Chin Saik Yoon
Chief Editor

Some trends and concerns

Nearly every economy in Asia Pacific has engaged ICTs as components in broader strategies to make life better. Many of the strategies have modest intentions; only a few are deliberately aimed at transforming the economies which they serve. Given the range of social, cultural, economic and political heritage present in the region, the chances of ICTs transforming life in Asia Pacific are as great as the possibility of the region changing the technologies. This may happen when ICTs are customised to fit specific circumstances. Gordon Graham’s (1999, p. 169) philosophical inquiry into the new technologies concluded that “we may expect the Internet to be tempered by human nature and the human condition as much as, indeed more than, we may expect it to transform them”. The developed countries in the region have already shown that they are very capable masters of ICTs. Some of the developing countries have also demonstrated their mastery by simplifying and paring down complicated technologies to meet their special needs.

However, the majority of the countries in Asia Pacific are just beginning to get a firm grip on the new technologies. Training people to install, operate and maintain ICTs is the first step for many of the economies. The region will continue to benefit from a large number of human resource development programmes in the short term. Although many of the programmes will be targeting formal education, an increasing number will be informal efforts conducted over the Internet using plain e-mail or mailing lists. The encouraging experience of the Indonesian ICT fraternity in providing informal ICT training will be an inspiration to many others in the region, especially those from developing countries.

The infrastructure across the region will continue to be enhanced in the near future. However, the economic problems faced by many of the economies will curb both public and private sector investments in the infrastructure. Countries which have just adopted ICTs will be busy building the primary infrastructure to connect their population to the Internet for the first time. This will be a major undertaking in many of the remote areas as they do not just lack Internet connections but also nearly all the other channels of communication – telephone, television, postal services and newspaper. In the developed areas of Asia Pacific, infrastructure building will upgrade existing networks to high-speed capacities, which will enable true multimedia and interactive applications, including video, audio and gaming.

As infrastructure improves and the technical capacity to send and receive information increases, national information gate-keepers across the region will continue to diverge in their approaches to Internet regulation. It will be an extension of the divergence already clearly evident in the region. Many will permit a free flow of information with perhaps oversight by senior members of civil society empowered in the fashion of press councils. This will be the light-touch approach.

Others will be more assertive and will establish blocking and information-filtering mechanisms, and perhaps apply even more intrusive surveillance systems, to bring traditional gate-keeping online. This approach creates a dilemma for policy makers. While it may help to address official concerns about the free flow of information and communication, at the same time it undermines the very reason why ICTs were adopted in the first place – to engage in the information economy. The growth of the new economy is merging the channels used in business and social communication with those deployed to deliver information goods and services. These channels must be secure, and trusted to be so, for such transactions to take place (Diffie & Landau, 1999). Channels which are monitored, filtered and blocked will retard the development of the information economy.

The region’s preoccupation with governance of the Internet within the boundaries of their respective economies may prove to be detrimental to local interests in the long run. Asia Pacific, as the largest user group in the world, exercises surprisingly limited influence on how the Internet is run at important forums like ICANN. The region’s lack of engagement and initiative in international governance can also prove to be expensive. The national bandwidth inquiry undertaken by the Australian Information Economy Advisory Council (1999) showed that international charging arrangements, at the time of the study, were “inequitable” because Australian ISPs were not reimbursed for carrying US-generated traffic on the trans-Pacific links. This meant that Australian ISPs and Internet users were in effect subsidising US ISPs and their customers, thereby eroding Australia’s international competitiveness.

Asian participation in legally binding international negotiations which determine how intellectual property is protected and exchanged is just as weak. Some of the most critical negotiations underway at the time of writing are those relating to the services sector being conducted at the WTO. An expert meeting (UNCTAD, 2002) on audiovisual services underlined the importance of developing countries asserting their positions in these negotiations. The experts recognised that these services play an important function in “transmitting civilizational values”. They concurred that audiovisual services, like other cultural industries, have a “significance that transcends their economic value”. These services represent a nation-building instrument that ensures respect for cultural diversity, traditions, national values and heritage. In addition to this primary role, they are also quickly evolving an increasingly vital economic function as “a pillar of the new economy”. In relation to this new role, some of the experts noted with concern the concentration of market power among Internet access providers. They also noted the “growing penetration of commercial models for providing information on the Internet”. The experts recommended that action be taken at the international level to ensure that a public domain is preserved for free public access. For these reasons, the public and private sectors in the region should engage themselves urgently in these international negotiations so as to safeguard their local interests in the long run.

The Internet is better known today as a cheap, ubiquitous channel for delivering information and online services. However, its true transforming potential lies in the interactive capabilities of ICTs. They were invented to provide a two-way communication channel. This changed when the private sector went online in large numbers and converted the Internet into a low-cost broadcasting platform for the delivery of its content and services globally. Many practitioners working on the World Wide Web ignore the interactive potential of ICTs and design systems and websites which deliver content and services in a top-down and urban-to-rural fashion. The preference of users in Asia Pacific (as well as the rest of the world) for the two-way mode of communication is clearly evident in the continuing popularity of e-mail applications. Many of us now find e-mail an indispensable component of our daily lives; we can probably make do without web access for a while but will find our work significantly impaired without our daily downloads of personal mail. The popularity of e-mail for interpersonal communication is clearly evident in post office statistics from Brunei. In 1993, the country received 349,000 kilograms and sent abroad 78,700 kilograms of conventional mail. Eight years later, in 2001, Brunei received 222,900 kilograms and sent abroad only 37,300 kilograms of mail (p. 61). Out going mail had been reduced by more than half; apparently e-mail is quickly replacing postal mail.

An encouraging number of Asia-Pacific communities have discovered the transforming qualities of two-way information flows. Nepal’s National Planning Commission posted the draft national information technology policy on the Web and invited stakeholders to e-mail their comments and suggestions on how the draft could be refined in the final draft. This simple strategy proved both useful and popular. It helped mobilise stakeholders not only around the drafting of the policy but also in its implementation (Chin, 2002a). Mongolia is involved in a similar experiment. In 2001, the office of the Prime Minister created a website for “open government” which enables citizens to interact online with officials and to post their comments on draft laws and regulations (p. 179).

One-fifth of the Asia-Pacific population, or about 614 million people, will not be able to go online even if Internet access is made available and given free to everyone in the region. The reason is that they are illiterate. Not since the invention of printing with movable type about 500 years ago have we seen the introduction of a mass communication technology which excludes illiterate users. The telephone, radio, television and fax machine have catered to the needs of everyone. The predominantly text-based ICTs have excluded the 398 million women and 216 million men from the region who cannot read and write (UIS, 2002).

This should not be the case. With multimedia capabilities, ICTs need not be used to run solely text-based applications. Touch-screen navigation and the use of icons, visuals and audio can all potentially help illiterate users get online. A variety of strategies have been piloted in the region for making the Internet available to not only illiterate users but also other members of communities. The Kothmale Community Radio Internet Project (UNESCO, 2001) in Sri Lanka involves broadcasters researching questions phoned or mailed in by listeners, on a computer with an Internet connection. The answers are read on air and reach not only the people who asked the questions but others who are listening in. Another promising experiment is being carried out in Pondicherry, in the south of India, by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation. Project staff download a map from a US Navy website every day. Information about wave heights and wind directions contained in the maps is then read aloud over loudspeakers to members of the fishing community served by the project (Dugger, 2000). This simple web-to-voice experiment is literally saving lives by steering people away from dangerous sea conditions.

The time may be opportune for practitioners and industries in the region to innovate their own voice and audio-based technologies to extend the benefits of ICTs to everyone in the region. The solution may be in the form of a simple, low-cost village PDA which enables users to navigate the Web using voice and audio facilities. It may evolve to be a super telephone offering not only affordable international calls to anywhere in the world but also to audio-based databases where users can retrieve content or record their own contributions to the collection.

Asia Pacific is headed in different directions to find the best match of the new ICTs to the particular requirements of the different economies. These differing orientations offer us fascinating cases to learn from. The numerous experiments will yield invaluable lessons to Asians and others studying us from outside the region. Although the methods may differ, the region is united in what it sees in the digital future. This vision was succinctly defined by representatives of 48 countries, 21 international organisations, 53 private sector entities and 116 NGOs who met in early 2003 in Tokyo, Japan, for a consultation on the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS):

The concept of an Information Society is one in which highly-developed ICT networks, equitable and ubiquitous access to information, appropriate content in accessible formats and effective communication, can help people to achieve their potential, promote sustainable economic and social development, improve quality of life for all, alleviate poverty and hunger, and facilitate participatory decision-making processes (WSIS, 2003).

References

Australian Information Economy Advisory Council (1999). National Bandwidth Inquiry. Canberra: Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. p. 183 http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_1-4_14914,00.html.

Chin, Saik Yoon (2002a). Participatory Policy Making in Nepal. In Pan Asia ICT R&D. pp.17–22. Singapore: International Development Research Centre.

Chin, Saik Yoon (2002b). The E-Marketers of South India. In Pan Asia ICT R&D. pp. 9 –12. Singapore: International Development Research Centre.

Diffie, Whitfield & Landau, Susan (1999). Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Dugger, Celia W. (2000). Connecting Rural India to the World. New York Times on the Web, 28 May http://www.mssrf.org.

Dyke, Greg (2003). Dyke Slates “Gung-Ho” War Reports http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2973163.stm.

Graham, Gordon (1999). The Internet: A Philosophical Inquiry. London: Routledge.

ITU (2002). Asia-Pacific Telecommunication Indicators 2002. Geneva: International Telecommunication Union.

Schiller, Dan (2000). Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

UIS (2002). Regional Adult Illiteracy Rate and Population by Gender. July Year 2002 Assessment. Montreal: UNESCO Institute for Statistics http://www.uis.unesco.org.

UNCTAD (2002). Report of the Expert Meeting on Audiovisual Services: Improving Participation of Developing Countries. Geneva: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

UNESCO (2001). Kothmale Community Radio Internet Project. CD-ROM. UNESCO New Delhi Regional Office.

WSIS (2003). The Tokyo Declaration: The Asia-Pacific Perspective to the WSIS. Tokyo: World Summit on the Information Society Asia-Pacific Regional Conference.

Content
Online services
Innovative and key initiatives
Enabling policies
Some trends and concerns