The other side of cyberspace - interview with professor Manuel Castells - Cover Story

Communication World, March, 1999 by John Gerstner

? - JG: You say that Africa is dropping further and further behind in the global economy with each leap forward by the techno-elite, and that the "disinformation of Africa at the dawn of the Information Age may be the most lasting wound inflicted on this continent." Is this more the result of politics than technology? What needs to be done to help reduce the information technology gap between the haves and have-nots around the world?

MC: New technologies allow linking up the few valuable segments of Africa to the rest of the world and disconnecting most people, letting them perish in their own horror. It will come back to haunt us. The issue is not to send more computers to Africa, but to devise a realistic, down-to-earth international aid program that will reverse the trend, starting from the grassroots, and using technology for it. A number of NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations), both African and international, are already working along these lines. I wish some high-tech companies would use a small percentage of their profits in helping out Oxfam, Doctors without Borders, and similar organizations, as well as technology diffusion grassroots groups, working with the youth. The illusion that we can live on a wonderful, shrinking planet, and ignore the 40 percent of the population hardly surviving with less than two dollars a day, is simply self-denial. Epidemics, wars, terrorism and moral outrage will reach us in our protected world.

? - JG: Your third book in the trilogy, "End of Millennium," chillingly details the dark side of the Information Age. What about the network society is hazardous to children?

MC: I think what is happening to children is one of the most striking contradictions of the Information Age because we build our future not with our machines but with our children. Poor children around the world are being exploited at work, abused, abandoned, neglected, sold for sex, massacred as child soldiers, by the tens of millions. See data in my volume III, or in UNICEF publications. But in our societies, even for middle-class children, there is increasing neglect of child care by overworked parents, by single parents trying to survive the daily rush, and by the lack of government-sponsored child care. Technology of course is not the guilty party here. Although, again, powerful technology applied to a sick society produces nasty effects, such as easy as easy access to a plentiful child pornography on the Internet.

As to why children are wasted, I dare to cite my own paragraph in Volume III, page 161: "Children are wasted because, in the Information Age, social trends are extraordinarily amplified by society's new technological/organizational capacity, while institutions of social control are bypassed by global networks of information and capital. And since we are all inhabited at the same time, by humanity's angels and devils, whenever and wherever our dark side takes over, it triggers the release of unprecedented, destructive power."

? - JG: Why have almost all spokespersons for the advent of cyberspace (three out of the four I've interviewed so far) tended to be very positive and optimistic about the fruits of information technology?