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Preface |
Building information societies: Challenges before Asia Pacific |
Stifling intellectual property rights regimes are quickly replacing the lack of Internet connectivity as the main obstacle to nurturing information societies in the region. While many of us from the ICT sector have been preoccupied with the WSIS process over the past few years, trade agreements have been negotiated and concluded that have begun to further curb the flow of information and technologies. Unlike the WSIS resolutions, these negotiations lead to binding treaties and agreements that compel governments to comply with the trade regimes which they created. These regimes will prove to be long-term barriers to future attempts to close the digital divide. Asia Pacific
has done well in areas where we have the latitude to thrive. Several economies
in the region continue to lead in a number of areas: from broadband services to
chip foundries and from e-government to SMS. Even among developing economies,
ICT awareness has heightened and experiments to introduce these technologies to
isolated, rural communities have begun to show promising results. Most encouraging
is increasing awareness that ICT is not only about computers and the Internet
but refers to all the means and processes for communication and information exchange,
and that information societies are not downloaded from a plug in the wall but
arise from nurturing participatory development communication processes that trigger
and support social change.
Our communication systems and processes were severely tested on the morning of
26 December 2004 after an earthquake struck Aceh and sent a tsunami racing across
the Indian Ocean. We largely failed this test. Many of the communities struck
by the waves were hit about two hours after the earthquake that triggered them.
Anecdotal reports emerging in the aftermath of the catastrophe told of isolated
teams of experts who tracked the progress of the tsunami remotely but did not
have the means to raise the alarm among the communities that were in harm’s way.
There were also disturbing anecdotes of other experts who had forewarning about
the tsunami but held back from raising the alarm owing to apprehensions about
reprisals from restrictive gate-keeping regimes in case disaster did not occur.
We came across only
a very small number of cases where ICT did save lives. In one case, Vijayakumar
Gunasekaran, the 27-year-old son of a fisherman from Nallavadu village, Pondicherry,
on the eastern coast of India, who works in Singapore, saved his village with
one telephone call. He told the Digital Review of Asia Pacific how it had
become apparent to him that fateful morning, after listening to local news over
the radio and television about the destruction in Aceh, that his village may be
standing in harm’s way. This made him call home and trigger the evacuation of
his village before the tsunami bulldozed the stretch of coast where Nallavadu
is located. As a result, not a single life was lost in his village, even though
numerous homes and fishing boats were damaged.
This story offers a profound lesson on how ICT works that goes deeper than the
making of a long-distance telephone call from Singapore to Pondicherry. Vijayakumar
was briefly a fisherman before leaving to work abroad. During this time, he volunteered
with a local NGO project that ran an innovative community centre that, among other
things, downloaded a naval wave chart from the Web each day. Vijayakumar and the
other volunteers would take turns to read out the forecasts of sea conditions
shown on these charts over the loudspeaker system that covered the village. In
this way, the fishermen learnt when it was safe or dangerous to go out to sea.
It literally saved lives by steering villagers away from dangerous storms, which
had previously killed a number of their friends and relatives. It was a simple
but highly effective information service that overcame illiteracy barriers and
that shared crucial but limited Internet access across a community. The villagers
over time grew to trust this communication channel and their friends and relatives
who operated it.
When Vijayakumar called home and urged his sister to flee and to tell others to
do the same, one of the villagers remembered the loudspeaker system and used it
to broadcast the warning across the village. And because the villagers trusted
the system, they heeded the warning and acted promptly, and they were all saved.
So whereas in most instances a telephone call would not have quickly evacuated
an entire village, this call did so because there were effective communication
processes, not just ICT, in place to respond to the call.
The lessons of our failure will take time to learn, but they will be precious
in helping us retool our methods of building information societies which are better
able to respond not only to emergencies but also to the needs of everyday life.
The case of Vijayakumar’s village proves that these two requirements are not separate:
establishing credible, participatory communication processes which are in use
every day also puts in place effective channels that respond to emergencies. The
case also shows that installing ICT is only the start. Even more important is
ensuring relevancy and building trust in what we install. And perhaps most important
of all is strengthening a community’s collective skills in processing data and
information to create meaning so that people can grow a body of knowledge upon
which they can base their actions.
This edition of the Digital Review of Asia Pacific begins with four thematic
chapters that explore some elements of these emerging lessons. These chapters
also highlight salient issues we should address during the Tunis phase of WSIS.
The first chapter reviews the challenges we face in building information societies
from the perspective of the lines of action that emerged from the Geneva phase
of WSIS. It concludes with concrete proposals for the digital solidarity agenda
aimed at addressing the particular needs of Asia Pacific.
The second thematic chapter maps urgent issues relating to Internet governance.
It introduces the background to the global debate on this theme, and examines
key policy issues and provides a perspective from the region. The chapter first
examines the role of ICANN before moving on to discuss Internet governance broadly,
including issues such as international charging arrangements for Internet services,
exchange points and regional backbones, spam, cyber security and crime, and legislation
for ICT-related sectors.
The third chapter focuses on crucial social, political and cultural aspects of
ICT that have largely been ignored in the past as we concentrated on building
the infrastructure rather than on the use of ICT. It discusses e-governance and
the potential of ICT for enhancing democratic exchange at a global level thereby
enabling people to address issues such as the environment, human rights, poverty
and injustice from an international perspective. It also sets out to answer the
tricky question: Does technology change society?
The fourth and last thematic chapter considers what may be appropriate ICT which
will meet the particular needs of Asia Pacific with its diversity of languages
and complex mix of demographic, economic, geographical and industrial environments.
It describes examples drawn from across the region of efforts to localise technologies
and devise appropriate and low-cost ways of deploying ICT. The chapter also discusses
efforts underway to adopt open source software in building tools that meet the
special needs of users in the region.
The chasm that separates the most developed and the least connected economies
is clearly illustrated in the Digital Divide Index diagrams that begin the chapters
reviewing the individual economies. We cover a total of 29 domains in this edition,
two more than the last. Iran and the Maldives are the additional economies reviewed.
The other 27 chapters on individual domains set out to update information as well
as to cover aspects of ICT usage and deployment not reviewed in the 2003/2004
edition. The Pacific
island states are reviewed in a subregional chapter. It covers altogether 22 island
states and some of their subregional collaborative efforts underway. Besides the
Pacific islands, we have expanded our subregional coverage to include two other
groupings; there is a chapter each on the ICT-related initiatives of ASEAN and
APEC. This edition
covers diverse technological environments, all of which undergoing rapid and constant
change. We cope with this change by publishing updates contributed by our authors,
who live and work in the economies they report on, at our website http://www.digital-review.org.
I look forward to seeing you online.
Chin Saik Yoon |
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2003/2004 edition 
2005/2006 edition