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Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2000 00:19:18 EDT
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Subject: [AfricaMatters] Stepping into the literacy divide
DAILY MAIL & GUARDIAN
29 September 2000
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Stepping into the literacy divide
by Arthur Goldstuck
While taking a break from Web Feet for a few months, my mind has turned again
and again to the problem of bringing the benefits of the Internet to the mass
market. The sense of personal empowerment that I experienced when I first
embraced this medium seven years ago was so fundamental, it seemed a given
that the Internet would eventually transform most lives.
After super-fast growth in usage of the Internet during those first few
years, that expectation seemed on the way to being realised. But, since 1998,
growth in usage in Africa has been slowing down rapidly. This is a result of
Internet penetration among the economic elite approaching saturation levels
and regulatory restrictions slowing down the growth of infrastructure. Hidden
in the statistics is the concept that has now become a buzz-phrase, the
"digital divide".
We are constantly told that a digital divide between rich and poor in the
United States and between rich nations and poor nations globally is the
greatest flaw in the supposed empowerment offered by the Internet.
But the real flaw goes much deeper. At the Highway Africa conference hosted
by Rhodes University in Grahamstown from September 10 to 15, the single most
common theme raised by speakers and delegates was the question of the
relevance of Internet access in an environment where a literacy crisis
prevails. The problem is as common to the American inner-city as in rural
Africa. Executive director of BlackPlanet.com Omar Wasow argued that, while
universal access to phones, computers and the Internet was an ideal to be
worked towards, it was not a practical ideal until people have universal
access to quality education.
"The information economy raises the value of education and the ability to
make good decisions, but information technology is a means to wisdom, not an
end," he said. "Therefore we should focus our energies not on expensive and
misguided efforts to bridge the digital divide, but rather to ending the
literacy divide."
That is just the beginning of the problem. In vast areas, there is no access
at all, and the debate on access vs literacy does not even have a starting
point. As Dr Tawana Kupe, who will head up the Rhodes University Journalism
School next year, pointed out, "in rural areas where most Africans actually
live, there is no access at all and no prospect of getting any access. It is
(these) people ... who will die without ever making or receiving a phone
call."
The conference newspaper, The Highway Daily, asked a range of speakers for
their take on the issue of Internet access for the poor. Fackson Banda of
Panos put the issue neatly in perspective, arguing that the telephone
represented old media, and even that was not accessible. "Unless we meet the
basic condition of accessing the old forms of media we cannot entertain the
idea of achieving universal access to media," he said.
Peter de Costa, senior communications adviser at the United Nations Economic
Commission for Africa, added that "we will need to invest heavily in
developing technologies and points of entry for people who may not be able to
read, write or even understand the utility of a computer".
These are issues entirely alien to Internet strategies and philosophies
developed around telecommunications technology in the developed world. As
such, it is the soft underbelly of the Internet, and the most likely point of
attack if the Internet becomes part of the catch-all campaign against
globalisation of national economies. This point is underscored by the warning
from Peter Benjamin of Wits University's Link Centre that the current
telecentres - computer, telephone and Internet access points in rural or
disadvantaged communities - "are mainly providing access to be consumers of
information and products developed elsewhere".
In short, current attempts to bring the Internet to the African masses are
nothing less than a 21st century equivalent of cargo culture, that bizarre
one-time idea of parachuting consumer goods down to isolated communities on
islands and in jungles, where there was either a wholesale inability to make
use of them, or localised economic collapse as a result of the need for
productivity disappearing in the face of this largesse from the heavens.
In the absence of an integrated and interactive solution that matches
telecentres with the needs and involvement of communities, and develops
communities to the point where the telecentres become merely an added means
of upliftment, these communities will continue to be marginalised from the
Internet, even as they are presented with the keys to the very doorway of the
e-commerce revolution.
© The Electronic Mail & Guardian - 29 September 2000
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