Reflecting on the World Summit: plain truths about 'know-ware' land

UN Chronicle, Dec, 2003 by Naren Chitty

The World Summit on the Information Society is of crucial importance. Summits allow for elevated and, therefore, broader vision. The slopes of the mountain and the vast expanses of surrounding plains may readily be viewed as a big picture. Summiteers would discern, on the slopes, active participants in the information society, clambering upwards, as well as in the surrounding plains, those who are either excluded from or inactive in relation to the information society. The metaphor suggests that the information society is a sudden bulge in the terrain of society; like most other social collectivities, it is hierarchical, and knowledge and decision-making are concentrated at the peak in a gleaming citadel of digitized forms, beeps and flashing lights that transform easily into piles of treasure.

The technologies of the information society are in sonic ways (notably in relation to interpersonal communication and technological empowerment of those with access) less hierarchical than traditional mass media. But hierarchy dies hard. At the apex of the information economy are corporate super-elites--owners of corporations engaged in information technology, information, knowledge and entertainment (collectively called "know-ware" by me) production, storage, distribution and sales Below them are their managers and smaller corporate manufacturers, distributors and vendors of know-ware. Lower down the pyramid are those who actually craft know-ware products. At the base of the pyramid are know-ware consumers. Out on the plains are those who escape, through avoidance or lack of opportunity, the gravitational pull of the information economy, the heart of this mountain. These plains folks share the ground that supports the information economy. The innards of the mountain are connected with the plains below by the comment stuff of mineable knowledge.

The plains people, like everyone else in the picture, can be sources of material for information products. This is the great strength of the information society. Everything is information, which may be digitized, and digital information travels swiftly and efficiently on telecommunication highways. The plains can be mined just as well as the mountain. The higher one climbs up the mountain, the more able one is to control the benefits of mining of the ground underneath. A Hollywood celebrity may sell her story for a fortune. A small village in Bangladesh is unknowingly incorporated into a remotely sensed map of subterranean resources and the fortunes of unnamed elites. The plains people, living in hovels or picturesque traditional edifices, have much at stake in the decision-making that takes place in the gleaming citadel on the mountain top.

It is the privilege and responsibility of those who meet at the Summit, those with knowledge and voice, to listen to the views and speak on behalf of the plains folks, to seek to extend the benefits of the information society to all. Indeed, they should extend access to the information society to plains folk as much for themselves as for the plains people who have a rich heritage, powerful imaginations and great vitality that is shut out from nourishing and being nourished by the information society because of screens of language and cost, the so-called "digital divide".

Indeed, if we look out into the horizon, we can discern in the great distance what appears to be small peaks. If we were to approach these peaks, we would see them loom large above us as great mountains of human experience that have in one way or another contributed to the formation of the information society, sometimes in an essential way. Here we see the Indian civilization with its glistening mathematical discoveries. There we see the mathematical discoveries of the Arab world, an Aladdin's treasure lying at the base of its civilizational mountain. The mountain of the Greek civilization contains rich lodes of logic and geometry; that of the Chinese, of astronomical know-how. China and Europe both had roles in developing one of the gateway technologies to the information society--the printing press. But it is not just mathematics, astronomy and printing that contribute to the information society. From philosophy to popular culture, legend to measurement of values, the whole universe is raw material for computers, the "factories" of the information society.

In my sphere of activity--media and communication scholarship--we have found that the major international research associations tend to attract, by and large, scholars from the West. The reasons given by scholars for non-participation in these organizations are that conference and membership fees are too expensive, and language is a barrier. The digital divide is not so much a "digital" divide but a general divide that resonates in the digital economy as well. The conferences for media and communication scholars are "research summits" and tend to take place, quite naturally, in salubrious settings at modern hotels in great metropolises and are valuable and essential forums for international scholars. However, scholars from areas outside Europe, and North America, particularly those from non-metropolitan areas within the Global South, need summits of their own and in their own areas. The great wealth of research experience represented by such scholars in the Global South is lost to researchers in North America and Europe, and there is little exchange of information between these groups. For this reason, a group of academics set up the Global Communication Research Association (GCRA) at a meeting in 2001 in Sydney.