First Monday The Internet in India and China

"We also examine determinants of Internet diffusion. We find that the Chinese Internet has benefited from economic and trade reform begun in the late 1980s, a strong government commitment to the Internet, complementary human and capital resources, etc. The two nations have very different governments and policies, leading to differing approaches to the introduction of telecommunication competition and infrastructure development. China has pursued a strategy of competition among government-owned organizations while India has set policy via recommendations of publicly visible task forces. It remains to be seen whether India's relatively transparent and market driven approach to Internet policy (and access) will prove effective in the long run.

India and China have approximately 40 percent of the world population, and most of their inhabitants live in rural villages that lack basic telephone service. If the Internet is to succeed in raising the level of human development and curtailing migration to teeming urban centers, it must succeed in India and China. What we learn there may enable us to provide communication and information to the world's 1.5 million unconnected villages."

redux [08.22.02]
Online Journalism Review Afghan's Thirst for Web Access

"Basic concepts of proper sourcing, balance, accuracy and fairness are the most essential lessons that need to be learned here. But with a bit of luck -- or, as they say in Afghanistan, "insha'Allah" (by the will of God) -- Bakhtar's Web site will soon be up and running. In any case, it will very likely be the first Web site hosted from within Afghanistan, thus finally bringing some light to an information blackout and connecting a country that has for too long been separated from the rest of the world -- and with disastrous results.

The dirt track of Afghan online publishing is ready to merge with the world's information super-highway."

redux [07.27.02]
Fast Company La Dolce Vita, Internet Style

"For seven centuries, Colletta had endured attack, famine, plague, and earthquake. The only force it couldn't repel was the economic progress of the 20th century. But Florenzo's departure was not the end of life in Colletta. Today, along the village's cobbled streets, Kieran, an Irish tax adviser, greets Olly, a Norwegian architect, with a hearty Buon giorno. Marco, a university professor from Torino, has an espresso with cafe owner Vincenzo before returning to his laptop to email his publisher. In Colletta, everything old is new again.

Built on a rugged spur some 1,000 feet above sea level, the 13th-century village is about to complete a remarkable renaissance. Colletta has been restored as a haven for mobile knowledge workers who want to live in medieval Italy but also want to remain connected to the rest of the world. No urban congestion, no suburban sprawl. Just a view of the maritime Alps that hasn't changed in more than a thousand years -- plus a lightning-fast Internet connection."

redux [04.11.02]
MSNBC Tibetan culture gets a tech boost

"At a gala recently at the opulent Russian Tea Room in New York City, serene looking Tibetan monks rubbed elbows with suited clients of a Silicon Valley company that boasts about having survived the tech bust. This is a story about an unlikely marriage between philanthropy and capitalism, and how it could very well help preserve the culture of the people of Tibet.

SCATTERED across Northern India, Nepal and Bhutan are 32 settlement camps, home to more than 122,000 Tibetan exiles displaced from their native land by Chinese troops, who invaded the country 50 years ago. Just last month, action was begun in earnest to install a computer in each of these settlements, and to wire each for Internet access."

redux [10.22.01]
BBC Village in the clouds embraces computers

"I have seen that even a small village like mine can benefit a lot from the internet.

We can use it to generate money for the village, to provide quality education for our children, to provide information about our culture to children all over the world, and to invite volunteers to come to our village.

If everything goes well, I plan to build a college in my village and provide computer courses to the students. This will open a door for us to produce computer programmers in the village, and produce software for the big firms around the world."

redux [09.13.01]
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."

redux [04.23.00]
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."

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."