman character sets. Don't mention Unicode please, until every web page in the world is written with Unicode rather than ASCII it is a moot point. There is the technological language barrier and a literacy barrier, many people in the world have no formal education so they don't even read their native language well if at all. How in the hell are these people supposed to read a webpage? I say if you're going to give anything to poor nations to benefit them how about fresh drinking water and some healthcare, efficient housing and a way to be self sufficient wouldn't hurt either.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
There are parts of this country that according to the US State Department qualify as 3rd world nations due to the living conditions there. These areas include man Native American Reservations and rancharieas, the rural south, the Apilacians, and areas along the northern midwest.
/. means we are members of a more privlaged class. We have the resources that allow us to have computers and internet access. There are people in this country who don't have these sorts of things.
Although many of these areas do in fact have access to the internet, the people don't. There are towns here in California that only have power for certain parts of the day. Once it reaches 8pm the lights go out. Not too conducive to late night coding runs and killer uptimes if you ask me.
By the very fact that we are able to post here on
Before we set off on thinking about how we are going to wire the Outback of Australia for high speed internet access, it would probably serve us well to figure out how we are going to get propper electricity and running water to areas of our own country.
----
"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
Steven Wright
I heard this story when I was a little boy. There was a starvation in ancient China. One day, the king went out of the palace to take a look, and he met farmers who are so thin and pale. He asked the following government officers, "Why are these people so unhealthy?" One officer told him, because they don't have rice to eat. The king didn't understand and ask, "why don't they eat meat instead?"
Yes, freedom of speech is important. Yes, have to right to get information is important. But before we can improve most people's living standard in the third world, concerning whether they have or what they have on internet access is simply asking what kind of 16oz steak they are eating.
Unless you can show me how internet access can improve their living standard significantly, I won't bother. We better to change their governments, not giving them cheap and good internet access while most people don't even have calculators.
A sig is redundant.
On the cultural side, pioneer companies are discovering a scary trait in Brazilians: we don't trust the Internet enough to buy there!
I'll not address the issue of whether those fears are founded or not - I'm not informed enough to comment.
What I will say is... It doesn't matter! If customers find what they want on the Internet, and then buy it, it doesn't matter that they did the actual transaction the old-fashioned way, with real rather than virtual cash. It's still profitable!
Offline, the yellow pages and free "advertizer" newspapers work the same way. They're not used like a catalog, to buy directly; rather, they're used to locate providers of products and services. Yet, they are profitable. They make money for the publishers who print the papers and sell the ads. They also make money for the advertizers who buy the ads, because they bring in paying customers they would not otherwise have.
I know the Christmas Island registry gives free domain names to nationals. (Of course, it's still first-come first-served for choosing names).
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
This is true in the 'developed' world too.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
The fact that this question would or could even be asked shows the fundamental lack of understanding and knowledge of the conditions of most of the rest of the world. In particular, US citizens have such a high standard of living that they forget that most of the third world does not have reliable access to fresh clean drinking water, to nutrient rich food supplies, or to vaccines for Polio and other diseases considered 'cured' in the more wealthy nations.
This doesn't even get us started, but if we did we would arrive at the fact that many of the telephone systems in these countries are unreliable, cycling on and off at night, or on an hourly basis.
Do I need to go on? How would access to medicine, food and water effect social change? Moreover, what social change would that represent in the wealthy nations who say things like 'oh, those poor people don't have the Internet.'
John
Of course not, they're pining for the fjords!
One of the (interesting!) comments below is that in Nepal, there are, besides some surprizing dial-up access points, storefronts where email can be used for USD.30 / message.
... someone is going to make a billion or twelve when they create the McDonalds of Internet service. Cheap, high turnover, standard prices, consistent, no-frills, ubiquitous, requires no huge investment from customer, simple but popular offerings (browse, mail, print). Actually, let's hope it's at least the Subway of Internet service, since that would perhaps be healthier ;)
Another one of the comments points out that only two African countries have more than a 1% penetration.
Combine those ideas
Also, micro-entreprenuers is all it would really take to, say, serve e-mail to a neighborhood.
timothy
p.s. Yes, I read a lot of Horatio Alger, so that particular flame you can hold back;)
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Westerners believe that these countries are backwards for the wrong reasons and tossing technology their way is the solution. Remember how the Green Revolution was supposed to end world hunger? How about all that aid that can never get through because some military force destroys it?
The reasons are so complex and believe me, having the net is not going to solve their problems anytime soon! Personally there is nothing sillier than to expect farm equipment that works here to work over there. If it breaks down, who on earth is going to fix it (providing that the farmer can AFFORD to fix it)
I'm sure an internet connection is the last thing people who are oppressed or starving are pining for
Check out Tonic, the register for the
So, anyway, it is not racism to note that the Indians you know are better at math and science, it is just considered to be an attractive choice of career in India.
Actually, I think that the US is one of the few countries in which people who are good at math and science in grade school need to keep quiet and hide it lest they be kicked around. I could be wrong about that, of course, because I only have superficial knowledge of other countries. I mean I know that the nerd stereotype from when I was a kid was not anything anyone would ever want to be (it seems that people are trying to turn it around these days, but when I was a kid it was a huge insult) and it was intimately connected with being good at math and math related things. I think these kinds of cultural differences matter.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Here is the appropriate link, http://www.salon.com/books/it/1999/12/06/indian/in dex.html Technical Sutra. I don't know what happened to it in the above post.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Add to government intervention a third reason that it is difficult to set up ISPs in some countries, government corruption. In other words, the need to pay the proper bribes. In some countries in the world paying gratuties to government officials in order to do just about anything is just part of the cost of doing business.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Actually, there was an excellent NPR Morning Edition story several weeks ago about one of these projects (Grameen was referenced, though I don't know if it actually funded it). The project discussed was setting up local email providers in remote 3rd world villages so residents could contact their families members who had taken jobs working abroad. They explained how they could send an email for less than the cost of a one minute phone call, and that it had become the main communication method used by these seperated families.
It makes sense, since email is fast, reliable, and you don't have to coordinate when the other party will be available. Most of the family members working abroad were themselves working in developing countries where phone service was unreliable and/or expensive.
I know friends that need to make trips to Africa for work, and their main connection with the US while there is via email.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
I typed "Where can I find a homeless shelter in San Francisco?" into Ask Jeeves, and got a link to Raphael House. Elapsed time: about 10 seconds. Besides, even if it is time-consuming and frustrating, what does a homeless person have other than time?
There are a boodle of search engines out there.
Yahoo returns links to the Jobs Consortium, an organization geared specifically towards finding jobs for the homeless. Elapsed time: 15 seconds.
This information is very readily available on the net, and being on-line helps people find organizations that don't advertise widely and therefore might not be widely known by the homeless population-at-large. This gives Wired Homeless a definite advantage over Unplugged Homeless.
Don't assume information is hard to find on the net. That will often prove incorrect.
gomi
Do you actually think the Internet is going to cure societies woes? (Sure, it got you stock options and a shiney new SUV but how is it gonna help the other 99.9% of the world population?)
Maybe they want stock options and a SUV too?
Is the Internet going to be the new missionary cause that will save the third-world?
Yeah, pretty much. It's a great tool for capitalism, which is the best way to dramatically raise per capita incomes. A rising tide lifts all ships.
Here in America, we have the Amish - a group that's sworn off technology and crass consumerism in exchange for a plain, simple lifestyle. By "modern" standards, these people should are supersticious luddites doomed to poverty. Yet, they enjoy a good standard of life and a very happy.
Hoo boy. Someone hasn't been paying attention. Desertion from Amish and Mennonite encampments is legion these days; both communities are moribund.
Maybe its time we forgot about modernizing the third world. Take all the land back from the multi-national agribusinesses, shut down the sweathouses, disarm the psycho dictators (who are often supported by Western governments) and give it all back to the people. Let them resume their lives and then carefully offer some aspects of "modern" life such as medicine and yes, even the Internet, without shoving it down their throats. I'm sure the Internet could be useful as a shared communication medium (perhaps a few terminals available in the village center) rather than a tool for economic competition.
I dunno. I'd rather be free, myself.
No-one is shoving the Internet down anyone's throats. People in less developed countries are begging, cheating, and stealing for the chance to get on-line, and to get access to all the goods and services our modern capitalist society offers.
If the simple, less-wired life were so damned compelling, people wouldn't be taking insane risks every day of their lives to get here ("here" defined as the USA, Canada, and to a lesser degree (because of tighter immigration controls) Europe).
The simple fact is we can't all live the almighty "American Dream". We're not better than everyone else, and in some ways, we're alot worse.
Oh, spare me the white liberal guilt, ese. Of course we can all live the American Dream. It has been found to require work in the past, so that might be a bit off-putting to some. I also hear some personal responsibility is required.
Take a deep breath and repeat after me: Economics is not a zero-sum game. People getting rich does not necessarily make you or me any poorer. You don't have to feel bad about having a good life.
gomi
he says. I'm pretty sure he won't give a crap because he's more concerned about where he'll sleep and whether he'll eat.
Tell him internet access can help him find:
Compared to the 'analog' technique of begging passersby for change. See if he gives a crap then.
gomi
You must understand that a country being poor does not automatically make all, or even most of its citizens poor. It's a lot more complicated than that, but Brazil has some tens of millions of Internet users and, of course, a bigger number of computer users. Call it perverse, unfair, whatever you like, but while there are homeless people hungry on the streets, almost everybody I know here has money to buy computers and Internet access.
On the financial side, millions of dollars are being invested in Internet businesses of all kinds, and it's been forecast that it will create 300 new jobs per working day for the remaining of the year in Brazil. So, it's a big economic boost.
On the cultural side, pioneer companies are discovering a scary trait in Brazilians: we don't trust the Internet enough to buy there! Maybe that comes from a few decades being screwed by big business like banks, health, credit card, etc. The fact is most Brazilians use the net to shop around, than go to the stores themselves to phisically buy the product. The biggest use of the net here is, by far, communicating. Chat rooms, e-mail lists, discussion sites are all blossoming.
On the social side, I see the greatest risks. Although the government has been very supporting, up to the point of legislating mandatory web publishing of public accounting records, the Brazilian people are not used to fight for their rights - it's a new democracy after all, just a little over a decade old. It does happen, but it feels like a new game where you don't yet know the rules. Also, we don't have American's enthusiasm for litigation. All that means that the same tools that can be used to promote freedom of speach and freedom in general can be used to lock people away from inconvenient content. This is not done by the Government, mind you, but by big business. For instance, when I try to access some American sites, they resolve my IP as coming from Brazil and dump me on a "Brazilian version" of the site which has different content from the original site. They clame this is localization, but it smells like censorship. The problem is the government does nothing to regulate this kind of actions and the people are not used to do that by themselves.
Finally, pornography. Sadly, this country exports pornography and sex in general. Again, this is the effect of an absent Government. The vast majority of the people is quite moral, maybe overly moral, but that doesn't stop tourists coming to Rio because it's not too hard to find cheap teen hookers. On the Internet, however, is where we can see most of the Government's actions against this. There's a special federal police bureau equipped and trained to deal with illegal Internet pornography, especially kid porn, and it's been quite effective. The bad news is that I believe this is driven by a lobby seeking to restrain some of the net's freedom. Nobody can afford to be publicly against efforts made to "shield" children from porn, and this is being used to create strong public support for some degree of censorship.
Overall I think the Internet has been and will be highly benefitial to the country, but we will need to mature into a wiser society to avoid falling into some of the traps.
There seems to be a lot of posts about the "third world" as a group. One small but insurmountable problem is that they aren't a homogeneous group at.
While I agree that most of the third world countries recently freed from colonial rule are working really hard to make material gains, this is not universally true.
May cultures simply don't value a large bank account the way us westerners do; or their culture has ways of looking at the world that preclude the U.S. "protestant work ethic." Some instances that come to mind are Nepal and some Pacific Islanders.
Nepal has not been colonialized (as a matter of fact, they stopped the British army in their tracks and were given their own country a brief time later by treaty. This was also the start of Gurkha employment my the UK...), but they are still a third world country (second poorest). I believe this is due to a combination of a little goverment and a lot culture. Although the goverment is rather opressive on some topics (religion), the main reason for Nepal's lack of income is the value officials put on teaching their culture to the exclusion of others. (Also note there is already a *thin* internet presence in Nepal, but I believe it's not nearly as important to change as the Gurkha returning after service with the brits).
On some Pacific Islands, there are very stable cultures in place that, although the whole island doesn't make as much money as an average American home, feeds (with locally grown crops and chickens) everyone, and makes most people there happy.
Regardless of the amount of information you pump into these cultures, it's unlikely they're going to change [for the better].
Now, I think you are on the mark for places like South America where we (the US) have suppressed their economies as a side effect of keeping Europe out during the last century. May countries (such as Brazil) are put into a place where they try to play catchup by the same means the US used to establish itself as a world power, but are facing resistance from enviromentalist who think having a stable biosphere is a good thing [sic].
I'm all for putting internet points of presence in every corner of the globe, but we must be realistic about what it will mean to different peoples, and what affect it will have on their cultures.
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
Marc Steigler's book EarthWeb mentions this issue. He points out that free and easy access to information undermines governmental attempts to control public opinion. There are a couple of web sites related to the book. The first http://www.skyhunter.com/earthweb/ has information about the author's related activities and links to other sites. The other one belongs to the publisher, Baen Books and contains several sample chapters.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
My friends just returned from a trip to Kenya. Much to my surprise I was IM'd by one of them while they were there, despite the 8 hour time difference. His host family (where he stayed) had full internet access and used AOL Instant Messenger. This is somewhat anecdotal evidence, but I have also corresponded with people using a computing center in Kenya. I would not venture that access is widespread, but at least in Nairobi there are ISPs.
"In individuals, insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." -Nietzsche
Most of the world that is not yet on the Internet is balkanized. Balkanization is what happens when one country says "stuff that comes from our country is better than stuff that comes from any other" or "We're a better people because we were born here or our grandparents were born over there" and such like that. Like the Balkans, the constantly warrior superpatriot morons.
The countries that are keeping the Internet out right now are countries keeping it out not so much because of the freedom of speech or information issue (though that is a factor) but mostly because they don't want people to use it and say "Wow, they invented this in the USA and the majority of the sites on here are hosted in the USA, the USA must be a really neat place!". Moreover, they don't want people to see that great inventions like the Internet are the result of capitalism. Look at a list of the countries in which accessing the Internet is punishable by death or imprisonment. They're all either communist or socialist. Yes, they preach that everyone should share everything, but behind that sermon is a big country daddy deciding what the kids of the country are big enough to handle, and he guesses it isn't the Internet because of the capitalism issue...
Esperandi
Studies show the rich consistently outearn the poor.
I wish everyone commenting on this thread had read your post... they seem to all believe that unless we bail people out, they'll never survive and get net access on their own. El Salvador is obviously a proof that the bleeding hearts who want to hand everything to people on a silver platter are dead wrong.
Esperandi
Don't worry about the tariffs, if the textiles in El Salvador are of quality, I am certain there are other buyers and that the United States is missing out on the textiles as much as El Salvador is missing out on the income.
short question...
Do you believe that if the people tear down land lines to use the copper and sacrifice the mass communication offered by the Internet carried over the lines that they still deserve Internet access?
Esperandi
No, everyone *COULD* generally benefit from the free availability of information. As i read the comments on this thread one this is abundantly clear. Everyone believes that the people in third world countries just magically appeared there 10 years ago or so and they've been struggling like mad to advance as societies. This isn't true. They've languished in the same ridiculous poverty level for centuries of their own free will and volition. If you sat someone down, told them in their native tongue that they could use this thing to get better crop yields, learn how to irrigate, learn how to heal the sick, and all that, the person would get up, walk away, and go back to banging clothes on a rock. They're not poor because someone is holding them down, they're down because they're apathetic about advancing. Everyone started out in the same place on earth, some people moved here, some moved there. They scattered all over and clumped in tribes and groups. Those groups in the third world are the groups that had no interest in improving their lives, why should anyone break their backs to hold them up? The only thing you could possibly do is breed in them a new kind of dependance (they've already stopped trying to fight nature and grow food, they just wait for care packages from the UN).
Esperandi
In societies where the government does this, accessing the Internet will merely get the citizens killed. And obviously, i was not talking about people to try to advance themselves and have seen an airplane in their lifetime. I'm talking about the people in Ethiopia and other such impoverished countries who are supported by the UN and poisonous charitable donations. Notice I also never said they were lazy. They are not, necessarily, they are simply apathetic about progress. And people who are apathetic about progress should not be helped to progress. People who are not apathetic about progress would reject your help and do it themselves.
Esperandi
Name a significant inventor that created his thing of genius while receiving complete subsidization. There aren't any, and that's not a coincidence.
I happened to have lived in Indonesia for 10 years (just moved 2.5 years ago), which to my knowledge is still considered a third world country. When I moved there, in 1990, there were no ISPs and most of the country had never heard of a thing called the internet. Most of the businesses and small sections of the government had some kind of connection, but it all was very limited. The government wasn't too enthusiastic about the net since it posed a problem of uncensored materials entering the country (the Wall Street Journal used to arrive with stories about Irian Jaya and the conflicts there blackened by permanent marker). When I finally got hooked up at home by the first ISP in Indonesia, in 1994/5, things were starting to take a turn for the better. For instance, I happened to notice that an ISDN service was offered along with other higher bandwidth services. By the time I left, in 1997, you could almost browse the web on a Sunday morning at a bearable (alas modem) speed. More ISPs had sprung up to accompany Radnet (website: http://www.rad.net.id) and more and more people were being connected. Most of these people were expatriats, however, who had the money for a computer and could pay for the luxury of internet access. The problem with third world countries, however, is not hooking people up to the net (even though the phone lines tend to be incredibly bad), but getting enough people that have computers to sign up (since the cost of computers is about double of that here in Silicon Valley). Anyways, that's just my 2 cents.
Some psychologist (I forget the name, somebody please reply with the name and/or links to info) a couple of years ago came up with something he called the triangle of needs (or something like that). The gist of it is that it's impossible to address higher-order thinking until several needs are satisfied, and it's not just the material needs. He theorized that high-order thinking that we would like to say the Internet encourages can only happen after you've got physical and emotional security. My question is, can these people even address this intellectually? Many of these countries have seen horrible wars, and I would theorize that the people are not emotionally ready to address this. Or am I completely off base?
"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."
Visit
How is Domain Name registration handled in coutries like Tonga where the top level domain extension is sold commercially? Do citizens of Tonga have any special privaleges regarding registering for this name, or are they just as likely to get a name as an American?
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This is a good topic with the recent Intel/Ford/etc announcements. What if we could convince these large corporations to also give computers to underdeveloped nations? Education is key too. What good is a computer is you've never used one, of perhaps never seen one? Giving to employees is nice, but this could be the ultimate act of good will.
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But the Internet is not without its benefits, Mnashtra has concluded: "But then, it has brought us many pictures of most gloriously naked women with tremendously big kayountas", he adds, smiling wryly, "so it is not all so bad."
-- WhiskyJack
Pakistan's been reading the Superpower HOWTO backwards. Feed At Least Half Your People comes before Have Nuclear Weapons!
In 1996 I was at the Jinan University getting accupuncture at the hospital (details). The head of the accupuncture department (married to one of the doctors) explained to me that all of their internet access went through a a filtering center. This would keep people from some of the subversive sites.
As we all know, filtering is not totally effective.
In a country where the news media is controlled by the government, the internet will people to access non-government approved information.
Those government will lose control, and it will have to adapt to that.
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I remember reading an excellent article on the subject in Wired a couple of years ago, archived at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.01/barlow.htm l?topic=&topic_set= h tml 0 7/o/qid=952621680/sr=8-1/026-5273086-090 7466 )
In looking for that, I came across this older article as well:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.06/africa.
The subject reminds me of reading Molesworth's comments about TV (Who is Molesworth? Read this to find out... http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/01411824
I am not here 2 just defend my country. there r a lot of problems. but there r some things that have progressed, and i thought u should know them: 1) education is really neglected. but plzz remember that even then, India has more graduates than the US or any country except China will ever have. but yes, a lot needs 2 b done. 2)bureacracy has been toned down somewhat in recent years. and if u have a problem there is always the way of greasing hands. its illegal, but it sure opens more doors than any u can imagine. 3)the rupee is already partly convertible. if u have a problem with that, then u should know that 1 of the reasons the indian economy didnt slump in the sounth-asian economic crisis was that the rupee was not fully convertible. i think everybody has a right 2 keep some sort of defences.. 4)to tell the truth, the killings that uc in the news is not the whole truth. india has the second largest population of muslims in the world, and 99.999% of them r the brothers and sisters of us hndus. and anyway, my religion never taught us 2 kill people just bcause of relegion, fr we think everybody has the right 2 his own god. those who say different r ignorant fools, and in any society there r always fools. and may i point 2 u that there was a thing called the crusade launched by the cristians not so long ago.... and how many towns and cities were plundered. let him throw the frst stone who has never sinned. understood? 5)corruption has 2 b tackled, but its very hard. and i doubt whether anybody will b succesful in tackling it. but it sure is real baddd.
First, how are many (most?) of the people in these countries going to be able to afford computers? If I had to choose between feeding my family or buying a computer, the choice would be rather obvious. Of course, the governments over there could provide a few computers here and there, but even that would have the potential to cause financial stress. Speaking of the governments, would they want their citizens to have access to this kind of technology? It would probably help them develop quicker as a nation, but as with almost any government, censorship issues arise.
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Regardless of the moral and social implications of the net, it is the economic factors that they must consider. If a country does not embrace the web and it's emmence possibilities for commerce, it will be in such a deep economic hole compared the the rest of the world that it will be very difficult to recover. -
Good, Bad... I'm the guy with the gun. -Ash
While financial barriers and the desire of local governments to control informations are obstacles to the widespread availabiltity of the internet; most people in the world will enthusiastically embrace it. A friend of mine travelled in Southeast Asia a few years ago and he recounted stories of going into a mud hut and finding computers there, it was an internet cafe. The only way for internet use to become a part of the culture is exposure to it. I heard that France had a widespread e-mail system since the early eighties. Perhaops there were questions whether the average american could accept such a technology.
Less-developed countries are adopting the same approach to computing and the internet that they have applied to other expensive information wave technologies: they pool community resources and install them as public services.
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.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
www.grameen.org, Grameen Bank, a microlending bank in Bangladesh
wlink.com.np, an affordable ISP in Nepal
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.01/barlow.htm l, a Wired article by John Perry Barlow about his travels in Africa and Internet access availability there
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
My sister is in the Peace Corps in Nepal, and there has been alot of adoption of the internet in the touristy spots (Kathmandu, Pakhara, etc.), but there was also adoption in places that were definately NOT touristy. I recently went over to visit her and there were internet access storefronts, and places to use email (for a small fee ~30 cents per email, including computer usage to write it), all over the place.
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$20 a month, 10 hours of full internet usage that she can use from her house (20+ hours by bus from Kathmandu). I did notice that the ping times were up near 900ms for their web server, but still, it is in Nepal (and just to note, it is using Linux according to netcraft.
Since alot of the technology workers in the US take trips to Nepal, many of you might know, just how amazing thinking about the internet in Nepal actually is.
Actually, "starting" an ISP in such a country is not that hard technologically speaking. Please remember that's what Open source is for: any third-world country can benefit from Linux/BSD (as well as SendMail/Apache/etc...) projects. These are, after all, proven OS, with a good track record, lots of sources of information and so on and so forth.
Also remember that PC is pretty much commodity hardware these days, which means it's fairly unexpensive, as long as the country you are working in has low import duties on these machines. In the worst possible case, I have known people (in Africa, for instance) who will smuggle (smaller) portable computers or even whole disassembled computers bought cheaply elsewhere in the world.
Thanks to the optimization done by open-source volunteers all over the globe, even low-end machines can handle pretty heavy workloads -- even ultra-cheap "obsolete" machines such as 486 and low-end Pentiums.
The real problems therefore are:
Also, please remember that in most of these countries, as sad as it is to say, you have very little (or none at all) legal recourse if you don't like what the government is doing. Democracy, even in the best of cases, is still, unfortunately, a very remote concept to the day-to-day life of most people in the Third World.
Finally, there is the little question of profit -- few individuals or corporations are wealthy enough to be able to afford a PC, let alone a 'net connection.
Just my US$ 0.02...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
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.
I wish I had been able to post ealy on this topic, but let me set a few things straight for some of the "I live my life through a tv set" slashdotters who have posted comments without any knowledge of life in a developing country.
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!
There will be some cultures that will be very hesitant to take to the internet. We have already seen resistance by some sects of the Jewish faith, and more recently there have been news articles referring to efforts in France to ban use of phrases such as "e-mail", due to a fear that it is watering down there language. Simply take a look at the level of control that China is trying to gain over its populace access to the internet.
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
Just look at the Net access numbers. Less than 0.7 percent of the Arab world is online. South Africa and the Seychelles are the only parts of Africa with more than one percent penetration. The numbers aren't all that much better for South America, and, significantly, the world's most populous countries, China and India, lag behind the rest of Asia.
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.
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A. Keiper
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.
Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years
I know they use e-mail in countries like pakistan, bangladesh, etheopia, kenya and nigeria to order things like used cars and tractors because it's just a lot cheaper than using a fax. Or they use email to fax through a portal, the person on the other side will get the fax with some added advertisements. I have a friend who does import/export of cars and tractors to these countries and i've seen a lot of email traffic for orders and confirmations.
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 /.
"Politics is for the moment, an equation lasts eternity" -A. Einstein
I would recommend looking at Grameen's work in this area. Grameen Bank was started by Mohammed Yunnus (sp?!), and economist from Bangladesh, who realized that all his hifalutin theories were not relavant to the impoverished women next door to his university. He began a micro-lending institution which has grown to an international institution. Really terrific stuff, see his book "Banker To the Poor".
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
*urp!*
While I am no expert, I can see that the biggest cultural shock is the freedom of speech that the internet fosters. Many of these countries' local governments have tight controls over the news and telecommunication media. The internet is new ground, practically uncontrollable (unless we all fall asleep). The upside and downside is that everyone would generally benefit from the free availability of information; it is up to each country to adapt to the rules of the game.
Even though I don't live there any more I visit regularly and keep well informed of affairs through regular phone calls and emails with my mom.
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 probably the leader in not only the less
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.
I honestly have no idea how other countries will deal with the internet. Countries like the US that tend to allow more freedom of expression can't even handle it. Every time I turn arround someone wants to sue an mp3 site, censor in the name of stopping porn, jerk away peoples domain names without due process, restrict the export of encryption, and force people to remove DVD code from their web sites.
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