LIDA 2001 Annual Course and Conference
Libraries in the Digital Age 
Dubrovnik, Croatia
23-27 May, 2001

DIGITAL AND SOCIAL EQUITY?
Opportunities and threats on the road to empowerment

Michel J. Menou
Department of Information Science
The City University
London, U.K.
Michel.Menou@wanodoo.fr.

Abstract

The so called "Digital Divide" has received increasing attention in the past few years in the highest circles, including the G8 summit. The lack of connectivity is said to be a major risk for the welfare of people while being connected is depicted as a free entrance ticket to paradise. Such millenarian views are both simplistic and unethical. They are a symptom of a spreading mental disease which we called "hICTeria". A more objective and balanced look at present divides and their causes is required. It is also useful to consider what role the Information and Communication technologies may play in people's struggle with their key problems and what other conditions should be met for this role to be effective. These issues will be considered from a broad perspective anchored in the situation of the majority of this planet population which do not leave in the OECD member countries.

Introduction: the Digital Divide mania

“We should bridge the digital divide” seems to have become within a few years the rulers’ most trendy political slogan on local, national and international scenes. Its popularity among those in power is, as usual, directly connected to the vagueness of its contents and infinite variations of its interpretation. Public ICT policies can hardly go without the required acknowledgment that providing an Internet connection to those who are not yet enjoying it is a top priority. The growth of the Internet, if not its invention, is on the way to substitute other noteworthy achievements such as reduction of unemployment, public deficit or else, as a major topic in political campaigns. The industry, having rushed to demonstrate that it is at the forefront of progress by stuffing its advertising with URLs, is not less vocal in demonstrating its concern. The non-governmental organizations, as they often are operating on the front line to try and offset social inequalities, naturally join their voice to the concert. All international governmental organizations hurry to appoint committees, call for conferences and commission reports which are painfully rehashing the same odd considerations.
At their 2000 summit, the G8 members found in the reduction of the digital divide a convenient palliation to not having kept their previous year's promise about the reduction of the debt of the poorest countries. While the new millennium (according to the Gregorian calendar) was inaugurated with the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the Davos World Economic Forum, never short of imagination, invited its participants to discuss ways to bridge the digital divide. 
When an idea is so much talked about,  from all corners, one might become suspicious. The more visibility often goes with the less activity. What is supposed to legitimate the slogan is the assumption, reiterated under various forms, that:

“Information and Communications Technology (IT) is one of the most potent forces in shaping the twenty-first century. Its revolutionary impact affects the way people live, learn and work and the way government interacts with civil society. IT is fast becoming a vital engine of growth for the world economy. It is also enabling many enterprising individuals, firms and communities, in all parts of the globe, to address economic and social challenges with greater efficiency and imagination. Enormous opportunities are there to be seized and shared by us all [1]”.

Don’t miss the N.I.I.rvana!

The description of all the benefits that humanity will derive from the extensive application of ICT is often quite similar to advertisements for the cruise of your life in the South Seas. Presenting the concept of the Global Information Infrastructure (G.I.I.) before the ITU, the then U.S. Vice-President Gore claimed that it will allow:

“Sharing of information
To communicate as a global community
Greater sense of shared stewardship of our small planet
Strong democracies
Better solutions to global and local environmental challenges
Improved healthcare
To educate our children
Robust and sustainable economic progress
A global information market place where consumers can buy and sell products
A global economy driven by the growth of the information age
Opening markets [2] ” 

	Since the G.I.I. was sort of extension of the (U.S.) National Information Infrastructure, or N.I.I., it was hard to resist the temptation of calling the state of affairs so described the N.I.I.rvana. Before one reaches it however, reality must undergo a number of transformations. The now dominant perspective of a technological determinism whose positive outcomes are grossly over-estimated, while the negative ones are eventually forgotten, was referred to by Richard Heeks [3] as an “ICT fetish”. An expression which has the advantage of reminding of the perversion that may explain both the phenomenon and its description.
One cannot question the fact that ICT applications are interfering with, and thus have the potential of transforming, all realms of human endeavour, if not the species itself. The extent to which the positive aspects of these transformations will offset the negative ones remain to be seen. The balance between economic and social concerns and relationships between the two are far from clear or simple in statements like the G8 one above. One may wonder who is going to seize what opportunities and who is going to share what, assuming all have a share in the returns.  In their pioneering study of the US information economy, some 25 years ago, Porat and Rubin [4] stressed the urgent need for achieving a thorough understanding of the transformations taking place, so that their negative effects could possibly be avoided, contrary to what happen with the industrial revolution. It is significant that very little has been achieved in this direction.
There are, however, a number of opponents who continue to claim that there are far more important needs to be met in the developing world than getting everybody online. What, if accomplished, will this do to cure such problems as endemic diseases, environmental degradation, political instability, etc? Should not the people be first properly fed and cured before being given means to communicate? Clearly a Luddite attitude geared at an absolute rejection of ICT is neither appropriate or feasible. Simplifying the issues in an “either-or” debate is not any more likely to enlighten us. Since pros and cons are not less excessive and undiscriminating in their points, we preferred to coin the name  'hICTeria', after hysteria, for this 'new' (everything is new in the contemporary world, especially the oldest facts and ideas) mental state. So let’s try and go beyond it.

Scope of the Digital Divide

What is the Digital Divide? 
On the international scene, which is our main concern, it is said to result from the fact that there is a huge and growing gap between the more advanced countries and the others regarding the size and intensity of their ICT applications. If the natural growth of this gap is not corrected, a number of countries are said to run the risk of being left aside  of the E-economy. On the domestic scene, the digital divide is seen when a significant portion of the population has no access to ICT at an affordable cost and possibly also no skill to use them. As a result, this segment of the population is deprived from such benefits as access to information and participation in the global e-commerce networks. Such a divide exists in all countries, would it be only because of the “novelty” of ICT. A social and political problem arises when it tends to become a standing feature or is not significantly declining. The more so if in the mean time, the group of those with access, or should we call them the “ICTrich” enjoy expanding capabilities.
A vexing ambiguity results from the fact that the existence of the digital divide is basically measured against the percentile of people holding an Internet access account. Other infrastructure related indicators eventually come into the picture, such as line density, network speed, number of domain names, etc. Such measures are a mere reflection of the individual consumption model of “advanced capitalism”. Whether this “model” is the only valid and effective one remains to be demonstrated [5]. It was pointed out recently that if in China each adult came to have a car the world's oil reserves would quickly be exhausted, not to mention what the resulting increase in pollution would do to the planet. A number of studies have shown that actual users of an Internet account or connected computer, not only in the developing world, may range from a few to several hundreds [6]. The digital divide metrics may indeed refer more to the appetite for new markets rather than equity concerns.
In any case there is a serious need for articulating a more effective definition of this phenomenon. The reference to the concept of affordable access inherited from the regulations of universal service for the telephone may not be sufficient. As high speed and bandwidth networks proliferate among the ICTrich, and an increasing number of critical applications do require them, the quality of service needs to come into the picture. A useful complement was introduced by the consideration of accessibility, which refer to the alleviation of disabilities suffered by a far from negligible portion of the population, e.g. sight, hear or motility impairments. Other inabilities, like illiteracy, or ignorance of the major communication languages, are far more widespread. Widening if not generalizing IT literacy, which is a common feature of policies related to the Digital Divide, is certainly desirable but will not overcome basic illiteracy; it may indeed reinforce this aspect of the divide. Judging from the unequal success, to use a diplomatic understatement, of the campaigns to eradicate illiteracy over the past decades, it appears that intermediation through social structures might indeed be the only viable answer.
One may be mislead by the growth of content on the Internet, or more generally in digital form, in languages other than English. This is obviously a basic requirement for the huge majority of the world’s population whose native language is not English. But the fact that resources are available, or at least searchable, into one’s native language does not ipso facto make the latter relevant. Homeless people may well be able to search the site of high street luxury shops, that won’t really help them for more than “dreaming” of a good life (what of course those working in the “people” media claim is as necessary as primary health care). Villagers of the Niger delta may well find information about the environmental protection programmes of the oil companies, it wont help them clean their air. More than in access to information, the digital divide will possibly take a more subtle an far reaching form: the one between those who own the information and all the others, especially those who need it. The push toward extensive private appropriation of all types of information which has been witnessed in the past few years is quite symptomatic in this respect. When ordinary words and expressions can become proprietary for the only reason they have been used in advertising campaigns and registered, the free flow of information might suffer serious threats; and so is common sense.

Avoided divides

The digital divide exists for sure. But strange enough, when compared to other socio-economic characteristics, it tends to coincide with most aspects of social inequalities. Anywhere in the world a person who is a member of a minority, poor, rural, ill educated has all chances to have no access to ICT nor possibility to use them. Far from being reduced, those divides tend to grow in the majority of countries. Legislation and programmes for overcoming them, when they exist and are enforced, are challenged by the tenants of the “laws of the market” as the universal rule. Up to now, with few exceptions, they have not been able to significantly improve the lot of the poorest quartile of any population. If connectivity is so essential, one may wonder why is it not free, or at least recognised as a basic human entitlement (which is coming only very slowly), and why is it not taxed at the same rate as staple goods and services? Could it be because the natural growth of the market is taken for granted? These ambiguities are well illustrated when the Chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission equates the notion of digital divide to a 'Mercedes divide' he allegedly suffers from, but which he gets along with [7].  What is understandable since he is himself a victim of another divide, the “VIP Dad” one.  
	Neither is the gap between the “more advanced” countries and the others limited to ICT. For centuries all aspects of society have been drastically undermined by foreign and/or internal exploitation, in addition to environmental limitations. So one may ask why not bridge the 'healthy life divide' and ensure that the better off countries mobilize so those drugs against major diseases and decent sanitary conditions are accessible to everyone?  Recent judicial actions by pharmaceutical companies in South Africa may have shown the limits of the social commitment of  the private sector. Why not bridge the 'fair working conditions divide' – the reduction of which would in practice eradicate slavery after more than one century of its legal abolition? Many other lasting divides could be pointed to. Not only are all those divides flagrant and remnant but  they  tend to rise as shown in figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Income gap between rich and poor countries

	Richest 20%	Poorest 20%	
1960	30	1	
1990	60	1	
1997	74	1	
2020?	100?	1?	
Source 1960-1997: UNDP Human Development Report 1999. 
2020 data our projection.	

Would perhaps the difference between the latter divides and the digital divide lie in the fact that a global ICT market can actually be achieved and much less for instance a cheap tri-therapy market?  The title of the international conference “Creating the Digital Dividend” organized by the World Resources Institute in 2000 is quite explicit in this respect as were many comments. As C.K. Prahalad put it,  though with a far more innovative and enlightened vision than most of the other contributors [8]: 

“The primary task is to create a consumer market out of the poor, albeit one that is conceived of and structured very differently from the Tier #1 market”

One may notice, hopefully without plunging the heralds of Newness into despair, that earlier ICT, such as the disposable roller ball pen or the transistor radio, have long ago shown the way.  Turning the poor into consumers is a commendable objective. In the eyes of the private sector, this objective is likely to be much faster and easier to achieve through divestiture of  public telecommunications infrastructure than by raising the poor income. It will be quite interesting to compare the growth of teledensity ten years after divestiture with the same figure in the 10 years preceding it. Of course, good apostles will rush to demonstrate the goodness of the principles by pointing to such examples as Grameen telecoms, like the democratic nature of French society can be shown from the fact that each century the son of a “gendarme” (military police man) becomes field marshall.

Threats and promises

Rather than the birth of a digital divide we might be witnessing the digitalisation of the divides. The questions which are not, or seldom, raised in the digital divide debate are perhaps significant of the double language used by those in charge. Connected to what? Connected for what? As if the simple fact of being connected in itself brought to bear all possible economic, educational, cultural or social benefits. Cars offer yet another striking example since the “intelligent car”, on which so much R&D funds are spent, is likely to result in the re-invention of something very close to the train, except for the private cubicles! 
For years international development co-operation has been built upon the same misconception, or hypocrisy, as colonisation: the more powerful know better. Let us assume for one moment, something that is far from the case, that all the world's information resources, mainly from the 'North', contain appropriate answers to the real life problems most people, who happened to live in the 'South', have, and could be accessed by the latter, paying of course! There would be, however, no moves to transform all the basic conditions that currently prevent the successful utilisation of this information. 
The Internet is like the Delphi oracle it can give the information, it cannot change destiny. It is people with vision, hope, energy, space to move and luck which make the changes. This is not to deny that ICT are indeed capable of fostering such factors and, especially, opening new spaces. But what should be really at stake is social change and not the marketing of ICTs. As Castells pointed out [9]:

“It is the entire social organization that becomes productive or, on the contrary, an obstacle for innovation, and thus for productivity growth.”

The central point in the debate about the digital divide should not be what is the best way to bring ICT to the poor, but what is the best way for the poor to take advantage of ICT in order to improve their lot. The consequence of this premise is, as Hamelink put it [10] that:

“The challenge, in both public and private scenarios, is to place the public interest at the center of policy considerations and to ensure that adequate mechanisms for public accountability exist.”

From this perspective it is striking to note that the so-called ICT revolution seems to be surfing on the wave of neo-liberal privatisations. No society in history has ever left to the unpredictable – or else all too predictable – forces of an abstract entity, like 'the market', the responsibility for establishing and managing a strategically critical resource. While public-private partnerships are certainly welcome, and possibly necessary for the development of an 'information society', they can only be fruitful if there is a common vision and commitment. Observing the enthusiasm of the private sector when asked to bring connectivity to remote and low-density rural areas, not to mention high bandwidth, makes one sceptical about its commitment to social goals. Fair enough since its raison d'ętre is profit. In many instances, the natural spokesman for public interest, the State, often seems to have other concerns; it may be appropriate to turn the table. It is up to the concerned communities to organise themselves and figure out how they can make use of the ICT. 
In all parts of the world, community networks are expanding and gaining maturity, as witnessed by the Global Community Networks conference held in Barcelona at the end of 2000. Rather than spending considerable amounts of money on governmental or other “high level” conferences simply to talk about the digital divide, and repeatedly study the phenomenon, one would be better advised to create conditions for these efforts to concretise, and provide the necessary support for the networks to take off and grow.
More importantly, it is more than time with respect to any activity on this planet, till something is still left of it, to question its rationale. Why  and what for? It is more than time to take a critical look at the discourse of all stake holders and re-establish the true sense of words. It is more than time to consider the single neo-liberal dogma for what it is, a dogma without challenger, that is a potentially totalitarian dogma. Making an abstract notion like the “market” the superior power of all things is not less perverse than claiming the superiority of any religion, ideology or race.  At least the first ICT revolution aimed at spreading “God’s word” rather than increasing the stock value of ICT companies. At the time of writing the above we saw an advertising on television by an high tech company. It showed two alpinists painfully reaching the summit of a high mountain and switching on a hand held “new generation computrick” in order to watch their favourite soap opera. The waves did not start an avalanche, but the stupidity of this concept is commensurate only to the Himalayas.

References
1.	G8 Charter on Global Information Society, Okinawa, July 22, 2000.
www.dotforce.org/reports/it1.html (visited 14 April 2001).
2.	U.S. Vice-President A. Gore. Address to the International Telecommunications Union assembly, Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 21, 1994. Extracts.
3.	Heeks, R. (1999). Information and communication technologies, poverty and development. Working Paper N° 5. Manchester: Institute for Development Policy and Management. Also available at: http://ww.man.ac.uk/idpm/idpm_dp.htm#devinf_wp
4.	Porat, M.U. and Rubin, M.F. (1977). The information economy. Washington, D.C: US Department of Commmerce, Vol. 1.
5.	Communication from R. Heeks to communityinformatics@vcn.bc.ca and further discussion February 2001.
6.	Menou, M.J. (1999). Electronic communications in African development: Tracking their impact. In Maaaaacdonald, S.; Nightingale, J., Eds., Information and Organization. A tribute to the work of Don Lamberton. Amsterdam, Elsevier, p. 371-392.
7.	Labaton, S. New F.C.C. Chief would curb agency reach. [Press conference with M.K. Powell.] The New York Times, 7 February, 2001.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/07/technology/07FCC.html?pagewanted=1 (visited 16 February 2001).
8.	Prahalad, C.K. (2000). Radically new business models. Strategies for the bottom of the pyramid: The Poor as a Source of Innovations. Paper presented at Creating Digital Dividend, Seattle, WA., 16-18 Ocotber 2000. www.digitaldividend.org (visited 14th April, 2001).
9.	Castells, M. (1999). Information technology, globalization and social development. Discussion paper 114. Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, p.11.
10.	Hamelink, C. (1999). ICTs and social development. The global policy context. Discussion paper 116. Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, p. 22.