What does it mean to be "information-poor"? Mike Holderness asks whether it's a feature of the Information SuperHypeWay, or a real question

What does it mean to be information-poor?

Debates on the implications of an Information Superhighway often refer to the category "information poverty". Is this mere journalistic phrase-making? Or might it be a useful category for discussion of the shape of human culture and communication (and their economics) in the next century? In particular, what may the effects of the new communication technology be on the less- industrialised countries -- "the South" for short?

The SuperHypeWay does not exist; it describes a future means of transport for digitised information. The Internet is merely our string-and-chewing-gum model for what it might look like. But the speed of that transport, and the fact that once a link is established the marginal cost of sending information to one person or to a million is essentially zero, mean that it makes radically new patterns of commerce and human communication possible.

A delicatessen in Oakland, California, survives by tickling its patrons' jaded palates. Once a week the manager connects her computer, through the internet, to the Earth MarketPlace service. It encourages her to fetch details of a farmers' co-operative in Suriname, from a computer in Nairobi. She reads the descriptions of their products and then negotiates a deal directly with the farmers, who read and reply to her messages on a computer in the co-operative's office.

At a stroke, the historical pattern of trade between North and South has been overturned. The wholesalers who feed profits back to the North have been eliminated: and the deli can obtain, and the farmers sell, products which the wholesalers would not be interested in.

This is not fiction: it is from a description by Rangil Senayake, of the ELCI electronic mail provider in Kenya, of a service he is negotiating with Earth MarketPlace now.

On the other hand, imagine you received a note saying that, due to an explosive rise in the price of paper, the New Statesman would in future be available only on the internet. This would save the remaining trees, save money and save the "paper". It would allow you to get the articles almost immediately they were edited. But the note neglects to mention all those who do not have computers, or usable or affordable telephone lines.

This is fiction. But an increasing proportion of scientific and technological publishing is now available only on the internet. Ask an academic about the exclusion of their Southern colleagues, and they're likely to respond, "ah yes, the classic Bangladeshi professor who can't get an internet connection..."

For people in the South, exclusion from sources of information is of course nothing new. The development and initial monopoly of printing helped to define the North. But many -- from US Senator Newt Gingrich to his compatriots who use the internet to publicise the Zapatista rebels in Mexico -- believe the North is moving from the age of industry into an "Information Age".

How much is this, or will it be, dominated by corporate forces in the developed North, and how much is it a tool for self- determination? How much do the questions it raises for the South differ from more familiar matters, for example of economic and information inequality? Should cultures or governments in the South fear a new deluge of Northern-based cultural, political and economic matter?

Anyone who claims to give firm answers to these questions is lying, or promoting a specific agenda. But we can at least set out the areas of debate.

First, who is connected? There are no exact figures. In mid-1995 there were, according to the Internet Society, around 5,000,000 computers connected world-wide. Some have one user, and some hundreds; around 70% are in the USA. Meanwhile, in April Vietnamese academics proudly announced the first 12 connections in the country, offering perhaps 40 people next-day delivery of text messages only.

"Internet access" can mean very different things. Dave Wilson of Rhodes University in South Africa says "The difference between high and low-end access can be illustrated by comparing a researcher in the US who has a fixed link to a multi-megabit per second network, to a researcher in Africa, who may be connecting at around 200 characters a second over an unstable telephone line." One implication of those numbers is that the US academic can fetch a book-size text in a couple of seconds, whereas her African colleague might spend all day running up bills to do the same.

And who could get connected, other things being equal? To connect to the net, you need at least a phone line. In 1992, 49 countries, from China to Cambodia, had fewer than one telephone per 100 people; 35 of these are in Africa. There are, notoriously, more telephones in New York or Tokyo than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. And in many parts of the South what phone networks exist don't talk to each other. Calls from Dakar in Senegal to Lusaka in Zambia are still routed from Dakar to Banjul, Banjul to London, and London to Lusaka. (Apart from being extremely handy for British and American phone-tappers, this colonial pattern of communication means that revenue is drained from Southern telecommunications companies to the North.)

Even in cities where there is a working telephone system, most people are excluded. David Dion works for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. He spends the equivalent of US$400 a month on food and $200 a month on telephone calls, including those his computer makes to the internet. Harry Surjadi works for Kompas morning daily newspaper in Jakarta, Indonesia. He spends $4.50 a month on food and $27 on telephone and internet access.

In real terms, internet access time is thus twelve times more expensive for Harry and his neighbours than for David. The differential is higher for the computers they need to compose, send and read messages. For the 10% of Londoners who are unemployed, a new $1500 computer represents six months' total income. For the 45% of Indonesians who are "under-employed", it represents several years' cash income. (The CIA World Factbook, in which it took five minutes to look up Indonesian employment through the World Wide Web internet service, predictably does not discuss income distribution. It does say that total GNP per head in Britain is $16,900, and in Indonesia $2,900.)

Tony Rutowski is Executive Director of the Internet Society's International Secretariat, based in Reston, Virginia. His responsibilities include spreading internet access to the South, and he identifies the major problem with this as "the availability of capital to purchase capital-intensive goods and services." To paraphrase him cruelly: the South must develop before it will be able to afford to join this development.

The government of Singapore is clear that part of its economic future is as a "middle office" between Northern corporations and their manufacturing plants in less-developed countries. Its IT2000 initiative for a "wired island" aims to put high-speed communications into every major building.

Singapore, like China, has announced plans to censor internet access. If this were feasible -- and there isn't space to go into that here -- it would leave their citizens "information-poor" in the sense that they'd have access to a poorer quality of information.

The Financial Times describes the economic consequence succinctly: "IT2000... offers enhanced electronic means for 'remote management' [in which] companies locate only their higher added value functions in Singapore... executives based there would be able more precisely to monitor manufacturing centres located elsewhere in the region, where land and labour outlays are lower."

But, as John Mukela of the Centre for Development Information in Lusaka, Zambia says, "Information-based production processes will increasingly elude developing countries and consequently exclude them from advanced manufacturing and world trade -- thus further exacerbating their poverty."

Rangil Senayake of the ELSI internet host in Senegal notes, too, that "companies seem to see Asia as a better source of people to process information and write programs than Africa. I don't know whether this is a problem of perception or something else but it's what I'm seeing."

The fabled irrelevance of national boundaries on the internet may, though, help stem the brain drain from the South. Academics, for example, go to California not just for cash but for recognition by their peers. If they could be constantly visible in the placeless international "research community" of the Net, many would probably choose to lead their three-dimensional lives at home. These are also people for whom the fact that the great majority of Net communication is in English is no barrier.

This may, however, contribute to what Sally Burch, working for Agencia LatinoAmericana de Informacion in Quito, Ecuador, describes as the "reinforcement of an informed elite within the country creating a bigger internal information/technology gap... [and] greater dependence on Northern information sources and technology."

From Nepal, journalist Kanak Dixit responds "Better that that happens than that nothing happens. It's not that this will strengthen a class structure -- it's better to make sure that the intellectual elite (which is not a class elite) will get access than that no-one does."

Sally Burch reminds us, however, that "Women are under- represented both as technicians and as users of most computer networks -- and this is particularly true in the South." Up to 90% of those who have identifiable names taking part in "newsgroup" discussions are men. This may may reflect the attraction or repulsiveness of the often viciously argumentative style of newsgroup debate as much as anything.

One effect of conducting these interviews by electronic mail, fax and phone is to cast doubt on the notion of "the South" as a geographical category. The means of communication biases the interviews towards the conclusion that those in "the South" who already have international electronic communication -- who are, by consequence, part of a local "elite" -- want much more of it, now.

Looking up from the computer screen, I find myself geographically located in the the second-largest Bangladeshi city in the world. My neighbours suffer "information poverty" more than do the people I have just been communicating with in Dakar and Dakkar. They also suffer greater (relative) old-fashioned economic poverty; and the one is a consequence of the other.