Author: Eminent Contributors
Editor(s): Kenneth Keniston / Deepak Kumar
Publisher: Sage Publications
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 194
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0761932356
Description
Recent decades have seen an unprecedented growth in information and communication technologies (ICTs), ushering in what is commonly referred to as the Information Age. This book explores whether modern ICTs can deliver on their promises of democracy, prosperity, and well-being for the people of developing nations which comprise 80 percent of the world's population. In order to do this, this volume uses lessons from the Indian experience-a country where information technology (IT) has made giant leaps but which suffers from what has been described as multiple digital divides.
The contributors explore four such closely interrelated divides. The first is internal-between the digitally empowered rich and the poor. The second is a linguistic-cultural gap between English and other languages and between Anglo-Saxon culture and other world cultures. The next gap is underscored by disparities in access o information technology and between rich and poor nations. Finally, there is the phenomenon of the digerati. This is an affluent elite possessing the appropriate skills and means to take advantage of the ICTs.
Addressing these several digital divides, this volume maintains that ICTs are not goods in themselves as such. If they are useful they can be so only as instruments in meeting other human, social, cultural, economic or political purposes. The contributors go on to suggest various ways in which ICTs could be sued to promote these goals and to increase equity while promoting diversity. This, argue the contributors, can be attained only if we apply the same intelligence and imagination that has gone into creating the technologies themselves.
Raising issues that are important not just to India but to virtually all developing nations, this volume will attract a wide readership among students and scholars of information technology, economics, development studies and management. It will also be of interest to administrators and policy makers besides the general reader.
Contents
PREFACE
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Four Digital Divides
CHAPTER 2
Towards a Knowledge System for Sustainable Food Security: The Information Village Experiment in Pondicherry
CHAPTER 3
Liberalization of Indian Telecom: Regulation in the Era of Convergence
CHAPTER 4
Information Technology to Support Diversity in a Global Economy
CHAPTER 5
Telecom and Regulation Scenario in India
CHAPTER 6
An Agenda: Electronic Governance for the Poor
CHAPTER 7
Digital Development
CHAPTER 8
Science, Technology, and the Politics of Computers in Indian Languages
CHAPTER 9
Collaborative Creation of Digital Resources in Indian Languages
CHAPTER 10
The Bangalore Boom: From Brain Drain to Brain Circulation
About the Editors and Contributors
Index