Page 319 - Culture Technology Communication

302 Kenneth Keniston

that use local languages in education, in the development of data-
bases, in Internet communication, and in multimedia Web-based
projects. The current initiatives of the Government of Andhra Pra-
desh and Tamil Nadu stand as models of what other States and the
Government of India might achieve.

Summary

The growing importance of digital technologies in South Asia reveals
problems and opportunities for that region and lessons for other na-
tions in the world. In South Asia are visible two issues critical for
every nation on earth: how can the new electronic technologies be
used to close, rather than widen, the gap between the powerful and
the powerless, the privileged and the underprivileged? How can the
new technologies be used to deepen, intensify and enrich the cul-
tural diversity of the world rather than flatten or eliminate it? These
questions come together with particular intensity in South Asia be-
cause of the fusion of power and language on that subcontinent. But
by the same token, solutions that develop in South Asia will be rele-
vant to the rest of the world. Just as India has been an example of
how a developing nation can preserve democracy and cultural diver-
sity, so South Asian solutions to the challenges of the Information
Age could be a model for the rest of the world.

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was prepared for the Conference on
Localization at the Center for Development of Advanced Computing,
Poona, Maharashtra, India, in September, 1998. The research on which
the paper is based is partially funded by a grant from the Nippon Electric
Company, administered through the Provost’s Fund at MIT. I am espe-
cially grateful to Patrick Hall of the Open University in England for his
comments on this draft.

1. There is an extensive technical literature on localization. Typical
are the works of Kano (1995) and Hall and Hudson (1997). A work that
stresses cultural factors more than most is del Galdo and Nielson (1996).
2. See Rushdie and West (1999). For a contrary view that stresses
the importance of fiction in Indian languages, see Mishra (1999).
3. Data on the precise numbers of speakers of Indian languages, or
for that matter of any other language, are complicated by several factors.