1999, Heft 1

Jörg Becker, Klaus Fritsche

Internet in Asia

Introduction

What was the greatest technological breakthrough on the road to today's global economy? Many would say the Internet, which has revolutionised the speed and scope of financial transactions. From our current perspective, such a reply may seen correct. But anyone who thinks more historically will come to a different conclusion. Viennese author Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) had very good reason for dedicating one of the stories in his collection Sternstunden der Menschheit (Great Moments for Humanity, 1928) to none other than Cyrus W. Field (1819-1892), the American engineer under whose management the first underwater cable was laid between North America and Europe in 1858. That underwater cable was, according to Zweig in his historical miniature entitled Das erst Wort über den Ozean (The First Word Across the Ocean), "an instrument elected by providence to disseminate religion, civilisation, freedom and law throughout the whole world". The historical insider knows, of course, that this first cable only held for three weeks and that the second cable over the same stretch only came into operation in 1866.

When Europe looks to the United States, almost always it looks in a westerly direction, across the Atlantic Ocean. That is not always so unambiguously the case vice versa, when the United States look to Europe. Traditionally, within the continent of the United States the East-Coasters and the West-Coasters stand opposite one another. And after the failure of Cyrus W. Field's underwater cable in 1858, the West-Coasters involved in the American telegraph industry became intensely active. One Perry McD. Collins had already drawn attention to himself in 1857 with his idea for a telegraph link with Europe via the Bering Straits and Northern Asia. Initially, this idea was very much in the shade of the trans-Atlantic cable, but after the failure of 1858 it began to take on a more concrete form. A Russian-American telegraph company, the Western Union Extension, went onto the stock exchange with great success the following years with capital amounting to 10 million US dollars, and a group of engineers and construction workers began work in 1865-67. The project was to build a telegraph line from San Francisco to St. Petersburg, via Alaska, under the Bering Straits, via Okhotsk, Yakootsk, Irkutsk and Moscow in the European part of Russia. As we know from George Kennan's travel report (1), this expedition became the sorry victim of deep sea temperatures in Siberia, lack of materials, and "wild" men and animals.

Although the Russian-American telegraph cable could not be realised, this historical event can still serve as a point of departure for some considerations on current Internet developments in Asia.

For some years now, there has been a veritable boom in new underwater and overland cables. These fibre glass cables are faster and cheaper than satellite links and cannot be "bugged".

Depending on one's perspective, Asia is of course "more" than either an "appendage" lying east of Europe or an "appendix" lying west of North America. As can be seen from Kennan's old map, Asia is a completely autonomous entity (what is more, with Korean industrial projects in Siberia, or Malaysian development collaboration in Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan).

This volume accesses the theme of Internet in Asia by means of the following dimensions:

1. Contrary to over-hasty and widely-held opinions about the globality of the Internet, one of the things that also becomes evident in Asia is the extremely uneven Internet distribution. In 1997, Japan had 1.5 million Internet users; at the same time there were only 90 in Pakistan, 2,000 in Vietnam, whereas in South Korea there were almost 200,000.
   
   The current expansion of the Internet in Asia can be characterised by uneven distribution, varying development patterns and speeds, and very different patterns of political monitoring, similar to the introduction of the telephone there several decades ago: Burma got its first telephone in 1884, Malaysia in 1891, Brunei as late as 1920, and Bhutan only in 1955. Even today, two years after publication of the above figures on Internet users in Asia, there is no evident change in these inner-Asian discrepancies.
   
   
2. A second equally widely-held standard opinion expressed in discussions about the Internet and development aid is that thanks to this medium development communication on the part of civil rights groups, NGOs, peace and women's groups has been successful.(2) This particular argument would, however, need to come to terms more thoroughly with the following three issues:
   1. What is the democratic legitimation for a group in country X interfering in the internal affairs of a country Y by means of the Internet? What is the relation between this external intervention and a people's right to self-determination?
      
      
   2. Even though sociological publications on NGOs in the northern industrial countries are few and far between, some considerations and experiences would still seem to speak for the thesis that many NGOs have meantime become quangos (quasi non-governmental organisations), that is to say, have long since lost their independence as NGOs because they are state funded.
      
      
   3. Just what real hope is there of possible alternative and niche communications in view of the past failure of previous media of which people had much the same hopes (open TV channels, video work, city quarter newspapers)?
   With reference to corresponding Internet application in Asia, claims have been made, for example, that the fall of Suharto in May 1998 was fundamentally linked with the opposition's increased capacity to get organised via the Internet, (3) that the massacre on Tienanmen Square in
   
   Beijing in 1989 would never have had such a global resonance without the Internet links of civil rights groups, or that the Fourth World Women's Conference which took place in Beijing in 1995 would not have been conceivable in that form without the active Internet activities of women's NGOs. Whereas all these claims reflect mainly the subjective impression of individual authors, there are two detailed empirical works in existence on the global role of the Internet during the Fourth Women's Conference. Their author, Dorothee Greve (4), comes to conclusions, however, which must give us cause for concern: More than 50% of the participants in a corresponding mailing list for the Beijing Women's Conference came from the United States, only 3% from Asia. According to the author, "communication of content was relatively limited. Seen in this way, the list did not fulfil the hopes that had been placed in it."
3. The more our public and private lifeworlds become dominated by information technologies, the more fragile the societal steering mechanisms become. The Swedish Ministry of Defence came to this very conclusion in the 1970s in its various vulnerability studies. It is an insight that certainly applies today, and is also evident in Internet use in Asia: Be it that Vietnamese in exile in the United States inundate the mailbox of the Vietnamese premier Le Duc Ahn and thus render it useless; that alternative journalists evade a publication prohibition by Suharto on their newspaper Tempo simply by publishing it in the Internet; that the sacked former Malaysian deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim maintains his own web site for publicity purposes (5); that Chinese hackers paralysed the nodes in Shanghai; that scattered members of the Khmer Rouge felt they had to deceive the world public by having the case of the "people's court" versus Pol Pot transmitted on the Internet (http://www.abc-news.com); or be it that crackers (probably recruited by the current Indonesian government) so successfully restricted the domain name .tp (virtual East Timor) in January 1999 that everything had to be removed from the net (6). These and other Internet events clearly indicate that Asia too is being shaken by a whole new kind of dynamism, uncertainty, vulnerability, movement, upswing and progress, and that there is no turning back.
   
   
4. What opportunities does the Internet offer the South? That is the title of one of the most important texts on the possible social function of the Internet in countries in the southern hemisphere published in the German-speaking region in recent times. (7) With reference to something like "cyber-colonialism", the publication makes the following claims: western values and contents dominate the net, western companies are assuming monopolies, services from non-western cultures will not be able to assert themselves, the traditionally collective societies of Asia will have problems with information technology as it is tailored more to the individual, the dominance of English will increase and this could lead to other languages, non-Latin scripts and smaller cultures losing in importance. So far, so good, one might say. The publication itself becomes a problem at that point when the authors emphasise that the cultural influences of the Internet on the south is not to be judged any differently to that of Coca Cola, MacDonald's or Hollywood films, and that no one was interested in changing or regulating these other sectors.
   
   This argument might be countered as follows: Driven by various motives, there are all sorts of forces and initiatives in countries throughout the world who are explicitly concerned to have the dominance of western cultures in the southern hemisphere restricted. Mention should be made here of the MacBride Report (8), as regards the work of UNESCO, and of the French policy of an "exception culturelle" in all current free trade agreements.
   
   In the developing countries themselves, more and more voices are vehemently denying any type of "cyber-colonialism" in the Internet. One such recent denial was by Eric Loo and Yeap Soon Beng. (3) Their argument that colonialism was not possible through the Internet rests on two notions:
   1. The interactive aspect of the net allows heterarchical (not: hierarchical) discourse based on variety and difference.
      
      
   2. The amount of information contained in the net is so large that the active user can increase his or her level of autonomy thanks to the enormous and still growing selection available.
   We would reply to these two arguments as follows:
   1. The techno-structure of the net refers to the supply levels, both in the technological sense and in the sense of market behaviour. It is an old logical error of thinking to want to create a smooth link between supply and demand.
      
      
   2. The theoretical figure of the active user in communications science comes from the realm of agenda setting theories.
   However, as this theory knows of no embeddedness of individual behaviour in a social or societal context, it is not really worthy of a science.
5. A group of economists around the Berlin scholar Axel Zerdick has recently developed an economic theory of the Internet which seems revolutionary. (10) If up till now a product was valued highly if it was rare, then rarity determined the value of the product. In a networked economy, by contrast, the rules of net effects and positive feed-back apply. Thus in the Internet only that is valuable which everyone has. And to be able to achieve high density usership in the net, it is important (initially) to play along in the net free of charge. Should this theory be watertight, its consequences would be devastating for the countries in the southern hemisphere, because one can and must see their economies as nothing other than deficiency economies. (11) But how can partnerships develop between deficiency economies and such economies as base their future wealth not on scarcity but on superfluity?
   
   
6. If one reads through the essays in this volume, then all too often the cultural question proves to be the dimension that is particularly interesting. It is precisely the aspect of the cultural impact of the new information technologies that constitutes the foremost concern of many developing countries. At the 1995 G7 summit in Brussels, these concerns show up in the phrasing of the participating nations' objectives, viz., "promoting diversity of content, including cultural and linguistic diversity". At the succeeding summit in Midrand, South Africa, in 1996 the corresponding phrase reads "diversity of language and culture".

The cultural dimension involves not just homogenisation but also independent autochthonal cultural forces. In her essay on the Internet in Japan, Petra Plate comes to the remarkable conclusions that the new medium will continue to be used to reinforce the existing culture, the Japanese brand of liberal conformity and consumerism.

These essays and this volume of the magazine Informatik Forum were compiled within the framework of the EU subsidised project The Social Use of the Internet in Asia (Malaysia and Vietnam), itself part of the promotion programme on information and communication technologies with developing countries (INCO). The following seven institutions are working together on this project:

1. Asian Media Information and Communication Centre (AMIC), Singapore;
2. Forschungsgesellschaft Informatik (FGI), Vienna, Austria;
3. German Asia Foundation (GAF), Essen, Germany;
4. Hoa Lac Hi-Tech Part (HHTP), Hanoi, Vietnam;
5. Institute for Communication and Technology Research (KomTech), Solingen, Germany;
6. Technical University of Vienna, Department of Computer Sciences, Institute of Design and Technology Assessment (IGW), Vienna, Austria;
7. Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Department of Communication, Bangi, Malaysia.

Thanks are due to the colleagues at all these institutes for the success of this volume, and of course to all the authors.

In our view, the two contributions on the Internet in Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan are particularly welcome, so as to rediscover the world for Central Asia and to open up Central Asia to the world after the demise of the USSR. With these two countries, the volume also touches on another EU-subsidised project, namely, on the Establishment of Electronic Information Services in Countries of Central Europe and the New Independent States, as part of the INCO Copernicus Programme under the management of Maria-Anna Courage of the Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung (GMD) in St. Augustin. Both EU projects cooperate with one another and on the periphery are even linked through their respective staff.

To conclude this introduction we would like to take up a suggestion made by our author Kurt Luger and briefly introduce the International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD) in the Netherlands. Founded in 1997 by the Dutch Development Minister and former collaborator on the above-mentioned MacBride Report, Jan Pronk, the task of the IICD is "to help developing countries keep up with the latest developments in information and communication technology (ICT)".

IICD's intervention strategy envisages two core functions:

• Client orientation, according to the needs and desires formulated in the developing countries;
  
  
• Focus on those ICTs that facilitate improvement in the quality of or access to basic social services such as health care, education/training, public information and environmental protection, and above all, are for the benefit of the underprivileged in those societies.

• Organisation of round tables in developing countries
• ICT Information Services
• Strategic Policy Exploration Networking
• Special Projects.

• it carries out demand-driven and not donor-driven projects;
• it does not take an elitist approach but also includes small business people, farmers and other possible users in the strategy, and has as its objective connectivity for all;
• it tries to interest young managerial forces in the countries of the Third World and enable them to receive an appropriate training;
• it can point to solid partners for a sustainable process through careful selection of agents of change;
• it pursues no economic interests, but is a non-profit organisation that sees itself as an information broker;
• it is committed to the principles of Dutch development collaboration and addresses the major problems in developing countries;
• it considers the local context and the needs of the country and integrates these to a maximum in its ICT policy (country masterplan) by setting priorities.

We can agree fully with Kurt Luger: It would well become Austria and Germany, were they to have an institute comparable to the Dutch IICD within the framework of their respective collaboration with developing countries.

Information and communication technologies enjoy a great degree of coverage in the press, where they are usually perceived positively. As a pars pro toto we would like in conclusion to make the following press citation:

"We are right to assume that there is no point on the globe with which we cannot make a direct link. We now know that the means of real omnipresence are at our disposal. Distance as a cause of uncertainty will disappear from the calculations of the statesman and the merchant." (13)

Is this about the Internet? No. It is the commentary in the American Times newspaper on the occasion of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable of August 1858.

This issue of "Informatik Forum" is released as a part of the project "Interasia - Social Usage of Internet in Asia". For more information see http://www.interasia.org

1. Cf. Kennan, George: Tent Life in Siberia, and Adventures among the Koraks and other tribes in Kamtchatka and Northern Asia, London: Sampson Low, Son & Marston 1870.
   
   
2. We refer here to only four titles which represent this particular approach:
   Luber, Burkhard: The World at Your Keyboard. An alternative guide to global computer networking, Oxford: Jon Carpenter 1993;
   Kendler, Susanne. "Computernetzwerke im Entwicklungseinsatz. Über den Nutzen der Neuen Medien für Entwicklungsländer", in: Dialog der Kulturen. Die multikulturelle Gesellschaft und die Medien, ed. by Luger, Kurt and Renger, Rudi, Vienna: Österreichischer Kunst- und Kulturverlag 1994, pp. 325-342;
   Lietsch, Jutta: Zum Beispiel Internet, Göttingen: Lamuv 1997.
   At ease with e-mail. A handbook on using electronic mail for NGOs in developing countries. 2nd edition, ed. by the New York Office of the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation, New York: FES 1998.
   
   
3. Cf. e.g. Marcus, David L.: "Indonesia revolt was Net driven", in: Boston Globe, May 23, 1998
   
   
4. Greve, Dorothee: "Mehr als eine virtuelle Welt. Soziale Bewegungen im Internet", in: Der "Information Superhighway", ed. by Kleinsteuber, Hans J., Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag 1996, pp. 236-256; Greve, Dorothee: "Internet und soziale Bewegungen", in: Modell Internet? Entwicklungsperspektiven neuer Kommunikationsnetze, ed. by Werle, Rainer and Lang, Christa, Frankfurt: Campus Verlag 1997, pp. 289-304.
   
   
5. Cf. Erickson, Jim: "WWW.Politics.Com", in: Asiaweek, Oct. 2, 1998, pp. 42-49.
   
   
6. Cff. Rötzer, Florian: "Crackerangriff auf das virtuelle Osttimor", Jan. 26, 1999, in: http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/special/info/6363/1.html.
   
   
7. Cf. Baum, Holger; Boldt, Klaus and Ghawami, Kambiz: "Der Handel mit Informationen wird zum Wettbewerbsfaktor. Welche Chancen bringt das Internet dem Süden?", in: Frankfurter Rundschau, Jan. 23, 1999, p. 9.
   
   
8. Cf. Many Voices, One World. Communication and Society, Today and Tomorrow, ed. by MacBride, Sean, UNESCO: Paris 1980.
   
   
9. Cf. Loo, Eric and Beng, Yeap Soon: "Cyber-Colonialism in Asia: More Imagined Than Real?", in: Media Asia, No. 3/1998, pp. 130-137 and 153.
   
   
10. Cf. Zerdick, Axel et al.: Die Internet-Ökonomie. Strategien für die digitale Wirtschaft, Heidelberg: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Springer 1999.
    
    
11. Shortage, deficiency, poverty, peripheral or distorted capitalism: whatever the terms used, they are all the very opposite of the Wealth of Nations, the economic ideal envisaged by Adam Smith in 1776.
    On such deficiency economies, which are much more frequent than the economies of superfluity, and in the context of Eastern Europe and the developing countries, cf. the following two introductions:
    Kornai, János: Economics of Shortage, New York and Amsterdam: North-Holland 1980; Die Armut der Nationen, ed. by Altvater, Elmar et al., Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag 1987.
    
    
12. Cf. Knowledge for Development, ed. by The World Bank, New York: Oxford University Press 1998.
    
    
13. Quoted after Stammbuch der neueren Verkehrsmittel. Eisenbahnen, Dampfschiffe, Telegraphen und Luftschiffe. Eine Sammlung von Liedern und Gedichten, Aufsätzen und Schilderungen, ed. by Löper, Carl, Lahr: Verlag Moritz Schauenburg 1881, p. 362 (re-translation into English).

Bestellmöglichkeit / Order Form

© Informatik Forum
Forschungsgesellschaft für Informatik
Email: if@fgi.at
Webdesign: Martin Mair