Page 45 - Culture Technology Communication

30 Charles Ess

will make for an intense confrontation straining social and international
peace” (196).
The digital divide can be seen in several ways. As a start, consider
the demographics of the Net. While estimates are admittedly inexact, in
February 2000, Nua (<http://www.nua.ie/>) reported a world total of 275.54
million users. The North (Canada, Europe, and the USA) comprised 208.05
million users—some 76% of the total Internet population. Asia and the Pa-
cific—home to more than half the world’s population—totaled 54.9 million
users (19.92%). South America boasted 8.79 million users (3.2%); the Mid-
dle East, 1.29 million (.47%); Africa was estimated to host 2.46 million
users (.89%). This last figure is consistent with Fay Sudweeks’ point: citing
Tehranian (1999), she observes that there are fewer telephone lines in the
entire African continent than in Tokyo (Sudweeks and Ess 1999). The
World Bank’s World Development Report 1999/2000 reveals the same pat-
tern: as of January 1999, the US claimed 1,131.52 Internet hosts per
10,000 people—compared with a world average of 75.22 and .13 for India
(<http://www.worldbank.org/wdr/2000/pdfs/engtable19.pdf>: cf. Keniston in
this volume).
Finally, Hoffman, Novak, and Schlosser (2000) find that the digital
divide within the US is decreasing by some measures—but increasing by
others (e.g., with regard to access to and use of the Web from home). For
that, the global economic trend is one of increasing disparity between rich
and poor. Most dramatically, “The ratio between average income of the world
top 5 percent and the world bottom 5 percent increased from 78 to 1 in 1988,
to 123 to 1 in 1993” (World Bank 1999). Presuming that wealth increases ac-
cess to technology and infrastructure, the growing economic divide does not
bode well for a putatively egalitarian global village.

2. Indeed, Carey’s point can be quickly expanded by the argument
that the very notion of an “electronic global village” is not simply a twentieth
century, McLuhanesque dream, but rather rests precisely on Jefferson’s vi-
sion of an “academical village,” embodied in his designs for the University of
Virginia, as a kind of education and communication system intended to ex-
pand democracy by educating a new “natural aristocracy” of young men who
were to become leaders in the new republic (Wilson 1993, 71).
3. Barber writes: “The mood is that of Jihad: war not as an instru-
ment of policy but as an emblem of identity, an expression of community, an
end in itself. Even where there is no shooting war, there is fractiousness, se-
cession, and the quest for ever smaller communities” (1992, 60). As he goes
on to point out, for Muslims “Jihad” means first of all an internal spiritual
struggle, and only secondarily a “holy war”; even then, Muslims insist, a
Jihad should be a defensive war, not the offensive “evangelical” war con-
noted by Western journalistic usage of the term. Barber is careful to ac-
knowledge that his use of the term is thus “rhetorical,” one in keeping with
journalistic use. But that use, I must note, is offensive to Muslims, precisely