"Divide and rule out" by Victor Keegan
Divide and rule out
The internet revolution has still failed to reach 98% of the planet's
population. Victor Keegan on the importance of bridging the digital
divide
December 14, 2000
The single pervasive theme of the 21st century has already been
decided. It is the Digital Divide and whether it can be bridged.
Seldom has a potential social malaise engaged so many minds
everywhere at the same time. It is as if concerned people around the
world have simultaneously decided not only that the problem should be
solved but that it actually can be.
Every one is getting in on the act, from the United Nations and the
Group of Eight at the top, to university departments and community
groups at the other end of the scale. In Britain, Tony Blair has
promised "universal access" (whatever that means) by 2005 and is
putting plenty of money where his mouth is - including £250m for
disadvantaged communities to go online, £250m to train teachers, and
increased pressure on BT to deliver broadband.
But what medium is best suited to deliver universal access? The PC
may peak at around 60% penetration and digital television is unlikely
to cover more than 70% of the population, leaving 30%
disenfranchised.
Most social problems of this magnitude are only debated after the
event. It is only when global developments have produced social
chasms - whether involving health, wealth, gender or ethnicity - that
the conscience of the world is stirred and remedies explored. The
digital divide is unusual in that a solution is being sought in real
time - while the revolution itself is being unrolled.
The initial success is mildly encouraging, at least in the
industrialised world, even though it has been triggered by the
driving force of the technology rather than human endeavour. The
speed at which people in richer countries have adopted the net is far
faster than adoption rates for previous technologies such as
telegraph, radio, television, fax and video.
Fast adoption has been driven by rapidly improving technology in all
the key areas - computers, telecommunications, storage, bandwidth,
digital cameras etc - accompanied by an equally rapid fall in real
prices.
Within some subsections of the IT revolution the adoption rates,
particularly among youngsters, has been phenomenal. Sending text
messages by mobile phone, unheard of 18 months ago, has now reached
10bn, overtaking email in popularity.
Since mobile phone penetration has already reached 90% among some
categories of young people, the problem of digital disadvantage has
been solved even before companies and governments have started to
work out what role phones should have in the digital revolution.
That is exceptional but it underlines the fact that there is no
single digital divide but lots of overlapping ones: between old and
young, men and women, rich and poor, blacks and whites, northern
hemisphere and southern hemisphere and, above all, between developed
and developing nations.
This is the area where the creation of a vast new underprivileged
digitariat, even more dispossessed than now seems inevitable unless
dramatic action is taken.
The bald statistics are depressingly familiar: barely 2% of the
world's population of more than 6bn are linked to the internet; most
people on the planet have not even made a telephone call, let alone
accessed the web; there are more telephone lines in a big city like
Tokyo than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. In the US, internet
access costs a user only 1% of average monthly income, whereas in
Uganda it costs more than a month's average (per capita) income.
Most of the new business opportunities in the next few decades will
either be the creation of digital goods (such as music, audio and
films) or the application of digital and internet techniques to old
economy products (such as mapping and monitoring systems in cars or
intelligent fridges). Those developing countries whom the internet
has passed by, will be doubly hit by all this. They will not be
making any of the new economy goods that people increasingly want to
buy, while at the same time their traditional markets (such as
commodities) will be squeezed by the price deflation brought about by
the creation of giant electronic marketplaces on the internet.
Meanwhile, what little international investment has been going their
way will be diverted to the more exciting prospects (even after the
experience of the past year) of internet-related projects generated
by the information-rich countries.
The US provides a strong contrast with the prospects for the Third
World. According to the organisation monitoring the digital divide
[http://www.digitaldivide.gov/ ], the share of households with
internet access has soared from 26.2% in December 1998 to 41.5% in
August this year. More than half of all households now have
computers. But the interesting thing is that while net access is
still disproportionately the prerogative of richer people, the
digital divide is being tackled. During the most recently recorded 20
months, the number of black households with internet access at home
has more than doubled from 11.2% to 23.5%. Hispanic households have
experienced similar growth (from 12.6% to 23.6%). This is still way
behind the access of white households and also Asian and Pacific
Islanders, who have the highest access rates of all (56.8%), but it
is moving in the right direction.
In Britain, a Guardian/ICM poll earlier this year predicted that
almost half of all adults in the UK would be online early next year.
But, whereas 59% of the most affluent AB social group would be
online, only 14% of the poorest DE social class, which includes the
unskilled, would be in a similar position. However, Professor Patrick
Dunleavy of LSE reminds us, that all expensive new goods sell first
to the wealthy classes. He points to figures from the British Market
Research Bureau showing that in the year to mid-1999 the growth in
internet access was 33% for the rich AB social group but 44% for C1s
and 44% for C2s. Even among the retired and unemployed DE group
access grew by 50% over that period. In August 2000 the proportion of
ABs and C1s who used the net during the previous month rose by 33%
compared with a year earlier, while C2s, Ds and Es rose by 70% to
80%.
George Gilder, the US guru, argues that the wealthiest 20% are paying
for all the false starts and glitches that plague any new technology,
thus bringing it down the learning curve, where everyone else can get
it a few years later at a quarter the price. He says:"That's the
digital divide. The rich provide the investment and the rest reap the
rewards."
David Elstein, former head of Channel Five, told a roundtable on the
digital divide (reported in this week's New Statesman) that every new
innovation, from radio to the Consumers' Association, divides
society. Online evangelists, he claimed, had not yet proved what you
needed to do for the net revolution that you did not for the others.
The answer, maybe, is that not having electricity or a phone in an
industrialising society is less of a handicap than net access because
of the all- pervasive nature of the new revolution. Not to have
access to information in an information-driven age, when most jobs
require techie or keyboarding skills, is to risk total exclusion.
Information moves so fast these days that sending an email has a
definite advantage over a letter.
In the information economy, knowledge is vital and most of it is
locked inside peoples' heads. That is partly why the dot.com
companies were so ludicrously overvalued this year. But once
knowledge becomes a digital product - a document, a music file or a
video - it can be transmitted instantly to millions of consumers at
no extra cost.
This offers a tantalising prospect for the Third World. Countries in
Africa which, 150 years on, have not yet even experienced the effects
of the industrial revolution, have the potential to leapfrog into the
information age. Some indeed are already starting to experiment (see
Online, page 12). It is not necessary any longer to have an expensive
network of copper wires because the wireless revolution can beam
appropriate information to remote villages from some of the
satellites that fly over Africa virtually unused. What is needed is a
new generation of international social entrepreneurs to harness the
unused technology of the multi-nationals to the needs of the poorest
countries.
Of course, as Bill Gates has pointed out, what deprived people need
is not computers but basic things such as medicine. Jubilee 2000 has
pointed out that you could vaccinate 2,000 children against six
killer diseases for the price of a computer. That is true. Also, as
Kevin Watkins of Oxfam points out, in much of sub-Saharan Africa more
than half of primary-age children are denied the opportunity of even
a rudimentary primary education and fewer than one third make it to
secondary school.
All of this puts technology transfer in a depressing context. But it
is not irrelevant. Internet access raises the prospect of being able
to disseminate vital medical information and to do remote diagnosing.
It is potentially a "killer-app" for Africa for improving education
if appropriate, and appropriately cheap, methods of delivery are
found.
Ultimately, the best way forward is by increasing economic growth.
This involves a host of factors including debt relief, stable macro-
economic policies that encourage enterprise and discourage
monopolies. But education is at the core because of the long-run
connection between improving education and economic growth. The point
is that improving health, food, education and net access should not
be seen as being in opposition to each other. They are all part of
the solution.
And they must be applied quickly. Otherwise the praiseworthy progress
being made to narrow the digital divide in industrialised countries
will be swamped by the opening up of an even bigger divide between
developed and developing countries. It is already happening.
If nothing is done it will create a digital sore that industrialised
nations will have on their consciences for ever. Their culpability is
all the greater because they know they have the means to tackle it
but have so far chosen to do very little to solve it. Soon, the
talking will have to stop.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,411112,00.html
