Shahid Akhtar
UNDP-APDIP

Claude-Yves Charron
Orbicom

Maria Ng Lee Hoon
IDRC-PAN

“The new communications era should not be perceived as a purely technological phenomenon. Its ultimate impact is social and cultural, although technological advancement is the key enabler. This new era invites a change in social and cultural patterns.”

Tengku Mohd Azzman Shariffadeen1 (1996)

The Digital Review of Asia Pacific aims to report on the state-of-practice of ICTs in the region, on the innovative ways the new technologies are being deployed to advance the socioeconomic development of Asia-Pacific countries and on emerging attempts to transform the digital divide into digital opportunities.

To take stock of the situation and elicit some of the future trends involved, four organisations decided to come together on this initiative as co-publishers of this volume: the Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (APDIP) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Pan Asia Networking (PAN) Programme of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and, the network of UNESCO Chairs in Communications (ORBICOM) in close collaboration with Southbound. This publication is an extension of the innovative editorial concept for the Pan Asia Networking Yearbook published in the early years of the digital revolution by IDRC.

The readership we are aiming to serve includes all who work at societal transformation through ICTs for development, including policy makers, members of industry, ICT specialists and development practitioners both within the Asia-Pacific region and on the international scene.

The authors participating in this initiative belong to the same diverse constituencies as the target audiences and come from 27 economies in the region, including areas for which almost no data was available until very recently. The authors and members of the editorial board met in Kuala Lumpur in November 2002 to conduct a peer-review process, which determined the content of this publication and elicited the regional trends published here. They also enjoyed the opportunity of taking part in a public forum at the MIMOS headquarters while in Malaysia.

A choice was made by the participants of the Kuala Lumpur meeting for a non-technology focus for this first edition of the Digital Review of Asia Pacific to complement the existing body of literature devoted mainly to connectivity, access and e-readiness issues,² ensuring that this publication meets the current critical need of reporting on how the region is deploying ICTs for development.

A number of our contributing authors took part in the Asia-Pacific regional consultation on the World Summit on the Information Society, and the series of case studies presented here provide us with an impressive diagnostic of the transition between the digital divide and the digital opportunities for the countries covered. These diagnostics will be updated on a regular basis via e-mail to registered subscribers. This publication will be followed up by the 2004–2005 edition.

The case studies and the regional trends discussed in this edition present us with a unique source of information by key scholars, members of the industry and policy makers who are well established in their respective countries. The chapters provide solid, well-grounded and nuanced perspectives on current issues and challenges. They make a unique contribution to ongoing national debates concerning endogenous development and to regional and international debates leading to the two phases of the World Summit on the Information Society of December 2003 in Geneva and November 2005 in Tunis.

The regional trends provide us with the building blocks for a discussion on the leadership needed to effectively deploy ICTs to achieve development goals and about the different types of actors involved: national governments, corporations, scholarly communities, civil society and donor agencies. One of the weak links undoubtedly relates to the lack of leadership within some technology and scholarly communities to strengthen the response of the education system to the ICT revolution and to provide leadership in the localisation of content.

A very young man, more than 40 years ago, presented a PhD dissertation entitled Struckturwandel der Offentlichkeit,³ later published by Herman Luchterhand Verlag (1962). One might consider, when reading the 28 essays here, that we could expand on Habermas’ analysis of the role of the press in the creation of a new public sphere and consider that we are entering a new communications era, with the technologies and the cultural and social changes they induce, confronting us with a new type of public sphere, very different from the traditional mass media, much more participatory in nature and much more international.

Such a new set of dynamics, be it in Afghanistan or in Japan, Timor-Leste, China or India, invites us to an unfamiliar way of riding the waves of change. We still have to learn how to cope with these new dynamics and to ensure that they allow for the realisation of the millennium development goals.

Notes

1.   Azzman Shariffadeen (1996). New Communications Era: Economic, Social and Cultural Consequences for Developing Nations. In A. Goonasekara, Y.S. Beng & A. Mahizhnan (Eds), Opening Windows: Issues in Communications. (pp. 104–12). Singapore: Asian Media Information and Communication Centre.

2.   Dutra, S., Lanvin, B. & Paua, F. (Eds) (2003). The Global Information Technology Report: Readiness for the Networked World. New York : Oxford University Press.

3.   Habermas, Jurgen (Translated by Thomas Burger) (2000). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 11th printing.