The Electronic Gap - Media - February 2000 - Brief Article

In the United States, business journals, market gurus, economics professors and highly paid consultants talk incessantly about the coming global boom, the transformation of the workplace, the technology revolution and the knowledge explosion. It is implied that the world is slowly becoming a reproduction of Silicon Valley. It is asserted that this is the future. But instead of swallowing this hype, perhaps we should pull back and look at the globe as a whole.

The pessimistic view would be to point out what is currently occurring in Kosovo, West Africa, Rwanda, Chechnya, Kashmir and elsewhere. We might also follow Robert Kaplan in the trips he describes in To the Ends of the Earth (1), only to discover that much of humanity is headed for disaster and self-destruction. I do not wish to be as negative as that. However, I would like to offer a caution to those who portray globalization in an uncritical and overly enthusiastic manner.

Each day I send and receive up to 40 messages on the Internet. From my home I can search the web sites of the World Bank and the United Nations to find new data, read the New York Times and check the 9 million book titles in the Yale University Library. The Internet gives me, my students and my children immediate access to knowledge, and the knowledge explosion is at the heart of the modernization and globalization of world society.

One in three Americans are regular, daily Internet users. Even within American society, the computer and e-mail have widened the gap between educated people (chiefly whites and Asians) and the less educated (chiefly black Americans). This gap will be felt in every aspect of life, whether it is in opportunities, potential, education or job-hunting. The United States will be divided into two groups, one which is computer-literate and the other which is not.

This phenomenon has been replicated at the international level. The most important fact is that we are in the midst of a technology revolution that seems less likely to close the gap between rich and poor countries than to widen the gap even further.

The technology revolution and the communications revolution still bypass billions of human beings. From UNESCO's standpoint, the Internet may have more influence than any single medium upon global educational and cultural developments in the coming century. Yet only 2.4 per cent of the world's population is on the Internet, or one person out of 40. In Southeast Asia, only one person in 200 is linked to the Internet. In the Arab states, only one person in 500 has Internet access, while in Africa only one person in a 1,000 is an Internet user. This situation will not change as long as those lands lack electricity, telephone wires and infrastructure. They cannot afford either computers or the expensive software they require. If knowledge indeed equals power, the developing world may have less real power nowadays than it did 30 years ago, before the Internet was developed.

If we want to work toward a knowledge-based society in the coming century, over at least the next 10 years we need to make a concerted effort to bring poorer societies into the system of electronic communications. This effort will need to be coordinated by the World Bank, the UN Development Programme, UNESCO, the NGO community and the global business community.

The alternative is to perpetuate a world which is fundamentally undemocratic and structurally unsound. If we do nothing, if we let the knowledge explosion intensify in technology-rich societies while poorer societies fall further and further behind, the growing gap between haves and have-nots will lead to widespread discontent and threaten any prospect of global harmony and international understanding. This is the most significant challenge we face. We have no rime to waste in responding.

British historian Paul Kennedy is the J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History at Yale University (U.S.A.). He is the author of a widely acdaimed work, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500-2000 (Random House, 1987), in which he analysed the factors underlying the rise and fall of empires over the past live centuries. In the final chapter he evoked the coming collapse of the USSR, and also speculated about the decline of the United States as a great power and the rise of Japan and China. Notable among his other works are Preparing for the Twenty-first Century (1993) and Strategy and Diplomacy, 1870-1945 (1983).

The present text has been extracted from Prof. Kennedy's contribution to a series of "21st Century Talks" held at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on November 6, 1999.

(1.) Robert Kaplan's book suggests that in most of the Third World conditions will get worse, largely because of the effects of overpopulation, environmental deterioration and social breakdown.

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