Plenary session: Social Impact of Technologies Moderator: José Antonio Moreiro, Dean and professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Spanish and the Digital Divide Jesús Jiménez Segura, Director of CIDIC, Centro de Investigación y Documentación of the Instituto Cervantes
Beyond phisical access, language is a major issue to be able to engage seriously in the Information Society.
Undoubtedly, political systems — and citizen freedom — have an important impact on the access to the Internet. That might be one of the reasons Spanish is increasing its presence on the Net despite Chinese being spoken by much more people around the world.
But it is also true that while freedom to access content (e.g. P2P networks) allows for a higher access, it also puts some stress on the sustainability of the whole system. So, there is a trade-off: the more free access to digital content, the better for quick adoption; the more access to content is free, the more difficult to stablish sustainable business models.
On the other hand, as visibility is so important always but specially on the Internet, many people migrate form their original mother tongues towards English so that to make themselves accessible to a broader public. This, of course, plays havoc in trying to establish a language on the Internet and provide its speakers with quality digital content.
Security as a digital segregation factor Arturo Ribagorda Garnacho, Catedrático de Ciencias de la Computación e Inteligencia Artificial de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Functional literacy: how to effectively use the Internet. Despite the zillion advantages, some drawbacks due to the Internet:
Unemployment? Some sectors negatively affected by automation, etc.
Isolation?
Insecurity?
When there’s insecurity, there’s fear and lack of adoption. For instance: almost 40% of people are afraid to use their credit card number online or 47% to do bank transactions; 70% of people think that leave comments on the Internet enables third parties to spy one’s lives; 60% feel there is no privacy on the Internet; 75% feel afraid of the Internet in general and their data scattered around.
INTECO measures security in Spain. In their 2008 survey, most people use anti-virus software, firewalls, anti-spyware… but the problem is that this software needs updating: most people install it for the first time (or just comes installed with the new computer) but never updates, which makes the software totally useless.
How to foster the Information Society from a security point of view:
Affordability of equipment
Attractive online services
Basic citizen training
Confidence in technical processes
Still, people get information from the Internet but interaction rations drop drastically, reasons being, most of them, related with fear of the Internet: security, doubting what is being bought (in the case of e-commerce), not clear identity of the issuer of information or the online service, etc.
Managing Content Juan Beitia Gorriaran, Especialista en gestión de contenidos, industria y mercado de la información. Baratz, Servicios de Teledocumentación S.A
In a world where everyone can publish content, Universities and Libraries should educate people to understand all that’s found on the Internet. Indeed, they could even manage that content and sort it in some way.
In Spain, libraries have gone through a deep process of modernization, automation and technological advancement, led by to librarians, who usually are technology lovers.
[Beitia details the advancement of automation of most of the 3,842 libraries in Spain]
The Future Web 3.0 and its Social and Technological Impact. The convergence of the Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web Luis Joyanes Aguilar, Catedrático de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos de la Facultad de Informática de la Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca
Nova Spivak divides the evolution of the web as follows
Q: What is the hazard of collusion or monopoly practices on the Net? Joyanes: Huge, indeed, and increasing. Jiménez: we should balance the power of the NTIA or the FCC in the US with international organizations like the ITU or the IGF.
Q: What happens with the long life of data on the Internet? On the other hand, if technology evolves quickly, can we lose information? Ribagorda: increasingly, international institutions are trying not only to agree on standards (e.g. to enable interoperability) but also that these standards are open enough so taht they can interact with past standards and make possible that future standards interact with them.
I have been accepted two communications which I am presenting tomorrow within the track Organizations and institutions before the digital divide: model development and good practices. The two communications will be both presented during the event and published in the respective proceedings, and they belong to the research I did for my PhD Thesis. The materials for the presentation and the full text of the communications, in Spanish, follow below. For other materials related to my PhD Thesis, please browse the phd tag (http:/ictlogy.net/tag/phd).
Hacia un modelo integral de la Economía Digital
[Towards a comprehensive model of the Digital Economy]
Let’s imagine there are only two kinds of Public Internet Access Points, that is, a place, different to your house or your work where you can connect to the Internet:
A library, a civic centre, or an ad hoc place equipped with computers and connection to the Internet; access and usage is free because its supported by public funding or private not-for-profit funding. Its goal is philanthropic and aimed towards making an impact on people’s livelihoods: empower them to fully achieve their citizen rights, help them to climb up the welfare ladder, etc. Let’s call them telecentre.
The other kind is similar to the previous one but it is not free. And it is not because its aim is to return the investment the owner made — an entrepreneur — in the form of revenues that will hopefully become profits, that is, costs will be lower than revenues. Let’s call them cybercafé.
Things are quite more complex and reality constantly shows that there are not pure models. But let’s keep things simple, very simple, for the sake of the explanation.
If things were that binary, telecentres would be having an impact on people’s lives while cybercafés wouldn’t; on the other hand, cybercafés would be economically sustainable (self-sustainable) while telecentres would not.
Internet penetration: a double edged sword
Internet penetration is growing everyday, for several reasons: willingness to adopt because of increasingly perceived utility, lower costs, public policies to foster Internet access at home and work, etc. This increased penetration can have two direct consequences:
As more people are connected, the remaining unconnected people will either be too poor/difficult to connect (on a cost/benefit basis) or just absolutely refusing to connect due to personal believes (refuseniks). Thus, it is likely that both governments and nonprofits will shift away from e-inclusion projects to other areas of development that have ranked higher in priority.
On the other hand, less people will go to cybercafes, as the demand will necessarily be lower. Indeed, the more infrastructure focused are public policies to foster the Information Society (e.g. putting laptops on kids’ hands) the stronger will be this moving away from cybercafes.
So, what will the future of telecentres and cybercafés be like? More than answers, questions is what really arise:
Will telecentres fade away and end up disappearing? If they were economically not sustainable (in the sense that they depended on third parties’ funding), will they shift towards cybercafes-like models? Or will some of them just remain to try and cover the needs of the ones left behind? How is it that some voices foresee the end of telecentres while bookshops and cheap softcover pocket editions did not succeed in getting rid of costly public libraries?
Will cybercafes shift to more telecentre impact-like focus and less access-based business plans? Will they compensate their shrinking access market by expanding towards a capacitation-based market? Will they be providing more content and, especially, services? Will they create communities of people around cybercafes as it is already happening in cybercafes whose customers are e.g. mainly immigrants and gather together around the cybercafe?
Will both telecentres and cybercafes evolve into enhanced centres (e-centres), where communities will gather and benefit from several community resources, computers and Internet access among others? Or will they just disappear?
Fortunately or unfortunately, things are neither that simple nor static and are way more complex and dynamic in reality. But these are, nevertheless, questions that both decision-takers and tax-payers should be taking into account so to be prepared for what is going to be next.
As libraries have provided more than books, but a place where to learn to read and find kindred souls, it is my guess that public Internet access points will disappear as such, and will either be embedded within existing structures (libraries themselves, or civic centres, to name a few) or the existing telecentres and cybercafes will evolve into a next stage where the learning and community factors will be much more relevant. We are indeed seeing plenty of examples of this, and it is a matter of time that priorities or the focus turns upside down: instead of going to access the Internet and finding people, one will go and find people and use the Internet as an enhanced way to socialize. At its turn, this should be accompanied by the end of this false dichotomy on whether you’re a citizen or a netizen, as if the Internet had a life and a citizenry on its own. But time will tell.
NOTE: I owe some of this reflections from conversations with people I met at IDRC on my visit at their headquarters in Ottawa: Florencio Ceballos, Frank Tulus, Tricia Wind, Meddie Mayanja, Silvia Caicedo and Simon Batchelor (the latter from Gamos).
Now this book has been translated into Spanish by the Universidad de los Andes within the framework of their Acceso Abierto al Conocimiento en Latinoamérica [Open Access to Knowledge in Latin America] initiative.
Of course, my chapter has also been translated and is now entitled Web 2.0 y el Acceso Abierto al conocimiento, which I have to admit is a clearer title.
I want to sincerely thank — thank you, thank you very much — the team at the Universidad de los Andes in Venezuela for considering the suitability of the book and translating it, and Enrique Canessa and Marco Zennaro for the original idea and editing work.
With almost everyone certifying the death of blogs, and while witnessing a massive migration towards the fertile and prosperous lands of social networking sites, emotion tears in my eyes won’t stop me from proudly shouting out loud that this personal research portal just turned six.
What about the events ()? Well, this part is certainly under revision. On the one hand, there are increasingly more people and more ways to share agendas about congresses, conferences, workshops or any kind of meeting than when I set that section up in early 2006. On the other hand, in the last semester we have been discussing with Christian Kreutz and the ICT4D.at team the possibility to team up and create a Google Calendar on ICT4D Events, but everyone (including me) is so busy… Time will tell.
Notwithstanding, the huge discovery this year has definitely been Twitter. From the several ways to use it, my main purposes are sharing links to resources, broadcasting “headlines” when attending events, and network, which despite all criticism, works pretty well for me.
Another thing worth noticing — and I thank Michel Bauwens for the idea — was collecting all the conference reviews (liveblogging) in a common place. It now features 280 articles coming from 52 conferences, which gives an idea of one of the main uses of the blog.
All that said, probably the most important thing during this last year was that I got my PhD. My thesis, Measuring digital development for policy-making: Models, stages, characteristics and causes got an “Excellent” from an international examining committee and will, hopefully, be soon uploaded to this site and join the 98 works that it already features amongst writings and speeches.
I’m writing this sitting at IDRC headquarters in Ottawa, just before meeting about their telecentre.org project. I can hardly find a better framework for “my” anniversary.
I want to end up this personal rant by thanking all the interesting people I constantly meet both online and offline. There is no other way I could have learnt so much — at least I guess I did… — without so many people sharing their ideas, data, information, knowledge and warmth. Thank you so much.
Other applications such as Fish Detector (Kenya), developed by Pascal Katana, and which detects fishes accoustically
Creation of jobs through crowd-sourcing (e.g. txtEagle, which allows people to complete simple tasks via mobile via SMS and get compensated for it, that is, people get paid to work by SMS)
Tangaza (“broadcast” in Kiswahlili) that allows users to send voice to several receivers
M-Kulima (“farmer” in Kiswahili) allows buyers to store and retrieve information about the milk market via SMS. Of course, its application is not bound to milk, but can be applied to many other markets.
Waññigame allows children to recognize numbers and learn to count
M-guide for toursm, by Strathmore University: the user takes a photo of an animal, the photo is sent to a server that recognizes the animal and sends the information back
M-Word for learning
How to create innovative culture? Transferring skills and knowledge through mobile boot camps, sharing ideas and encouraging students to brain-storm in groups, mentoring students and liaising them with experts in this field, creating of a research and open-learning atmosphere.
Eva Domínguez: mobile phones are a revolution in fields as Education (m-learning) and Journalism, especially citizen journalism.
Jessica Colaço stresses the experience of Ushahidi regarding journalism and citizen journalism, how it is used for transparency and accountability, etc.
Luis Ángel Fernández Hermana points to the distinction between people that use technology on a compulsory basis or as a personal option. In higher income countries, technology is compulsory: you “have” to use the last gadget. This is not the case of lower income countries, where people seek benefit (or profit) in technology.
Luis Ángel Fernández Hermana: In what languages are mobile applications and services? Jessica Colaço: Normally in English, most of the times also in local languages.
Lev Gonick: the mobile platform is a much more crowdsourcing fitting platform to create educational content.
Carlos Miranda: it’s good that mobile phones are kept simple (no video, no cam, no anything). The “intel” is outside, it’s the people. [how strongly I disagree…]
Paul G. West: how to deliver mass-education via mobile phones? [unanswered question; what a pity, I would have loved to get that answer].
Marc Alier: if applications have to be developed, how are they distributed to a larger amount of users and other developers? Jessica Colaço: normally, SMSs are broadcasted with the instructions to find and/or install the application, as providing a URL is not usually a good solution (though still a possibility).
Susan Metros: what is the power of mobile operators? do they listen to their customers? Jessica Colaço: increasingly, customers “come in” the design of applications and services.
Sílvia Bravo: are mobile phones helping Africa to “emancipate” and “be Africa”, or just leading the path towards a copycat of richer countries? Jessica Colaço: the good thing of mobile phones is that they have been adopted at a so-grassroots level that there is no aim to copy, but to be.
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