Exiled to Cyberia

Rewinding to 1998 and my piece 'Can the South Asian Toad Leapfrog' was a sobering reminder of just how fast technology is moving forward, even in our part of the developing world..It was nice joke ten years ago to say: "90% of Indians are waiting for phones, and 5% are waiting for dial tones." Look at where we are now: The number of Indians with mobile phones is about to cross the one billion mark. In November 2012, the number of people in India who accessed the internet through their smart phones and tablets exceeded the number of people who accessed it through their PCs or laptops..In that 1998 article, I poked fun at a minister who said India should graduate from making potato chips to making microchips. I ridiculed Bill Gates and his remark that India could "leapfrog" into the future by turning Bangalore into the digital sweatshop of the internet age. Today, Gates himself has been left trailing behind by embarrassingly young internet billionaires who have adapted to the new mobility that the internet has provided with the spread of i-Phones, Androids and other smart phones..When that article appeared in Himal, I was making a living being a cyber-skeptic. Before talking about levelling the playing field, I argued, it was important to ensure there was a playing field. Before sticking a computer into a classroom, we should first make sure it has a roof. Or electricity. Or text books. Or qualified teachers. Or that the school-children are not stunted because they don't have enough to eat. We were being carried away by a technology that promised to set everything right overnight. We actually believed that convergence would change the world..But the coming together of telephony, computers and television has actually changed the world, whether we like it or not. We may have doubts about whether the transformation in the way we communicate will make a difference, but the speed of the spread of communication technologies has metamorphosed society. The medium is the message, in a way that Marshall McLuhan, the visionary media theorist of the 1970s and 80s, probably never imagined. It is the end of geography..The moment of truth came to me in 2010 on a mountaintop overlooking Rara Lake in a remote part of northwestern Nepal, a week's walk away from the nearest road. I had just got myself my first smartphone, with which I took some fairly decent images of the stunning scenery of a crystal blue lake spread out below me with the snow-covered mountain beyond. By coincidence, right behind me was a telecom tower, and I could transmit that picture out immediately into the worldwide web through Twitter, Facebook and email. Suddenly, here was a technology that was immediate, and which could magnify and extend the journalists' reach way beyond what old timers like me thought was possible..Since that epiphany on the mount, I have become a born-again proponent of the potential of new information and communication technologies have for transforming society. I am not yet sure where all this hype over bandwidth and speed, all the breathlessness of social networking sites, is going; I doubt it will solve problems of governance, equity and delivery of basic services to the poorest in poor countries. But I am now convinced about its ability to transform at least journalism. Indeed, it already has..There are examples from around the world that information can empower. Ease of communication opens up doors for business, cuts out middlemen, and lessens the transactional costs of trade. The vast corpus of knowledge stored and archived on the internet has also changed the way people around the world access knowledge. Crowd-sourcing has made the whole process more participatory, with built-in capacity for self-correction. Falsehoods don't have a long shelf-life on the internet, as the Wiki effect allows the public to correct mistakes..The challenge now is to ensure that the information available on the net is available to those who need it the most to catch up. Information does not necessarily spread knowledge, and informed people are not necessarily wiser. The latest scientific information on tuberculosis is all over the internet: how to prevent it, which therapies work, the antibiotics that bacilli have become resistant to. But this information needs to get where it is needed as cheaply as possible, it needs to be relevant to the needs of the people it is meant for, and it must be packaged so that it is easily understood. In Southasian countries, where most people die of communicable diseases, the first line of defence must be the communication of preventive measures and the generation of awareness of their causes. But is it absolutely necessary to spread that knowledge via Google search, or is old-fashioned radio more effective?.To be useful, information must help people communicate and participate, and allow them and their rulers to make informed choices. Recognition of the power of knowledge may be as old as civilisation itself, but what is different now is the speed and capacity at which we can move that information. At present, this speed and capacity are concentrated in the same countries in which wealth and power are concentrated. The global spread of mobile phones has proven that the technology has the capacity to 'leapfrog'. Now we just have to make sure that the message we are communicating will help improve lives..After all, the corporate and political structures that governed the Knowledge Revolution are the same ones that governed the Industrial Revolution. The main impact of e-commerce, in fact, is an enhancement of the same old consumerism, allowing access to digital mail-order catalogues with online payment and global home delivery. We have just added the 'e-' prefix to commerce..In terms of numbers, it may not look too bad. There are over 540 million internet users in China, over 130 million in India. But in terms of the percentage of the population using the internet, Southasia still falls far behind the rest of the world. The digital divide doesn't exist just between the US and China, it is glaring between China and India, too. Nearly 80 percent of people in the US use the net, 40 percent in China and 14 percent in India. There even seems to be a digital divide between the US and Iceland, the only country in the world with nearly 100% internet penetration rate, which must mean that even newborn babies in Iceland are web-savvy..These figures are changing so rapidly that they will probably be outdated by the time this article is published and read. The gap is narrowing between the US and China in terms of per capita internet users, but it is growing between China and India. The proportion of people going online in India is growing fast, but in China it is growing faster. Even within Southasia, you see gaps in per capita internet usage. A proactive government policy on internet literacy has made the Maldives surge ahead, but because of its sheer size things take longer to change in India.