MSNBC Global digital divide could hamper growth
"Many developing countries will remain on the losing side of the “digital divide” unless they establish the necessary framework for high-tech growth, a report released Tuesday found."

"For high-tech companies looking to wire developing countries, there are “great possibilities to make money and move the world along in the right direction,” he said.

"But Internet access may seem like an impossibility to the 42 percent of the world’s adult population that has never even used a telephone, said Carlos Primo Braga, manager of the World Bank’s information-technology development programme."

redux [08.07.00]
First Monday Negotiating the Global and the Local: How Thai Culture Co-opts the Internet
"As the Internet is spreading around the globe, a problem is created concerning its impact on the local cultures. This paper argues that the relation between computer-mediated communication technologies and local cultures is characterized neither by a homogenizing effect, where the technologies bring about one global monolithic culture, nor by an erecting of barriers separating one culture from another, where there is no impact at all. Instead, local cultures usually find ways to cope with the impact and are resilient enough to absorb it without losing some kind of identity. A case study is presented on a local Internet scene in Thailand to see how Thai culture co-opts the Internet and how its identity is being constantly negotiated."

The New York Times It Takes the Internet to Raise a Cambodian Village
[requires 'free' registration]
"Overlooked in last month's Group of 8 discussions about the challenge of a growing "digital divide" between the information rich and the data deprived was the work of Bernard Krisher, a 69-year-old former journalist who is trying to bring the Internet to one of the poorest regions in Asia."

"Though the effort is on a small scale, Nicholas Negroponte, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist who is also engaged in the effort to aid Cambodian villages, said the project demonstrated that the global impact of the Internet could ultimately serve to reverse the disparity between urban wealth and rural poverty.

"The Net will reverse urbanization," said Mr. Negroponte, director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory. "The past 150 years of development have been one of urbanization. To be rural has meant to be poor. The Net could bring some of the same opportunities to the rural world and maybe even turn being rural into being rich.""

redux [07.09.00]
Washinton Post Poor in Latin America Embrace Net's Promise
"Until a brilliantly sunny day when the Internet reached this Ashaninka Indian village in central Peru, tribal leader Oswaldo Rosas could think of few benefits modern life had brought his people.

Poverty and disease had debased and decimated them since British missionaries brought the first link to the outside world 81 years ago. As recently as the early 1990s, communist guerrillas had forced some Ashaninka into slavery. Even after the Peruvian army defeated the insurgents, life in this thatched hut settlement with no electricity or running water remained a grueling struggle.

It still is, but as the incongruent buzz of a computer fired up in Rosas's hut--now doubling as a tribal cybercafe--the somber 30-year-old leader could not repress a smile. "This," he said, pointing to the machine, "is the first real chance they have ever given my people.""

""Calep, 15, who hovered by the humming unit covered with a brightly hued Indian blanket here in Marankiari Bajo, would agree. His village computer, he said, has brought "the hope that I won't be poor for the rest of my life."

Calep wants to be a computer programmer. He is not naive enough to think one computer will be his ticket out of poverty. But he is not cynical enough to rule it out.

"I've never gone very far from my village, but I've [chatted] with kids [on the Internet] in places like Canada," he said. "Now I think anything is possible.""

redux [04.23.00]
The New York Times When Villages Go Global: How a Byte of Knowledge Can Be Dangerous, Too
[requires 'free' registration]
"The prospects seemed bright when the Internet was recently introduced in a remote part of the mountainous Cotopoxi region in Ecuador. Under the guidance of aid workers, Quichua-speaking peasants planned to gather crop information and sell their crafts over the Web.

Soon, though, it was discovered that some of the men were using the computer to visit pornographic sites. "

"Dismayed, the women began to question how the men were treating them, and a debate ensued over the common practice of beating women. Although use of the Internet was later curtailed, its introduction unexpectedly generated discussion on a once taboo topic.

"The changes created by the Internet in rich industrialized nations are well known, affecting everything from how people date to how they work. But less is known about the impact on societies with limited contact with the rest of the world. As such experiments multiply, at least one outcome seems certain: the way people in these communities relate to each other and with the world is likely to be altered forever."

Netfuture I'm Glad The Internet 'Corrodes' My Culture
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.

Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).

It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."