Page 311 - Culture Technology Communication

294 Kenneth Keniston

devoted the first part of his talk to the wonders and potentials of the
new digital technology. He stressed how it opens doors, provides ac-
cess to information, facilitates communication, and aids commerce
and education.
But in the second half of his talk, President Clinton pointed out
that computers and computer-mediated communication also have
the potential to widen the gap between the computer “haves” and
the computer “have-nots.” As the haves increase knowledge, power,
and access to resources, the gap between them and those who are
“computer-deprived” grows. In the United States, where at present
almost half of all households have computers, and of them about half
are connected to the Internet and the Web, those who benefit most
from the Computer Age are those who already possess the greatest
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resources, political power and wealth. The “information-deprived”
are those who are already deprived in many other ways as well.
Clinton ended his address by suggesting that market forces alone
would not be enough to remedy this gap: both public action and pri-
vate commitment are required to make the benefits of the Computer
Age accessible to all.
In countless respects, the situation in South Asia is different
from that in the United States. But in one respect it is the same: in
both parts of the world, access to computers is empowering, and in-
ability to access computers perpetuates deprivation, exclusion, and
poverty. Indeed, as a general maxim in the history of technology, new
technologies are appropriated by those who have power, and delib-
erately or not, these technologies serve initially to extend the power
of those who already have power. In this regard, electronic technolo-
gies simply follow an historic rule.
But in South Asia, this universal problem is compounded by the
overlap of power and language. Members of Indian elites are almost
invariably English-speaking; India’s vast population of peasants,
tribals, scheduled, and backward castes—the excluded and deprived
(many of them illiterate)—rarely know any but a few words of En-
glish. This convergence of language and power in India means that
in special ways, the Information Age perpetuates the powers of the
English-speaking elite; it widens the already large gap between
those who now have both power and English, and the nineteen out of
twenty Indians who have neither. No one planned it this way, but
the dominance of English as a computer language helps perpetuate
existing inequities in South Asia.
The second important issue stemming from the importance of
English in computers in South Asia is the issue of cultural diversity