E-Digest

See for a concrete plan and initiative the work of the TeNet group based in IIT Madras. They are developing alternative technologies which reduce the cost of internet and telephone access drastically. See Ashok Jhunjhunwala's papers "Can information revolution be for disadvantaged" and "Using telecom and internet in India" for a detailed assessement for what is required in terms of technological research and policy initiatives to make internet and telephone connectivity to almost half the population of India. His assessment of of the IT Working Group reports of the government can be found in the paper "Can information technology help transform India". He provides an interesting insight into the economics related to where the efforts at technical innovations are directed.

International devlopment agency IDRC organised a scenario-building excercise where scholars and others came together to prepare future scenarios for the world in the so-called information age. They came out with four scenarios which might result depending upon the international environment and national policies. They do not say which is likely. These scenarios are described in a small booklet called "Development and the Information Age". It will be useful to compare these policy environments with what is being recommended by the Tenet group above.

Manuel Castels's paper "Information Technology, Globalization and Social Development" is exposition of how social development has to be redefined in the wake of information thechnology revolution. Castel's three-volume work on `the information age' has come to be recognised as the most definitive.

Some international agencies like World Bank and scholars have promoted the idea that information technology will help developing countries `leapfrog' into a developed status, only it they took steps to build `knowledge societies'. See the World Development Report 1996 [B.Q12.W6 R] which is focussed on "Knowledge for Development". For a similar notion from an India NGO see Aditya Dev Sood's article in EPW.

In World Bank's discourse it is taken for granted that `knowledge society' would automatically follow with the increasing use of information technology. How does the accompanying trend of tighter control of intellectual property affects the rights of people to "appropriate, invent and innovate in the area of media/information" is discussed in the article by Pradip Thomas: "Copyright and Emerging Knowledge Economy in India".
 
 

THE "INFORMATION REVOLUTION"

Cees J. Hamelink in his book "Trends in World Communication" describes the technological and business developments leading to what came to be known as information revolution. A brief account of the economic forces leading up to these developments can be found in the relevant chapters of CED's publication "Background to Globalisation".

A broad survey of various debates surrounding the social implications of these technologies can be found in the collection edited by Dutton called "Information and Communication Technologies". See a book-exerpt from the work of Saskia Sassen titled "The Topoi of E-Space: Global Cities and Global Value Chains" for a recent analysis of how the sphere of electronic communication and transaction is becoming segmented; the exerpt apperas in the book "The Public Domain" (pp.24-32).

For a set of articles which interpret the information revolution as a development of contemporary capitalism see the collection "Capitalism and the Information Age". This contains articles by major media thinkers of today like Chomsky, Edward Herman etc.
 

FREE SOFTWARE MOVEMENT
 

A development in the information technology that has become significant over the last decade is the free software movement seen the rise of such operating systems as Linux. K. G. Kumar in his EPW article "Beyond the Market: Freedom Matters" provides an update on this and also on how software giants like Microsoft are feeling threatened by the growing popularity of this trend. Delhi-based organisation Sarai has published a wide-ranging collection titled "The Public Domain: Sarai Reader 01". One of the major sections of this book gives some of the basic manifestos, ideas and documents of this free software movement.
See the article by one of the pioneers of free software movement on what is called the GNU Project.

Compiled by Avinash Jha, 2001

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This Digest aims at promoting public debate in public interest