Potential of the Internet - developments in connectivity
Joseph Slowinski
Joseph Slowinski is Associate Instructor, Indiana University, 3130 Education,
Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USA. Fax +1 812 856 8116, e-mail: joeslow@indiana.edu;
http://www.indiana.edu/~w200slow/W200 and Assistant Editor, Institute
for the Study of Russian Education, http://www.indiana.edu/~isre
Since the advent of the World Wide Web (WWW) in
1989, the Internet's enormous growth has led to the availability of
an unprecedented amount of global information. Today, anyone with access
to the Internet can instantaneously access as well as disseminate information
anywhere around the globe. Technology holds great promise in regard
to enabling developing nations to participate more actively in global
information flows; yet, throughout the developing world, many impediments
hinder the development of an information society.
The global average of Internet users is 1.6 users
for every 100 citizens. In economically developed nations, the rate
is between 10 and 20 per cent of the population. Clearly there is a
division between the information `haves' and `have-nots'. For the developing
world, two major factors must be overcome to ensure a participatory
role in the world's flow of knowledge: weak information-oriented infrastructure,
and the language of knowledge flows.
Access to information in the developing world
is limited and telephone reliability remains a stumbling block. According
to the International Telegraph Union (ITU)'s World Telecommunication
Indicators Database, approximately 90 per cent of calls in developed
nations, but only 50-60 per cent of calls in developing nations are
connected. Inconsistent electricity supplies present a further problem
in some areas.
Language use of the World Wide Web further inhibits
information transfer. In October 1998, Euro-Marketing Associates reported
that more than 66 million people accessing the Internet do not communicate
in English. Yet access is extremely limited for non-English speakers
(readers). A recent study by Alis Technology reported that, of 30 million
web sites worldwide, 4 per cent of the pages were in German, 1.6 per
cent in Japanese, 1.5 per cent in French, 1.1 per cent in Spanish and
82 per cent in English. Even Euro-Marketing Associates' lower figure
of 60 per cent of web pages in English shows an English language density
in cyberspace which inhibits the access and use of knowledge disseminated
through WWW for the majority of people in the world.
Although present-day realities are inhibiting
the developing world's participation in global information flows, information
technology offers a relatively inexpensive method of disseminating knowledge
from the south to the rest of the world, challenging the traditional
north to south dissemination of information. Information technology
holds the opportunity for developing nations to rewrite their histories
by disseminating their own views in their own words and images. The
relatively free nature of the World Wide Web allows scholars, organisations,
communities and individuals to participate in the international public
sphere. Yet this shift in global information flow is dependent upon
access to the global information superhighway. How can this be accomplished?
Recent technological advances offer some exciting
means of shifting the balance in the information age. An Internet browser
entitled `Video-on-Line' (available free at http://www.vol.it/VOLB/browser.html)
is capable of searching the web in 20 languages including Afrikaans,
Ewe, Fan, Fulani, Hausa, Ibo, Kimbundu, Nyanja, Somali, Swahili, Tswana
and Wolof. According to the UNDP, this browser is being used by over
half a million individuals. Another multilingual browser called Tango
allows the viewing of web pages in more than 90 languages.1
Also useful, although less geared to Africa, is
a program from `Internet with an Accent' providing Internet tools for
constructing web pages in 30 languages.2 The same company produces a
word-processing product which translates Windows commands into eight
languages and allows you to write documents in 30 languages. Alta Vista
provides for searching WWW pages in 25 languages (http://www.altavista.digital.com/).
It also provides a free on-line translation service between any of six
languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian (http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/).
Software which will translate 5KB of text from/to the six languages
is available for personal computers.3 At this stage these machine translations
can be inaccurate but the future should yield improvements in the quality
of translation.
In regard to infrastructure development, one initiative
promising to provide access to rural citizens in several African nations
is the African Information Society Initiative (AISI), created in May
1996 by the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) Conference of Ministers
which comprises 53 African ministers of social and economic development
and planning (http://www.bellanet.org/partners/aisi/). The AISI is developing
rural telecommunication centres to provide access to the information
superhighway for agriculture, business, education, health and other
critical spheres. Similar telecommunication centres have been very successful
in rural Scandinavia, and African ministers believe that setting up
such centres will lead to `leapfrog' development, since rural people
in Africa could have access to the most up-to-date technology and knowledge
in the world. For those in developing nations with access only to e-mail,
GetWeb, an initiative of the International Development Research Center
in Canada, enables users to receive an e-mail with the text of a requested
WWW page.4 Web forms as well as web searches can be completed using
the GetWeb services.
Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration
of Human Rights states that all citizens of the earth have the right
to seek, receive, disseminate information and ideas through any media
and regardless of frontiers. The global proliferation of information
technology is a reality; in 1993, 137 nations were connected to the
Internet while today 241 have access. But access is far from becoming
a reality for many living in Africa. None the less, appropriate forms
of technology can lead to the acquisition of information as well as
the dissemination of knowledge from citizens living in developing nations.
With the technological initiatives discussed in this article, the developing
world can look forward to producing and disseminating as well as retrieving
information from around the world.
1. Tango costs approximately US$60 from http://www.alis.com/internet_products/browser/browser.en.html
2. Internet with an Accent available for US$99
from Accent Software at http://www.accentsoft.com
3. Uni-directional translator software is US$29
while bi-directional costs US$49 from Systran at http://www.systransoft.com/personal.html
4. How to Retrieve and Search the WWW through
E-mail
Send a message to getweb@unganisha.irdc.ca. In the body of the message,
type GET URL. For example, if you wanted the following page http://www.indiana.edu,
then you would type GET http://www.indiana.edu. In addition, the following
are available to send web pages to e-mail accounts:
getweb@usa.healthnet.org
agora@dna.affrc.go.jp Use Send rather than GET
agora@www.eng.dmu.ac.uk Use Send rather than GET
agora@kamakura.mss.co.jp Use Send rather than GET
agora@uit.no Use Send rather than
GET 3mail@gmd.de
[BPN, No. 24, 1998. p. 11]
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