Digital Culture and the Digital Divide:
A Theoretical
Framework
Mark
Balnaves
Edith
Cowan University
Brian
Shoesmith
Edith
Cowan University
Abstract.
The Digital Divide is a commonplace phrase to describe inequalities in technology
in media between societies and nations, at local and global levels respectively.
The authors argue in this paper that (1) the idea of a “divide” is too crude
to describe what is actually happening in societies that are adopting and
diffusing digital (and traditional) media, (2) there has been an evolution
in the lexicon describing media and technological change and the term digital
divide has its place in that evolution, and (3) a more rigorous social science
and cultural analysis of quantitative and qualitative indicators of digital
culture is required to understand what is going on in societies. Analyzing
digital culture, rather than mapping a divide, teases out the complexity of
the activity of cultures and audiences in societies that would normally be
classified as “poor”. The evolution of terms in the information society lexicon
suggests that digital culture and not digital divide is the best way to describe
what is happening at a global level.
Introduction
In the past decade the
term Digital Divide (hereafter DD) has attracted a good deal of attention
from politicians, analysts and critics but the meaning of the term remains
elusive. Couldry (2002) argues that the term is a convenient
label used to describe a debate about access to digital technology and the
asymmetrical relations of modern communications since the mid-1990s. In his
view the term has focused a particular debate that has exercised the imagination
of both politicians and academics in this period because it highlights a particular
cultural shift that seems to defy conventional explanation. This shift, according
to critics (Norris 2001), revolves around a set of relationships
between individuals, groups, regions and even nations that are linked in someway
to the new forms of communication dependent of digital encoding for the distribution
and consumption of information and knowledge. The relationships are perceived
as essentially ones of inequality, between the “haves” and “have nots” in
a globalized economy. Norris points out the term has become “shorthand for
any and every disparity within the online community” (2001,
p. 4). She goes on to elaborate the term by pointing that it is not just
a technological issue but rather one that has significant economic social
and political dimensions as well (2001, p. 4). In particular
Norris makes the useful distinction between “the global divide” and “the social
divide” (2001, pp. 3-4).
Castells has also
entered this debate pointing out that the DD “adds a fundamental cleavage to
the existing sources of inequality and social exclusion in a complex
interaction that appears to increase the gap between the promise of the
Information Age and its bleak reality for many people around the world. Yet,
the apparent simplicity of the issue becomes complicated on closer examination”
(2001, p. 247).
In this paper we wish to
explore this complexity. Our central argument revolves around a desire to
expand our understanding of the digital world. Both Norris and Castells follow
the orthodox view that the digital divide is confined to access to the Internet.
This is a view we wish to challenge. From our perspective access to the
Internet comprises only a fragment, albeit a central and crucial part, of the
digital world. The presence of one billion mobile phones in Asia
suggests that the digital has become more embedded in all aspects of
contemporary society than most accounts of the DD concede. Indeed, the ubiquity
of the digital mobile device demands we reassess our understanding of the
concept of the DD. Accordingly, we seek to “stretch the notion of the digital
divide to encompass … a broad array of factors and resources” (Warschauer, 2002, p. 3). With this in mind we propose to
talk in terms of digital culture rather than focus on the DD.
In an attempt to realize
this ambitious project we tentatively cover four things. First, a brief
genealogy of the term digital culture where we argue that the mobilization of
the idea of information flows to explain the phenomenon is flawed. Rather, we
suggest, we should be discussing the flows of knowledge formation associated
with the concept of convergence. We show that there are three types of
convergence; corporate convergence (where corporations combine a range of media
and related services); technical convergence (where different technologies are
combined) and service-related convergence (where the user has flexibility in
access across a range of technologies and services). Digital culture, we
suggest, is underpinned by these three forms of convergence. Second, we show
how a discourse of knowledge and information has emerged since the 1950s by
tracing a genealogy of the terms used to describe social and cultural change
arising from the impact of technology upon culture. In short, we argue that the
term digital culture is the culmination of these terms used to describe and
account for the new forms of knowledge that emerged since World War II. We call
these new knowledge forms “e-knowledge”. Third, we provide the initial
theoretical framework for studying digital culture. Finally, we take existing
data and re-caste it graphically to exemplify the trends we have identified as
significant in creating digital culture.
Once we accept that
digital culture is more complex than the of the lack of access to technology it
rapidly becomes clear that we have little idea of the actual situation in
respect to what actually constitutes digital culture in either technologically
enhanced societies or technologically deprived societies. This is not to argue
that there are no data. Clearly there are, but we contend that these data are
based on inappropriate categories and systems of measurement. The recent UNESCO
inquiry (Bridging
the Digital Divide, 2001) reads
as though it anticipated finding the “haves” and the “have nots”. This
expectation on the part of UNESCO arose, we would argue, because the
organization approached the DD in the same problematic way it approached
development communication in the 1950s, in terms of technology transfer from
the powerful donor to the grateful recipient rather than as a technological
dialogue (Shoesmith, 1996). Given the powerful
nature and extensive scope of digital communication we think this
characterization is no longer appropriate. One example of what we mean may
suffice.
Carlin is an Australian
diver and salvage operator who has “discovered” the wrecks of HMAS Perth and USN Houston in the Sunda Straits, Indonesia.
Carlin was assisted in his search by a local Indonesian fisherman, who gave him
a surprise;
As the
fisherman pushed off, the Australian noticed he had bucket sitting between his
legs. Inside he was amazed to see a GPS.
How a seemingly impoverished fisherman happened to have such a sophisticated
device – and knew how to use it – still baffles him. (McBeth,
2002, p. 51)
This example is highly
suggestive. Anecdotes about the extent of digital culture and people's use
of modern technology in Asia are now common.
The source of the above quote, the Far
Eastern Economic Review, has increasingly focused on the economic and
social implications of the rapid diffusion of digital technology in Asia. Its narratives, however, are frequently couched in
the language of Carlin and McBeth; providing an orientalist discourse that
is ultimately elitist and patronizing. The Indonesian fisherman’s sophisticated
use of digital technology demonstrates the nature of the dialogue that goes
on between cultures and renders the concept of a digital divide as untenable,
reinforcing the need to expand our understanding of the term digital culture
and what it comprises. In making this point, however, we do not wish to give
the impression that inequalities do not exist between nations or groups of
people. Clearly they do, but not just because people are deprived of access
to computers and the Internet. Moreover, the argument that access to the Internet
will end the inequalities seems to us naïve, highlighting the crude nature
of many of the measures deployed in the analysis of the problem. Nevertheless,
the debate around the DD alerts us to the fact that power is always distributed
asymmetrically, and the lack of access to the Internet is not a solely marker
of inequality, but of the transition from one economic state to another; in
short it marks the transition from pre-modernity to modernity in many cultures.
Couldry (2000) argues further that until the analyst moves into the
field and asks people questions about their views on culture and cultural
products, we really do not have much to go on beyond theology or prejudice. He
goes on to say [it is] “my personal conviction that it is in the direction of
rigorous, wide-ranging empirical research that the future of cultural studies
must lie” (2000, p. ix). It takes no leap of the imagination to transpose
Internet Studies or DD Studies to replace the term cultural studies in this
quote. What follows is our attempt to outline a rigorous empirical approach to
the study of the digital culture that takes into account not only social and
economic trends but also the views of ordinary people who actually select and
use digital technology in the pursuit of their lives.
Like Couldry, we are not
averse to theory in order to establish the base that allows us to elaborate on
digital culture. We think that all human activity lends itself to theorization
and explanation. However, we also think that anecdote has a role to play in
providing the context for theorization. We set out our theoretical framework
before progressing to the methodological considerations. This theoretical
approach is wide-ranging and clearly influenced by cultural studies, augmented
by a methodology derived from the social sciences and incorporates ethnography
and statistical analysis. The application of the theory also allows us to
establish the coordinates for the mapping of digital culture. These
coordinates, we argue, are firmly grounded in people’s everyday lives. In
taking this stance we want to shift the discussion away from the idea of the
digital divide to thinking about digital culture.
Theoretical framework
How then do we make
sense of this diverse digital universe that has emerged in the last decade? We
argue there are a number of possible ways to theorize this situation –
sociologically, semiotically, historically, through post modern theory and so
on – but in our view none of these explanatory systems ultimately provides an
adequate account of the fundamental changes to culture and communication that
the digital revolution has wrought. Rather, we turn to the ideas and concepts
of Innis (1894 – 1952) the Canadian political economist and communication
historian as primary theorist, for two significant reasons. Innis takes the
“long view” of culture and society, which we think appropriate when dealing
with an issue as profound as the formation of new cultural forms. Innis also
provides a satisfactory model that accounts for these formations.
Innis (1951),
like Marx, was not satisfied with quick solutions but rather sought to explain
events, not as a continuum, but in terms of interrelatedness and continuity
rather than through discreteness and discontinuity. As Crowley and Heyer (1991, pp. 1-2) argue,
Innis virtually invented the sub-discipline of communication history, so
compelling are his arguments. Innis was also a prescient thinker (Berland, 1999). Reading the modern cultural studies cannon
can be a disconcerting exercise for an Innisian; one continually hears echoes
of Innis, usually unacknowledged, in arguments about the manner in which new
media fundamentally bring change to social formations. As Berland says
the
differential production of “intellectual capital” is a necessary cornerstone of
the very complex dynamic constituting modern and contemporary centre-margin
relations. Innis’ principle contribution to the history and theory of culture
is his insistence on the central role of communications and transportation
technologies in materially mediating economic, administrative, cultural and
intellectual life. Shapes by their commercial and geographic context, these
technologies facilitate the ongoing production of centre and margins – that is,
spatially differentiated hierarchies of political-economic power (Berland, 1999, p. 282).
The best gloss on Innis,
however, is Carey’s magisterial essay “Culture, Geography, and Communication:
The work of Harold Innis in an American Context” (1989).
Carey gives an overview of Innis’s thinking and the manner in which
communication technologies shape culture (or civilization, which was Innis’s
preferred term). Three propositions from Innis’s work and Carey’s overview of
Innis can be discerned:
1. Monopolies of knowledge develop and decline in
relation to the medium of communication (eg the Catholic Church lost control of
language through Latin and parchment, time-biased media, when printing diffused
the vernacular, space-biased media);
2. All technologies have a contradictory potential;
3. Concentration on a medium of communication implies a
bias in the cultural development of the civilization or culture concerned.
There is a tendency to
see Innis as a technological determinist (Drache, 1995) although as Drache
points out, it is difficult to sustain this argument once you grasp a core idea
of Innis, who says quite explicitly that all technologies have a contradictory
potential. That is, digital communication may for example create the utopia of
the Electronic Frontier Foundation but equally it could induce the information
dystopia described by Carr in his novel Killing
Time (2000) where chaos and social breakdown, not to
mention war and mayhem, are directly attributable to the information revolution
begun in the latter part of the Twentieth Century.
Sassen (2002),
an urban theorist, has also begun to address the issue of the alleged impact
of the digital on society and culture, which for her comprises the modern
city and its particular social forms. Like Castells (2001)
she sees the digital as having an inherent capacity to form networks:
Understanding the place of these new
network technologies from a sociological perspective requires avoiding a purely
technological interpretation and recognition of the embeddedness and the
variable outcomes of these technologies for different economic, political and
social orders. They can indeed be constitutive of new social dynamics, but they
can also be derivative or merely reproduce older conditions. (Sassen,
2002, p. 2)
Sassen goes on to
conclude “the impact of digitization actually results from a combination of
digital and non-digital variables” (2002, p. 13). While
this is a salutary reminder that technology always imbricates the social, it
does little in our view to extend our understanding of the impact of
digitalization. The application of Innis, on the other hand, does add to our
understanding. The struggle between the old and the new means of communication
is central to his argument and is described in great detail in Empire and Communication (1952). He also has an explanation of how the new triumphs
over the old. The success of a new means of communication in supplanting the
old arises because it attracts a monopoly, or more specifically it creates
monopolies of knowledge. The most obvious example of this is the monks in their
scriptoria in the Middle Ages. Burke’s A
Social History of Knowledge (2000) explores how new
monopolies of knowledge emerged in early modern Europe.
Innis unfortunately neglected to provide a detailed explanation of precisely
how a monopoly of knowledge was actually formed. We have to turn to Burke and
other sources in order to construct an account of the conditions under which a
monopoly was created.
Burke (2000)
makes a compelling case that we consider the early modern period of European
history as crucial to our understanding of the modern world. It was the era
when modern institutions were created and with them new forms of knowledge and
new ways of controlling knowledge (pp. 32-52). It was also
the era of printing and the beginning of mass literacy among Europeans. The
speed with which printing permeated European culture compelled scholars (the
clerisy is Burke’s preferred term [pp. 18-31]) to
conceptualize the world in different ways leading to new strategies for
collecting, storing, cataloguing, distributing and consuming knowledge (see in
particular pp. 81-115). Burke actually discusses the
geography of knowledge and his major trope employed to analyze this period is
the map and, as Burke argues, it is these maps that reveal how knowledge is
distributed and monopolies formed in space and over time.
In the analysis of a
more recent era Marvin (1988) provides, we think, the key
to this concept of monopoly. Marvin takes the notion of the “textual community”
and uses it to explain how technologies such as electricity, telephony and
phonography were introduced and successfully dispersed through Victorian society.
The technologies she describes have become so normalized that it is difficult
to grasp that in their day they were not only potentially revolutionary but
there was no guarantee that they would be successful. Marvin’s account draws
upon the work of Stock, a Canadian medievalist, who invented the concept of the
textual community to account for the impact of literacy on religious schism in
11th Century Europe (1983). A textual community revolves around an “authoritative
text and their designated interpreters” (Marvin, 1988, p. 12).
Thus a textual community is built upon a number of key concepts, namely the
text, interpretations of the text that creates a social structure built on the
principles of inclusion and exclusion. Those who are included in the
interpretive framework are empowered, while those excluded are powerless. The
convergence of these elements, in the right conditions, leads to the creation
of a powerful entity as Marvin shows in her detailed study of electrical media
and its proponents in the Nineteenth Century. We would extend these elements
and say they also constitute the major features a monopoly of knowledge.
In the following
sections we explore, albeit tentatively, the ideas surrounding the introduction
of the concept of the digital culture and discuss briefly how it has dispersed
globally, using Innis’ three major propositions as the framework. We look at
the genealogy of the term digital culture, the formation of e-knowledge and
finally address some of the contradictions associated with the diffusion of new
technologies.
The
formation of new monopolies of knowledge
As the Internet has
become more pervasive and socially dispersed enthusiasts have sought to harness
its chaotic energy to quite specific tasks and enterprises. On the one hand
there is a degree of trendiness involved; place “e” before an established
branch of knowledge or human endeavor and you axiomatically have a new way of
thinking about or doing something that may not bear scrutiny. On the other hand
the sign “e” may signify a profound shift in the way something is thought
about. The trick is, of course, to be able to discern which of the alternatives
is in play and as yet we do not have the necessary models that allow us to
assign the significance of the labels. Nevertheless, below is an attempt to
begin this mapping exercise of what we will call e-knowledge. It is also
necessary to point out at this stage that the possibility of thinking in new
ways about old issues as well as new one is not the exclusive property of the
North. One of the intriguing properties of the Internet is its capacity to
transcend boundaries.
Following Innis and
Carey, we argue that digital communication provides a new symbolic universe that
not only requires new ways of thinking about new problems but also provides new
structures in which thought occurs. The digital is not only transcendental but
is also non-linear. We may dip into the knowledge at any point without recourse
to foundational thinking or eschatology. This aspect of the digital has
profound implications for the South as a whole, where the pre-modern, modern
and post-modern coincide in rich profusion. What follows in Table 1 is a
partial listing of some aspects of this new digital cosmology that demonstrates
how new textual communities have generated a lexicon that suggests an extremely
diverse range of ways of linking into these communities. This language is
dynamic and expanding and representative of new emerging epistemologies.
Table 1: New forms of knowledge
|
Economic
|
Political
|
Knowledge
|
Leisure
|
|
e-commerce
|
e-government
|
e-medicine
|
Computer games
|
|
e-business
|
e-participation
|
e-Scholarship
|
Gambling
|
|
e-waste
|
e-voting
|
e-learning
|
Pornography
|
|
e-publishing
|
e-democracy
|
e-strategies
|
Web surfing
|
|
e-advertising
|
|
e-trust
|
e-travel
|
|
e-procurement
|
|
|
|
|
B2B
|
|
|
|
Although the listing is
not exhaustive, it is impossible to analyze all the links between this small
representative group of new formations within the confines of this essay. Here
we concentrate on the political aspects broadly defined. Each of the four
dimensions itemized above represents a significant shift in the conduct of
politics. In part they represent the culmination of the technologization of
politics that began with the press, radio and television. More importantly they
represent an even greater shift in the manner in which the electorate is embedded
in the political process through the act of voting. The secret ballot was a
hard won political right of the 19th century that now has almost
universal acceptance. Clearly, as the plebiscites and elections in one party
state demonstrate, it is open to manipulation but even under the most coercive
of regimes there is also the potential for anonymous, passive protest However,
both information theorists and political scientists see the Internet as
ultimately enhancing the political process through the creation of networks (Agre, 2002: Coleman,
Taylor, & Van de Donk, 1999).
E-government is based on access to the digital world and
has the support of the World Bank (www.worldbank.org/public),
which accepts the argument that e-government provides a number of attractive
features to citizens in emergent democracies. It empowers them through access;
it delivers government services more effectively and efficiently as well as
improving management of the government. These features have important
economically insofar as they reduce costs, improve revenue, and discourage
corruption through greater transparency. While it is never explicitly stated
the tenor of the World Bank discourse is that the introduction of e-government
would benefit Africa and Asia where corruption
and tyranny are perceived to be endemic. The shift this form of government
seems to imply, from the public sphere to the private arena appears not to be
an issue for the bank. Moreover, the possibility that e-government is open to
manipulation seems to have escaped the political theorists responsible for the
World Bank’s paper. There is insufficient space to analyse the reasons why the
World Bank is so supportive of this model of government. Nevertheless the point
remains; whether people have physical access to digital communication is
immaterial. Decisions based on an appreciation of the significance of the
digital may be made at the centre that affects the margins. People in Asia and Africa are now embedded in the digital world whether they
know it or not. However, formation of digital communities is not always this
abstract and deracinated.
Genealogy
of an idea
The U.S. National
Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)
began its discussion of digital culture in 1995 with an analysis of telephone
and computer penetration of homes in the U.S. (Dept of Commerce, 1995),
which it extended in 1997 and 1999. The analyses of the data identified a
number of trends that suggest the gap between the “have” and the “have nots”
was accelerating in a world increasingly dependent of digital communication. To
emphasize the significance of their findings the NTIA
named the reports “Falling Through the Net”, evoking images of social contracts
and safety nets provided by the state to protect the less endowed sections of a
society. UNESCO took up the cause in 2000 with Bridging the Digital Divide articulating concerns that the
developing world was being excluded from a new digital era seemingly dominated
by US
command of the resources. In 1998 26.3 percent of the U.S. population
accessed the Internet and this grew to 54.3 percent in 2000. By contrast only
2.4 percent of the world’s population accessed the Internet, the figure rising
to 6.7 percent by 2000. [1] The discrepancies caused alarm
among policy makers and social theorists for a number of complex reasons. There
is a implicit perception in both the NTIA
reports and the UNESCO documents that digital communication is of a different
order to previous communication “revolutions”, a view we wish to challenge. The
difference, the argument seems to go, lies in the speed, volume and
interactivity of the medium. Its introduction is the harbinger of a new order.
Its impact is economic, political, social and cultural. Exclusion from this new
order would exacerbate the already vast gap between North and South. Castells (2001, 246-274) and Norris (2001, 4-
9) provide insightful accounts of the global implications of the DD that
are beyond the scope of this paper.
The NTIA and UNESCO
narratives deploy what Marvin calls essentially artefactual arguments that sees
the history of communication as “the evolution of technical efficiencies in
communication” whereas we would do better to see it as
A series of arenas for negotiating issues
crucial to the conduct of social life; among them, who is inside and outside,
who may speak, who may not, and who has the authority and may be believed.
Changes in the speed, capacity, and performance of communications devices tell
us little about these questions. (Marvin, 1988, p. 4)
Answering the questions
posed by Marvin will also lead us to reformulating our understanding of digital
culture. The Indonesian fisherman noted above not only possesses a machine but
also the means to quite literally change his way of life. With the GPS he is
part of a digital world that requires him to re-negotiate his economic,
cultural and social co-ordinates.
By emphasizing the
uniqueness of digital communication and its social impact, NTIA and UNESCO lose sight of the history of
communications, which shows us what powerful agents of change literacy and
printing were in their time. The studies of Havelock (1988) and Ong (1982)
are exemplary in respect to orality and literacy and their respective cultural
implications. Eisenstein (1980) and McLuhan (1962) mount
compelling cases about the revolutionary impact pf printing on European
culture, including the colonies that Burke (2000) also
explores in depth. All of the communications technologies identified above were
convergent technologies and it is in convergence that we should look to begin
to grasp the cultural, ecological and environmental significance of digital
culture and communication.
Constructing a genealogy
of terms invented to describe developments in communication and cultural
technologies from the mid-20th century is instructive. In each case
the term becomes one among many that has been used to describe the changes in
knowledge formation associated with the burgeoning of the communication
environment in the period under scrutiny. Moreover, the brevity of the life
span of the various terms is striking. Of the twelve terms we identify only two
have had longevity – McLuhan’s “global village” and Bell’s “post-industrial society”. The brief
life of the other terms is indicative of two things. In the first place they
fail to actually capture and describe the conditions they purport to describe.
The terms are, in short, little more than metaphors used to describe an ongoing
condition of asymmetry that has characterized global economic, political and
cultural relations since at least the 16th century, the beginning of
European expansion on a global scale. Second, the speed with which things
appear to change. Again, it is important to refer back to earlier communication
“revolutions” and the apparent speed of change (Burke, 2000),
suggesting that the velocity of change is relative to the social structure of
an era. In Table 2 we provide a partial listing of the antecedent terms
relating to the digital culture.
Table 2: A genealogy of descriptive communication terms
|
Era
|
Term
|
Source
|
Conditions
|
Relations
|
|
1950s
|
The End of Ideology
|
Daniel Bell
The End of ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political ideas in the
fifties (1965)
|
|
Precedes Fukuyama by three
decades. More a response to living in a nuclear world than a claim of US
triumphalism.
|
|
|
Rise of new
information class
|
Milovan Djilas, (1953) The New Class:
An Analysis of the Communist Regime.
|
|
The new bureaucrats
and their reliance on information to maintain control in a Marxist-Leninist
context.
|
|
|
The rise of the
meritocracy
|
Michael Young, (1958) The Rise of the
Meritocracy 1870 – 2033: An Essay on Education and Equality.
|
|
The increase of
information workers as a result of changing education practices in a liberal
democracy.
|
|
|
The emergence of
post-capitalist society
|
Ralph Dahrendorf, (1959) Class and
Class Conflict in an Industrial Society.
|
|
Changes in the nature
and composition of class as a sociological category in changing economic
circumstances.
|
|
1960s
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Global Village
|
Marshall McLuhan (1964) Understanding
media: The Extensions of Man.
|
A timely recognition
of the significance of changes in communication, information and
entertainment patterns based on electronic media
|
Recognition of
emerging globalism and translational capital and their potential affect on
culture.
|
|
|
|
Jean-Francois Lyotard
(1979) The
Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(shift to 1970s)
|
Changing patterns of
social life, rise of feminism and acceptance of birth control.
|
A major shift in perception
that challenged the dominant meta-narratives of industrial society.
|
|
1970s
|
Age of Information
|
|
Economy based on
commodification of knowledge and information.
|
Industrial production
and manufacturing shifted offshore and/or outsourced.
|
|
|
Information Economy
|
Marc Uri Porat, (1977) The Information
Economy: Definitions and Measurement.
|
Term signifies the
shift from an economy based on industrial capital to one based on
transnational capital that privileges information as a product.
|
Employment dominated
by service industries. Social relations increasingly atomized.
|
|
|
Post-Industrial
Society
|
Daniel Bell The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A
Venture in Social Forecasting (1973
|
Describing the shift
in productive capacity in the industrialized world towards the service
economy.
|
Shift from US and
Europe to Japan
of manufacturing heralding change in center-margin relations.
|
|
1980s
|
Information Society
|
A term that has
evolved over the decades and common usage emerged in the 1980s.
|
Refinement of the
notion of the Age of Information, where computers have become central
convergent media.
|
The “me” generation
where greed is good characterized by conflation of knowledge and information,
with both viewed as commodities.
|
|
|
Third Wave
|
Alvin Tofler The Third Wave (1980)
|
A term invented to
signify a new industrial and social order, successor to the industrial world.
A populist account that boosts the benefits of technological change. Has been
very influential in China.
|
The recognition that
that there had been fundamental changes in working and social relations as
well as the relations of production.
|
|
|
Gene Age
|
Robert Lewontin, Steve
Rose and L.J. Kamin (1984) Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and human nature
|
|
Fundamental change in
ways society thinks about human life as a consequence of progress in
biological knowledge and information. A shift in the nature versus nurture
debate.
|
|
|
The Control Revolution
|
Beniger, James R (1986) The Control
revolution: Technological and economic origins of the information age
|
|
An influential work
that is underpinned by a recognition of the unease apparent in
post-industrial culture about the degree of social control the modern
bureaucratic state exercises.
|
|
1990s
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Information Super
highway
|
Al Gore (1994)
Building the information superhighway.
|
Awareness that the
Internet represents a significant new medium with wide applications across
cultures.
|
Prominence of
networking. Possibly the first clearly articulated political response to the
“information revolution”.
|
|
|
Virtual Communities
|
Howard Rheingold (1993) The Virtual
Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
|
Metaphorical rendering
of new social conditions based on converging technologies.
|
The impact of
computers on human consciousness.
|
|
|
Cybersociety
|
|
|
In the mid-1990s a
host of works appear that address the changes conditions of modernity. New
spaces, new temporal regimes and new economic relationships. Meta narratives employed in the past to elaborate the
human condition no longer seem adequate.
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Network Society
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A remarkable work of
sociological synthesis. Castells addresses the fundamental shifts in
modernity from a position informed by a deep understanding of classical
social theory. He recognizes that new formulations are required.
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Network theory as
explained by Castells takes up and extends the pronouncements of McLuhan in
the sense that networks mirror both the human nervous system and everyday
patterns of life in social situations.
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2000s
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The Digital Divide
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Recognition of the
pervasiveness of the new technologies and the articulation of a political
solution to solve a US
domestic issue that became a global issue.
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Confirmation that
communication technologies had changed and were perceived to have profound
political, economic and cultural consequences.
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Digital Culture
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The pervasive
influence of digital forms on all aspects of modern life, from domestic
settings to outer space.
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The emergence of new
forms of knowledge related to new ways to storage, process and retrieval.
|
Each of the terms, and
the influential texts where they are elaborated, explores new ways of thinking
about the world and the human condition. In terms of new monopolies of
knowledge, the terms show discursive attempts to describe major shifts in what
is conceived as “information” and “knowledge”, the nature of the distribution
of information and knowledge itself, and the centrality of information and
knowledge to a new economy. In an Innisian context, this means a greater bias
towards space (instantaneous reception of information), potentially greater
access to the means of distribution of knowledge (difficulties in central
control of that information and the technologies associated with it, eg
Napster), and new literacies required to access and to use information and
knowledge. At the core of each metaphoric rendering of the changing conditions
is the introduction of a new technology that induces new ways of thinking about
phenomena. At the same time there is always tension between the new and what it
challenges. The impact of all of these has been more pronounced in the North
but in each era the concepts and ideas embedded in the terms discussed also
impinged upon Asia, incrementally changing the way Asia
and Asians thought about themselves in a post-colonial environment. Evidence is
also beginning to emerge suggesting that the same trajectory applies to Africa
(see the material on Ghana
below). We argue that two factors link all of these terms. First, they are
attempts to describe the process of convergence in a number of different forms.
Second, is the presence of an emerging digital culture. The significance of the
digital culture is that it represents more inclusive forms of knowledge than
any of its predecessors.
Making sense of experience [2]
Gallop (2002) argues
that theory has wrongly suppressed the importance of anecdotes in the analysis
of social and cultural phenomena because they are messy and unverifiable.
However, for Gallop the anecdote provides a powerful link between subjects and
the manner in which they make sense of experience. Anecdotes precede
theorization and contribute significantly to the manner in which we understand
phenomena. In the case of this paper anecdotes help to tease out how
traditional monopolies of knowledge are being tested or challenged. It is in
this sense that we offer the following anecdotal impressions.
Indonesia
In 2002, on the fourth
floor of the Ciputra Shopping Mall, South Jakarta
are seven or eight Internet cafes in a row. All of them are full to bursting
with both young men and women occupying the chairs that are packed close
together. Space is at a premium and demand to access the computers is high, as
two universities are located immediately adjacent to the shopping mall and
traditionally the students cannot afford to purchase their own computers. Thus,
both demand and use of computers is high in this sector of Jakarta
but this is not reflected in the statistics relating to access available for Indonesia.
Moreover, the computers are used for both study purposes and leisure surfing.
The former activity is usually endorsed by society while the latter causes
concern. There is evidence that pornography may be accessed in these settings
and it is this sort of surfing that alarms the authorities as it has a special
resonance in a predominantly Muslim country like Indonesia. Moreover, it is clear
that in the urban setting access to computers is widespread among the young.
In another context,
under the Suharto regime the publication of the Jawa Pos, one of Surabaya’s (East Java) leading newspapers was strictly controlled.
Its ambition to become a major regional publisher was frustrated at every turn
by the New Order regulations relating to newspaper publication. Post-Suharto it
produces over seventy titles ranging from newspapers and tabloids catering for Surabaya as well as
nearby towns to special interests magazines focusing on sport and motoring. All
of these publications are produced in a specially built complex located on the
outskirts of Surabaya,
printed on very modern, computerised printing presses by a vertically and
horizontally integrated company. The success of the Jawa Pos Group of companies is replicated elsewhere in Indonesia. The
increase in the volume of publications in terms of readership and titles points
to an increase in literacy among the people of East Java.
Warschauer (2001) explores the connection between
increasing exposure to computers and literacy, suggesting that the two are
linked.
China
The status of the
Internet in China [2] has probably attracted more critical attention than any
other aspect of digital culture in Asia. The
reasons for this are complex and extensive and a detailed analysis of China and the
Internet is beyond the scope of this essay. [3] Here we focus on three factors; the apparent
contradiction between the anarchy of the Internet and the control ideology of
the Chinese government; the size of the Chinese Internet market and the
inequalities of modern Chinese society that are supposedly highlighted by the
lack of access to the Internet.
In many respects the
struggle over the Internet in China
is the struggle between Confucianism and Daoism transposed to a modernist
setting. No government is more anxious to harness the power of the Internet for
the economic development of their nation than the Chinese Communist Party
(hereafter CCP) (Hearn & Shoesmith, 2001, 2002a.
2002b). Its approach is thoroughly Confucian. The development of the Internet
must occur within strict guidelines devised by government bureaucrats in the
Ministry of Information Industries (MII) at the behest of their political
masters. People may not access specific sites that are blocked by government
decree. These sites are blocked using sophisticated software devised by U.S. companies
for the Chinese authorities and who, in other contexts, subscribe to open
access to the Internet and normally eschew state control of information flows.
Access to Google was blocked in anticipation of the Chinese leadership meetings
to plan the 16th People’s Congress in August 2002 (Lawrence, 2002: 34 – 36). This was swiftly followed by
blocking access to Alta Vista, another major search engine
(chineseinternetresearch list, accessed 24/9//02) by the authorities. However,
the decision to block Google and Alta Vista meant that the CNN site became
available to Chinese surfers for the first time since 1989 (it is normally
blocked) and CNN is linked to Google (as is Yahoo). Internet users in China quickly
grasped this anomaly and reported the fact on the various international sites
devoted to Chinese issues such as the China
News Daily and the chineseinternetresearch list. This incident, then,
points to the Daoist nature of the Internet. It is highly personal, dispersed
and ephemeral. We argue that the digital culture emerging in China
represents a fundamental shift in Chinese cosmology that the authorities are
acutely aware of.
At another level there
is suspicion, arising from the Confucian/Daoist dichotomy, that the extensive
use of the Internet in China
is itself anomalous. In a very short space of time the number of users has
increased to over 45 million. The number of computers available seems to be
growing exponentially and there is a burgeoning Internet café scene in the
major Chinese cities. China
is now the second largest computer market in the world after the U.S., and it is
expected to surpass that market by 2005 (Shoesmith
& Wang, 2002). At the same time that computer access and use increases
in China, the country is
entering an era of instability, characterized by the massive inequalities
between the prosperous cities of the eastern seaboard and the poorer rural
center of China.
There is also the prospect of massive unemployment as the state-owned
industries, governed by the principle of the “iron rice bowl”, struggle to
adapt to capitalism with “Chinese characteristics”. The prospect of political
instability also arises with the transfer of political power from Jiang Zemin
to his successors at the 16th Party Congress (October – November,
2002). The contradiction between the possession of computers and the economy
and culture they embody and the status of China as a developing nation is
difficult to reconcile. The contradiction is deepened when we grasp how few
Chinese as a proportion of the total population actually access computers –
approximately 4.5 percent (Shoesmith & Wang, 2002).
These figures suggest that there is a digital divide in China, which
has profound political and economic implications for the country. However, two
other aspects of digital culture are now common in China. China is an image-saturated culture
with over 90 percent of the population able to access TV, much of which is now
digital, and the mobile phone is ubiquitous.
If we look at China from a
different perspective we can construct another scenario. Prior to the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1965-1974) Chinese communication policy was
characterized by “maximum effect with minimal technology” (Wang & Shoesmith, 2002). That is, the old media
(books, broadsheets, radio, Tannoy loudspeakers, and film) were used to great
effect for propaganda. At the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution television
was introduced on a mass scale. By the early 1990s China was a TV saturated culture.
This was achieved in a number of ways with one of the most significant
developments being the introduction of closed cable television (cctv) to the
work units that formed the basis of Chinese social and economic life (Shoesmith & Wang, 2002). The function of cctv was
to relay Chinese Central Television (CCTV) into every home possible to ensure
that state propaganda was effectively distributed. In short, Industrial
Community TV demonstrates how a specific culture adapts the media to the needs
of a “conceptually bounded community” (Shoesmith &
Wang, 2002). TV was not just a medium for propaganda in these circumstances
but also an agent for entertainment – which in the circumstances has had
profound political resonance for the CCP. We would suggest something similar
may be happening with computers and other forms of digital culture in China.
Samoa
One of the problems
associated with mapping culture is the availability of reliable social data for
the pre-TV or pre-computer era. The problem is compounded by the fact that few
seem to have recognized the possibilities for social change embedded in the
technologies, largely we believe because of the specter of technological determinism
that hovers around social analyses that address the possible impact of
technology upon social behavior. Consequently we are compelled to infer from
data gathered for other purposes. Thus, in trying to plot the cultural
distribution of digital technology we have to look back to the introduction of
TV to a conceptually bounded, and geographically remote, society; in this case Western Samoa.
Table 3: Television viewing and
other evening activities in Western Samoan households, 4-10 pm
% of
Time Spent
Without TV With TV
Prayers 6 4
Eating 17 10
Talking/Discussion 30 9
Story telling/Singing 15 3
Visiting friends/
Community activities 22 4
Playing
cards/
Weaving mats 10 0
Watching TV 0 70
Source: Martin (1987: 3-21)
Table 3 indicates the
social activities before and after the introduction of TV in Samoa.
This data shows three important trends.
·
It shows that television
replaced a set of social activities that were time-biased media (weaving, story
telling) with a space-biased medium, watching television. However, it does not
explain why one activity has replaced the others, which is a matter of
conjecture.
·
The introduction of TV
placed Samoans in new conceptual world that demanded new forms of “literacy”
for them to make sense of the knowledge they were exposed to;
·
This new knowledge
required new understandings of production and consumption of meaning.
It is also important to
recognize that while the introduction of TV achieved these three things it did
so on a minimal basis. That is, at no time were Samoans exposed to the same
repertoire of knowledge embedded in TV as their American counterparts.
Nevertheless, they entered into the “televisual” world of the American that
demanded a range of reading skills, albeit on a reduced scale. We think this is
important, and similar principles apply in situations in Asia and Africa, where computers and other forms of digital
culture are found in limited form. As Innis (1934/1984)
points out, the first indigenous hunter to trade a fur with a voyageur in the Sixteenth Century
entered into a global economic network, whether they recognized it or not.
It is difficult to
construe the Samoan experience as a “divide” or a “gap”. It does make sense,
though, to talk about the rise of a new literacy. Our brief discussion about
Indonesia and China also suggests that the co-ordinates for such analyzing new
monopolies of knowledge range from space and time (the Indonesian fisherman has
a new way of construing his map of the world over time and space), center and
peripheries (Internet cafes flourish in poorer countries showing that
peripheries can bypass central norms of access), knowledge and technology
(diffusion of technology does not necessarily equate with cultural erosion, as
is the case with Samoa), politics and economics (conceptually bounded
communities, like the ICTs in China show that political and economic
circumstances at a local level can contradict assumptions at a macro level).
The contradictory potential of technologies
Ghana’s telecom mess limits the utility
of the Internet, raises the costs
of information services-and suggests that the country is
mired in the Stone Age, technologically. But the situation here, as in much of
sub-Saharan Africa, defies such
straightforward conclusions. There is another side to the country’s
technological profile, a burgeoning homegrown technology culture that explodes
assumptions about the inherent backwardness of Africa
and the nature of the so-called digital divide (Zachary,
2002, p. 88).
In the
late 1990s, luminaries such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates and the UN’s Kofi Annan
together with the G8 group and the World Economic Forum saw the giving of
computers to poor countries as an opportunity to close the digital divide. As
Zachary points out, “These plans have come to little or nothing. In the main,
the rich have dropped boatloads of computers onto the poor with no awareness of
the environment in which the machines will (or will not) be used.” (Zachary, 2002).
If
technology alone is used as an indicator of a “digital divide”, then the United States
can be construed as “poor” in mobile phones, as Figure 1 demonstrates. The United States has significantly less mobile
phones than Italy but
significantly more personal computers than Italy. Perhaps the world community
should be sending mobile phones to the United
States and personal computers to Italy?
If we
look at Ghana,
one of the world’s poorest countries, then we see that its mobile phone numbers
are low, compared with wealthier nations. But if we examine Figure 1 closely,
then it becomes clear how rapid mobile phone subscription growth was in Ghana between
1995-1998.
Figure 1: Mobile phones & PCs per 100 people
Legend: 1. Italy 2. Sweden 3. Britain 4. Germany 5. South Korea 6. France 7. Japan 8. United States
9. Ghana
Source: International
Telecommunications Union dataset, 2002.
For example,
if we compare the U.S. (8)
with Italy (1), we find that
Italy has wide distribution
of mobile phones compared to America
but only moderate distribution of PCs. The pattern raises a series of questions
about the relationship between culture and technology in different contexts
that are beyond the scope of this essay. By all social and economic criteria Ghana is considered a poor country and yet the
data shows that there is a high penetration of PCs, and as we show below the
situation in respect to mobile phones is rapidly changing in Ghana.
Conventional arguments about the digital divide are challenged by these data,
which augments our view that it is digital culture that should be the focus of
our discussions and analysis.
Figure
2: Mobile subscriptions, 1995 and 1998
Ghanians
see mobile phones as one of the ways out of a poorly performing grid-locked
terrestrial telecommunications system that has blighted internal communications
since independence from Britain
in 1957. In the mid-1990s Bossman Dowuona-Hammond convinced Ghana’s government that it was worthwhile controlling
a satellite link that by-passed Accra’s phone system (Zachary,
2002). The Ghanian enthusiasm for the mobile phone is replicated in Nigeria (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1905744.stm,
accessed 10/3/20020) which suggests
to us the inclusive power of digital communications, which is the core activity
of digital culture, is widely accepted by diverse social and cultural groups.
According to Dowuona-Hammond, “In the past, fear prevented us from getting
the tools we needed. With the right tools, we can compete.” (Zachary,
2002).
Interestingly,
the Ghanian experience can also be found in the United States, where in 2002
56.8 per cent of Asian and Pacific Islander households had internet access
compared with 46.1 per cent of White households. Hispanic households were
at 23.6 per cent, double the access only 20 months before (Schutz,
2001).
What these data tell us
is that we have to telescope very carefully any analysis of a digital culture.
If we rely on only one coordinate, say technology, then a very skewed picture
of the digital cultural landscape emerges.
The bias of communication
If print technology
heralded a massive shift towards space-biased media in the middle- ages, and a
loosening of central control of knowledge, then digital technology is
indicative of an increasing imbalance between time and space-biased media, with
associated tensions of diffusion and control. The term digital divide is open
to a number of interpretations. At its worst, it is a continuation of the
asymmetrical modeling of communication that characterized much of the writing
on development communication from the 1950s through the 1970s. More
productively it reminds us of the asymmetries in any culture with regard to
access to material technology. The word “divide” also implies that the gap may
be bridged, in this case through the provision of computers. Here we are
talking about top-down models of communication where the active donor gives to
a passive and grateful recipient. For these reasons, we reject this term and
the model it embodies as being too exclusive and fundamentally inadequate to
account for the profound changes all societies and cultures seem to be
undergoing, changes that have attracted the attention of numerous social
theorists. We propose that the term digital culture should be used as the
overarching theoretical bases for research and comment on the changes we
identify.
What we have attempted
to show, in a preliminary form, is a complex situation shaped by difference. It
is our view that re-focusing the debate on digital culture per se rather than
one aspect of that culture, the digital divide, should be the focus of the
research agenda. Or to put the argument in an Innisian context, concentration
on a medium of communication implies a bias in the cultural development of the
civilization or culture concerned. The idea of “digital culture” suggested here
highlights the continued shift towards a “space bias” in cultural development,
worldwide. There is no argument with the fact that computing and the Internet
are significant cultural additions that have profoundly changed cultural
behavior. However, access to the Internet and computing is only one aspect of
the digital revolution that has occurred and to emphasize this above all other
aspects is to create a partial and inaccurate picture. Rather, we would seek to
identify as many other aspects of digital culture as possible that will not
only show graphically the pervasiveness of digital culture but also allow us to
compare and analyze its impact and affect on culture generally. In short, we
have reached a point in the discourse of information and knowledge where it is
appropriate to talk of digital culture. As we have shown, there are many
instances, at an individual level as well as collectively, where audiences are
taking advantage of digital technologies in ways that the digital divide
argument does not acknowledge. This is not to suggest that asymmetries of
access and power do not exist. On the contrary, it is abundantly clear that
they do, but what we wish to assert is that if we ignore the contradictory
potential of these digital technologies then we ignore the complexity and
variety of a technologically enriched era. Finally, we also contend that a digital
culture provides each community and nation with a range of new symbolic
resources. This symbolic realm demands an interpretation that cannot be
provided by existing explanatory frameworks hence the emergence of digital
textual communities.
Endnotes
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