JohnsBlog

The internet, though global in reach, has its own specific geography, simultaneously linking and dividing people and places in new ways. As Manuel Castells demonstrates in The Internet Galaxy, plotting any aspect of the internet economy – origins of diffusion, locations of technical infrastructure, location of investors, service providers and content producers, location of users – will give you a map of the digital landscape which is both familiar and rapidly changing (Castells, 2002). Like Mercator’s Projection, which exaggerates the imperial North while shrinking the underdeveloped South, our Internet map would massively inflate the size of the most technically advanced countries of North America, Europe and the Pacific rim and further belittle the developing countries of the South.

Within the magic circle of northern hemisphere wired societies, the internet has turbo-charged the economies of a handful of major metropolitan areas which now constitute the main hubs of network development and investment, account for the majority of internet domains, and form the main nodes in the global network. As Castells points out, the internet is in fact the technological driving force of global urbanisation:

The entire planet is being reorganised around gigantic metropolitan nodes that absorb an increasing proportion of the urban population, itself the majority of the population of the planet… The internet is the medium that allows metropolitan concentration and global networking to proceed simultaneously. The networked economy, tooled by the internet, is an economy made up of very large, interconnected metropolitan regions. (Castells 2002)

Because the internet has made connection to the network a precondition of full social and economic participation, it has also – at least initially – increased the divide within the wired societies between richly connected urban and poorly connected rural areas and between the well-connected majority and economically deprived ethnic minority communities who cannot afford connection. However as internet diffusion nears saturation these internal digital divides are beginning to narrow.

But the digital divide between the developed/wired world and the undeveloped/unwired one is arguably still growing. For less economically developed countries, lack of connection to the global network equates to marginalisation in the new global economic system: “development without the internet would be the equivalent of industrialisation without electricity in the industrial era.” (Castells, 2002)

The global network may actually be accentuating inequality. The 1990s was a decade which saw not only the rise of the internet and the growth of the networked economy, but also a substantial increase in inequality between rich and poor countries – a widening of the gap in productivity, income and social benefits between the developed and developing world. This growing development gap is another aspect of globalisation, the distinctive economic and social transformation of our time, whose technological driving force is the internet. Castells concludes that

Under the current social and institutional conditions prevailing in our world, the new techno-economic system seems to induce uneven development, simultaneously increasing wealth and poverty, productivity, and social exclusion, with its effects being differentially distributed in various areas of the world…This global process of uneven development is perhaps the most dramatic expression of the digital divide. (Castells 2002)

Such uneven development is characterist of technological innovations in general. Way back in the 1960s, E M Rogers wrote

the consequences of the diffusion of innovations usually widen the socioeconomic gap between the earlier and later adopting categories in a system.. Further, the consequences of the diffusion of innovations usually widen the socioeconomic gap between the segments previously high and low in socioeconomic status. (Rogers, 2003)

However as internet-powered globalisation proceeds, some of its imbalances may be evening out. Just as some of the network access inequalities in technically advanced societies – between men and women, urban and rural, rich and poor – have diminished as the net diffused more and more widely, so there are signs of the digital divide between developed and developing countries beginning to narrow.

One factor is the waning of global economic domination by the countries of the North and West. A new tier of southern and eastern economic superpowers has arisen – the so-called BRIC grouping of Brazil, Russia, India and China – whose economies are growing so fast that they will soon match in size or overtake those of North America and Europe. The stature of the BRIC economies is reflected in the countries’ internet presence, as measured by the number of internet domains based in the BRIC countries: in 2007 a list of the 20 countries with the largest number of domains showed China in third place with 157 million domains, Brazil in 12th place with 25 million, Russia 17th with 20 million, and India 19th with 15 million (see domaintools.com).

Although north America, Europe and the Pacific rim countries (including Australia) still have the highest penetration of internet users, they no longer have the largest number of users – Asia does. More importantly the rates of internet usage growth in the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America now dwarf those in the developed North and West, as the table below shows. The South is catching up.

Data from June 2008. Table from Internet World Statistics @ www.internetworldstats.com/stats

Other less economically developed countries are also taking strides. Indonesia is currently the least wired of East Asian nations, but has just announced an ambitious programme of broadband rollout, backed by NGOs, local businesses, international corporations and the UN, that aims to provide 20% of the population with a cheap, fast connection via either wireless or mobile by 2012.

Several aspects of ‘Web 2.0′ have the potential to help make participation in the global network more feasible for people in developing countries. For example

• Open source makes free software available to people who could not afford to pay
• Cloud computing makes powerful applications available to all and means computers need be less powerful
• OER makes educational resources available free to anyone with a connection
• Mobile & social computing makes helps people to get organised and make their voice heard

Another positive is the huge number of organisations now working of the problem of bridging the digital divide: UN bodies like UNESCO and the Global Alliance for ICT, academic/business initiatives like OLPC, international NGOs like Digital Alliance Foundation, bridges.org and Eduvision, and networks like Digital Divide.org, Digital Divide Network, Scidev.net and Web2forDev. A growing number of people understand that helping to bridge the divide is the responsibility of all of us, and is about investment in hardware and in infrastructure, and above all about investment in education.

As Digital Divide.org say on their website, “closing the digital divide is fundamentally about empowerment – that is, about using new technologies to empower the poor just as they now empower the rich.. It is the only way to make globalisation work for the poor”.

It is also arguably a precondition for survival, for we humans face global climate catastrophe unless we can find ways of equalising development – of ending the pursuit of endless economic growth, contracting and converging in order to reach a more just and sustainable way of co-existing with each other and the planet. The hope must be that the global network can play its part in this process of slowing down and evening out.
—–

Castells M, 2002. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Interent, Business and Society. Oxford

Rogers EM, 2003. Diffusion of Innovations, 5th edition, p471. Free Press, New York

When it comes to intellectual property the internet has a split personality. Like chromosomes lining up in preparation for cell division, every piece of web content is caught in opposing forcefields emanating from the Net’s twin poles: the need to Keep, and the urge to Share.

In the Keep corner, here’s the copyright notice on the website of University for industry, which runs the UK government’s learndirect programme:

Save as expressly set out in this Copyright Notice, you may not modify, copy, reproduce, re-publish, upload, post, transmit or distribute in any way any of the learndirect Materials. Any use of the learndirect Materials not expressly permitted in this Copyright Notice is strictly prohibited and will constititute an infringement of the copyright and other intellectual property rights of Ufi..

While over in the Share corner, here’s the copyleft statement on Wikia.com, a wiki-hosting offshoot of Wikipedia.

Except where otherwise specified, the text of all wikis on Wikia.com is freely licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Reusers of the content must retain it under the same licence, ensuring it remains free… Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GFDL..

This core polarity between Keep and Share, so intrinsic to the internet, can be understood in several different ways.

It can be traced back to some of the divergent cultural streams identified by Manuel Castells as flowing fortuitously together in the 1970s to form the internet’s distinctive zeitgeist (see Internet Galaxy 2: Net culture). The entrepreneurial tradition, for example, sets a supremely high value on ownership, for entrepreneurs require markets, and markets are about the exchange of property. Entrepreneurs must keep what is theirs until they can sell it for a profit, and it is largely this capitalist drive to marketise the new technology that has fueled the internet’s explosive growth in the last two decades.

The hacker subculture on the other hand has an ethic of knowledge sharing and collaboration, derived partly from the practice of the open source software movement and partly from communitarian philosophical strands in 1960s and 1970s youth culture. The hacker instinct is to donate what they make to the hacker community so it can be used and improved by others. Copyleft and the GNU Free Documentation Licence were bequeathed to the world wide web by the share-alike ideology of this hacker tradition.

Another way of understanding the Keep/Share dualism is as the latest manifestation of the historical struggle between commoners and enclosers, which in the 17th – 19th centuries in England forcibly took most farmland out of common and into private ownership. The Creative Commons open publication licences set out to recreate this ancient communal form of ownership in the context of what Charles Leadbeater calls the “new global information commons”. Leadbeater points out that unlike the real world version, the digital commons does not fall prey to overuse and lack of care – the so-called Tragedy of the Commons – but on the contrary is augmented by sharing: “The sheep grazing the commons shit out more grass. The more the commons is used, the larger it gets.” (Leadbeater, 2008 )

Leadbeater describes the digital-age version of the struggle between commoners and enclosers like this:

In England the village commons were enclosed to encourage more private investment to raise agricultural productivity and provide more food for the expanding urban population.. Now the same argument is being used to justify enclosures of the digital commons.. The argument of large corporations such as Microsoft and News Corporation is that the digital world will work better if everything can be turned into private property, to be protected and controlled. Were these emergent commons to be parcelled up and fenced off .. we could buy, have, make and acquire, but we would find it much more difficult to enjoy collaborating, participating, contributing and playing. (Leadbeater, 2008 )

A still more ancient source of the IP polarity, suggested by Geoff Mulgan in his book Connexity, is the age-old contradiction between the human need for stability and security and the human desire to explore and exchange. This tension dates back to the beginning of civilisation, expressed in the counterbalancing pull of the periphery against the centre, the outpost against the walled city, the frontier against the capital.

The edge places can be found throughout history: they are the hubs, entrepots, port cities. They see themselves as a web of connections, not as a territory. They were often not only creative and absorptive, but also often unstable….
By contrast in the landmasses you find the cultures of the centre. These are built around great empires, huge bureaucracies, absolute religions and ideologies.. They aspire to stasis and immobility. This immobility has been reflected in .. grand buildings that symbolise hierarchy.. (Mulgan, 1997)

Is this tension between centre and edge still at work in the Keep / Share duality? Arguably here again, as with the Tragedy of the Commons, the internet has changed the rules of an old game. For the nature of the global network is that it has no centre, but consists entirely of nodes and connections. The Net is all edge.

….
Castells M, 2001. The Internet Galaxy: reflections on the internet, business and society. OUP, Oxford
Leadbeater C, 2008. We Think. Profile Books, London. Available in part online from http://www.wethinkthebook.net/home.aspx
Mulgan G, 1998. Connexity: responsibility, freedom, business and power in the new century. Vintage, London