I have been thinking about this theme for the last year or so. The classical understanding of the great French revolution, the English revolution in the 17th century led by Oliver Cromwell and even the American freedom struggle are considered as “Bourgeoisie Democratic Revolutions”. Bourgeoisie revolutions are those kind of revolutions in which the nascent ‘Bourgeoisie’ as a class takes over power from the ruling feudal class. The head of the feudal classes is symbolized by the monarch. The “Bourgeoisie” at this stage is composed of the newly emergent class of merchants and industrialists and the feudal class is composed of the landlords using a comparatively primitive means of production. In contrast to the bourgeoisie democratic revolution, a Socialist revolution in a classical sense is supposed to take place in a country with the bourgeoisie as a ruling class and which has a capitalist mode of production and one in which the proletariat captures state political power and establishes its dictatorship over the bourgeoisie and the means of production is taken over by the state for the collective welfare.
Marx had predicted that the Socialist revolution would first happen in an advanced industrial country like Britain. And so how exactly do we explain the socialist revolution which happened in Russia led by the Bolshevik party and the revolution that happened in China led by the Chinese Communist party? The understanding of many Marxists is that in Russia, Lenin telescoped a bourgeoisie revolution and a socialist revolution in the Russian October revolution and that in China, Mao brought about a ‘New Democratic Revolution’ which was supposed to revolutionize the forces of production to such an extent that Chinese society will undergo a transformation to the socialist phase led by the Chinese communist party without undergoing the phase of Capitalism.
But the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union and in China makes us rethink the above mentioned explanations. Taking the case of the former Soviet Union, a section of the world’s Marxists believe that the collapse was caused by the emergence of a new bourgeoisie class which toppled the soviet system in 1989 and another section of the world’s Marxists believe that the soviet bourgeoisie emerged within the communist party and captured state power with the death of Stalin and it was symbolized by the emergence of Khrushchev and his clique in 1953.
But there could be a third explanation. And this was to do with the very nature of the socialist revolution that happened in 1917. In February 1917, the Menshevik party, which broadly represented the interests of the nascent Russian bourgeoisie captured power from the Russian Tsar and this is characterized as a kind of social change which resembles a bourgeoisie democratic revolution. And in October 1917, the Bolshevik party led by Lenin which represented the interests of the nascent Russian proletariat captured power from the Mensheviks and this was supposed to be a Socialist revolution. And the new Bolshevik state successfully fought a civil war against the feudal forces of the Tsar which were backed by many capitalist countries of Europe for their own narrow geo-political ends.
It has to be accepted by any sane and humane observer that what happened in 1917 in Russia was a momentous historical change that had a definite progressive character. One thing that emerges very clearly from this change is that the earlier feudal system was overthrown and a modern political, economical and cultural system took its place. Lenin interpreted the October revolution in terms of Marxist categories but could this be regarded as a socialist revolution even in the sense that Lenin and the progressive world in general interpreted it? I feel that the answer is in the negative.
One reason for this is that mere rhetoric or ideological interpretation or progressive terms don’t decide a historical phenomenon. A historical phenomenon has to be judged in the light of the concrete material conditions that define it. This is what the Marxist methodology teaches us. The nature of the class which wielded and consolidated its power in post-revolutionary Russia has to be understood. There is no question that it was none other than the Bolshevik Communist party and the soviet state apparatus. There are technical differences between the Communist party and the state apparatus but for the purpose of this analysis both could be conflated into one single entity. Since in terms of Leninist theory, the party is considered supreme over the state, henceforth this conflated entity is denoted as the “Communist party”.
Now it has to be examined in what ways the Russian Communist party differed from the bourgeoisie as a class. Before that it has to be examined as to whether the Russian Communist party could be considered as a “class” as such. A “Class” is defined as a section of society which is related in a particular way to the means of production. Thus, the Russian Communist party which centralised all control over the means of production in post-revolutionary Russia could definitely be regarded as a “Class”.
Now let us examine in what ways the Russian Communist party differed from the classical understanding of the bourgeoisie as a class. In very simple terms, the Bourgeoisie is the class which owns the means of economic production. The Russian Communist party did not “own” the means of production. Now, the term “ownership” has to be defined. Ownership over an asset includes the right to use, sell, prohibit or allow some other person from using it and the right to pass it on to the next generation. In a technical sense, the Russian Communist party did not have ownership over the means of production but for all practical purposes it had near-absolute control over the means of production and the labour force that worked on it.
The Communist party had a monopoly over state power and did not allow for any Montesquean separation of state power. And in the economic sphere, the bourgeoisie was not supposed to be there in Soviet Russia. But a deeper analysis could spell something else. In the realm of Political Economy, in a standard bourgeoisie democracy, there is a separation between the state and the bourgeoisie class. Marx thundered that the state is the executive committee of the bourgeoisie which is very much true. And in Russia, as we have already seen, the Communist party had near-absolute control over the means of production and the labour force that worked on it and a question arises as to in what essential sense it was different from the bourgeoisie as a class?. The answer emerges that there was only a technical difference between the communist party as a class and the bourgeoisie as a class.
Off course in 1917, in the immediate aftermath of the October revolution, this was not the case. The Bolshevik party really represented the Russian proletariat. But then in an industrially backward state like Tsarist Russia, where is the question of existence of the proletariat as a class?. There was only a nascent proletariat class as well as a nascent bourgeoisie class in 1917. What seems eminently plausible is that while the feudal nobility as class got itself decimated because of the tumultuous civil war after the Octobteh er revolution, only a part of the bourgeoisie class got itself liquidated in the process of the revolution but this part was a relatively minor part of the nascent bourgeoisie class. The major part of the nascent bourgeoisie class got itself assimilated into the communist party apparatus and it along with the other entrants and elements of the Communist party, started building and consolidating itself as the new and robust bourgeoisie class of Soviet Russia. This whole event was given an ideological interpretation using a Marxist epistemology.
This is not to question the moral character or the brilliance of a great human being like Lenin and all the other idealistic heroes of the Soviet revolution. While Lenin and his comrades himself might themselves have been under the genuine belief that it was a socialist revolution, the reality might have been something else. And the reality might have been that what happened in Russia in 1917 was not a socialist revolution in the Marxist sense but a bourgeoisie revolution in the Marxist sense. Just like the bourgeoisie democratic revolution in France in 1789 differed from the bourgeoisie democratic revolution of England of the seventeenth century or the bourgeoisie democratic revolution of America in 1776, the Russian October revolution was also a bourgeoisie democratic revolution with its own peculiarities. The same holds true for the Chinese revolution of 1949 which was also a a bourgeoisie democratic revolution with its own oriental peculiarities.
In the final analysis, Marxism was never implemented in practice in any country in any period. Different parts and countries of the world underwent different kinds of bourgeoisie democratic revolutions to change over their feudal systems to a capitalist system. This process is more or less complete in the current times and possibly one of the last such bourgeoisie democratic revolutions could be the Maoist inspired revolution in Nepal in 2006. Now we see that almost all countries of the world are operating very much within a capitalist framework. While Marxism survives as a robust methodology to understand reality and social change, the question remains as to whether it remains a robust prophecy.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
A SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE “SELF” AND THE “OTHER”
Many a time we are confronted with one fundamental question of existence. Whether we should be selfish/selfless or rather what should be the extent of self orientedness and society/other orientedness that should guide us so that we live a satisfying life. Assume that a person is influenced by a humanistic ideology like Marxism or for that matter even humanistic Christianity. That person understands that the purpose of life is to serve society or God at some level in some capacity. More importantly assume that the ideology that the person internalizes advocates a kind of living that privileges self-sacrifice as the only way of life which will enable a person to not only lead a meaningful life but also attain self-actualization. So, in this scheme of things, the ends from the society/religion perspective is supposed to be contribution to society/god and for the individual, the end is self-actualization by leading a life of frugality, self-sacrifice and devotion to his ideology.
But there is a problem in this. Selflessness may degrade into masochism (“Masochism” stands for that irrational psychological tendency to inflict pain on oneself so that self-suffering becomes an end in itself). Masochism may lead to Sadism and many masochistic persons have a Sado-Masochistic personality structure. For example, we see many individuals in Social Service organizations/Communist parties/Religious institutions who think that they have “sacrificed” a lot but have not got anything in return and hence become embittered and sadistic. The tragedy is that many amongst such people may have been very refined in their moral qualities to start with but then since their intellectual understanding was erroneous, they may end up as unhappy and socially dangerous people. A good heart without a scientific understanding of life may not make a person a good human being. So, every individual, from a scientific perspective has to live for himself/herself. Then only she will be happy and her psyche will be integrated and healthy and her contribution to society or any extra-personal entity will be meaningful for herself and others. But the question arises isn’t this a kind of selfishness?. To resolve this problem, we have to look at another crucial aspect of human behavior which is nothing but honesty.
Any person should be honest to his values in life as well have the honesty to question those values which is more difficult. Questioning one’s own value system is needed because, no value-system is static and has to change with time. A person’s value system normally reflects the value system of that person’s society or part of society from which he comes from. He, who does not conform to that value system will be a social deviant. A social deviant can be either a criminal or a social revolutionary. A person who follows society’s value system and also questions them in a socially progressive way is a social revolutionary and one who follows society’s value system and also questions them in a socially regressive way is a criminal. So one has to be true to one’s values whether it is right wing/left wing, liberal/feudal etc while also simultaneously question them continuously. This may cause a lot of mental pain which many persons may not be able to bear. But there is no other way. This pain will be a satisfying kind of a pain because it will be imbued with a sense of purpose. The problem is that if we don’t question our own values, then our thinking will become fascist. Historically, this has been the psychological reason for why left-wing social democracy in Germany gave birth to Hitler’s right-wing Fascism.
Just like all human beings are not equal in mathematical ability or painting skills, there will be differences between human beings in moral qualities and honesty levels. We have to accept this simple fact about human beings while affirming our belief in the basic equality of humanity as well as understand that people can change with time for the better or worse. So, there will be good and bad human beings in this world or to put it in more humanistic terms, people with predominantly good or bad tendencies who will correspond roughly to people with honest or dishonest tendencies.
The question of honesty is not as simple as it seems. It was Sigmund Freud who made a seminal discovery that what we honestly believe about ourselves may not be the truth about ourselves. This discovery of Freud toppled the existing notions of ethics which till then understood dishonesty as the fractured relationship between thought and talk, not as the fractured relationship between thought and thought itself. This is possible because the human psyche is very complex and has many layers. Our mind can effectively manage contradictory tendencies by giving comfortable explanations to itself. Nobody can be dishonest to others. A person can only be dishonest only to himself. For example a person of a very low moral character like say a hardened criminal may not believe that he is morally bankrupt but will be able to give some explanations to himself to justify his actions. This may be the only way for him to be sane.
So, the problem that has to be resolved is not a problem between being “self” oriented or being “other/society” oriented but being honest/dishonest to oneself. In other words, it becomes a question of being true to oneself. This phrase, “Being true to oneself” is getting hackneyed these days. Many interpret that as a free license for being selfish and justifying acting in their bare self interest at all times. This is to be expected in a world in which insecurity levels are increasing and individuals are increasingly getting socially atomized and cut-off from their traditional social moorings and bonds. But “Being true to oneself” has a meaning which is richer and more wholesome than this. For this we have to understand what is meant by the “Self”.
What does the “Self” consist of? Freud made a fundamental mistake by conceptualizing the self as something that is driven by deeply ingrained biological impulses which essentially construct the “self”. This is wrong because as the truism by Aristotle goes, “Man is a social animal” and for him, his social being is primary and his biological being is secondary. The human “Self” is constructed by a complex socialization process through which the biological “being” transforms into the social “being”. In this process not only do the biological senses get subordinated to the social but also the individual realizes herself as a part of a social whole. So, the “Self” in itself organically consists of the “other”. The other may consist of a combination of a set of persons/social entities like a lover, family members, one’s own community or religion or one’s own nation, social class etc. Thus we see people sacrificing for their families, for their country or suicide bombers sacrificing themselves for what they believe etc. A caveat needs to be attached here that all this other-centered self-sacrifices may not be socially progressive and may even be socially regressive. Thus we see highly evolved, selfless individuals getting influenced by regressive ideologies like right-wing religious fundamentalism etc. So, if one is true to his ”self”, he will be automatically satisfying his duty to others.
The Marxist understanding of the individual “self” is much more scientific than the Freudian one but has a big lacuna because it considers the “self” as being determined by being a part of a social “class”. It ignored crucial socio-psychological aspects of the self. So, in Soviet Union and other former communist countries, it was possible for many individuals with venomous and power-centric tendencies to successfully make themselves and others believe that they are living for the sake of the proletarian and hence social interest. This is the psychological explanation for how communism degenerated into state capitalism and dictatorship of a small minority and finally collapsed.
A crucial understanding of the “self” that could complement the Marxist interpretation at the socio-psychological level could be that of Erich Fromm, a member of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. He considers the “Self” to be constructed by a continuous day-to-day process of being in action/praxis which consists of both reflection and action. So, if a person is able to be in continuous passionate activity, then it means that he is being driven by the “self” and hence honest. But this may be very difficult for the person himself to realize. For example, a person who is driven by a great “alien“ ambition and appears to be in constant activity may be actually conforming to what society expects from him than the innate desires of his soul and hence his activity may be mechanical and not one that helps self-realization. But there is no easy way for the person himself to realize this.
So, the only duty that one has to satisfy is to be true to one ”self” in such a way that she understands that her “self” incorporates the other relevant extra-self entities or the “others” who are a part of her existence. One has to learn not only to be passionate about one’s life, one’s worldview/ideology but also passionate about reflecting and questioning her values in a process of engaging with social reality through continuous praxis in which her life’s central passions get reflected in each and every individual activity. This process of being “Being true to oneself” becomes complex and difficult and hence needs continuous and life-long practice. But herein lies the crucial answer to the question of how selfless/selfish a person should be and also the tragedy and the beauty of the human condition. One final caveat - The process of how to be honest to oneself may be much more complex that that which has been discussed in this article but this is what my own limited understanding permits.
But there is a problem in this. Selflessness may degrade into masochism (“Masochism” stands for that irrational psychological tendency to inflict pain on oneself so that self-suffering becomes an end in itself). Masochism may lead to Sadism and many masochistic persons have a Sado-Masochistic personality structure. For example, we see many individuals in Social Service organizations/Communist parties/Religious institutions who think that they have “sacrificed” a lot but have not got anything in return and hence become embittered and sadistic. The tragedy is that many amongst such people may have been very refined in their moral qualities to start with but then since their intellectual understanding was erroneous, they may end up as unhappy and socially dangerous people. A good heart without a scientific understanding of life may not make a person a good human being. So, every individual, from a scientific perspective has to live for himself/herself. Then only she will be happy and her psyche will be integrated and healthy and her contribution to society or any extra-personal entity will be meaningful for herself and others. But the question arises isn’t this a kind of selfishness?. To resolve this problem, we have to look at another crucial aspect of human behavior which is nothing but honesty.
Any person should be honest to his values in life as well have the honesty to question those values which is more difficult. Questioning one’s own value system is needed because, no value-system is static and has to change with time. A person’s value system normally reflects the value system of that person’s society or part of society from which he comes from. He, who does not conform to that value system will be a social deviant. A social deviant can be either a criminal or a social revolutionary. A person who follows society’s value system and also questions them in a socially progressive way is a social revolutionary and one who follows society’s value system and also questions them in a socially regressive way is a criminal. So one has to be true to one’s values whether it is right wing/left wing, liberal/feudal etc while also simultaneously question them continuously. This may cause a lot of mental pain which many persons may not be able to bear. But there is no other way. This pain will be a satisfying kind of a pain because it will be imbued with a sense of purpose. The problem is that if we don’t question our own values, then our thinking will become fascist. Historically, this has been the psychological reason for why left-wing social democracy in Germany gave birth to Hitler’s right-wing Fascism.
Just like all human beings are not equal in mathematical ability or painting skills, there will be differences between human beings in moral qualities and honesty levels. We have to accept this simple fact about human beings while affirming our belief in the basic equality of humanity as well as understand that people can change with time for the better or worse. So, there will be good and bad human beings in this world or to put it in more humanistic terms, people with predominantly good or bad tendencies who will correspond roughly to people with honest or dishonest tendencies.
The question of honesty is not as simple as it seems. It was Sigmund Freud who made a seminal discovery that what we honestly believe about ourselves may not be the truth about ourselves. This discovery of Freud toppled the existing notions of ethics which till then understood dishonesty as the fractured relationship between thought and talk, not as the fractured relationship between thought and thought itself. This is possible because the human psyche is very complex and has many layers. Our mind can effectively manage contradictory tendencies by giving comfortable explanations to itself. Nobody can be dishonest to others. A person can only be dishonest only to himself. For example a person of a very low moral character like say a hardened criminal may not believe that he is morally bankrupt but will be able to give some explanations to himself to justify his actions. This may be the only way for him to be sane.
So, the problem that has to be resolved is not a problem between being “self” oriented or being “other/society” oriented but being honest/dishonest to oneself. In other words, it becomes a question of being true to oneself. This phrase, “Being true to oneself” is getting hackneyed these days. Many interpret that as a free license for being selfish and justifying acting in their bare self interest at all times. This is to be expected in a world in which insecurity levels are increasing and individuals are increasingly getting socially atomized and cut-off from their traditional social moorings and bonds. But “Being true to oneself” has a meaning which is richer and more wholesome than this. For this we have to understand what is meant by the “Self”.
What does the “Self” consist of? Freud made a fundamental mistake by conceptualizing the self as something that is driven by deeply ingrained biological impulses which essentially construct the “self”. This is wrong because as the truism by Aristotle goes, “Man is a social animal” and for him, his social being is primary and his biological being is secondary. The human “Self” is constructed by a complex socialization process through which the biological “being” transforms into the social “being”. In this process not only do the biological senses get subordinated to the social but also the individual realizes herself as a part of a social whole. So, the “Self” in itself organically consists of the “other”. The other may consist of a combination of a set of persons/social entities like a lover, family members, one’s own community or religion or one’s own nation, social class etc. Thus we see people sacrificing for their families, for their country or suicide bombers sacrificing themselves for what they believe etc. A caveat needs to be attached here that all this other-centered self-sacrifices may not be socially progressive and may even be socially regressive. Thus we see highly evolved, selfless individuals getting influenced by regressive ideologies like right-wing religious fundamentalism etc. So, if one is true to his ”self”, he will be automatically satisfying his duty to others.
The Marxist understanding of the individual “self” is much more scientific than the Freudian one but has a big lacuna because it considers the “self” as being determined by being a part of a social “class”. It ignored crucial socio-psychological aspects of the self. So, in Soviet Union and other former communist countries, it was possible for many individuals with venomous and power-centric tendencies to successfully make themselves and others believe that they are living for the sake of the proletarian and hence social interest. This is the psychological explanation for how communism degenerated into state capitalism and dictatorship of a small minority and finally collapsed.
A crucial understanding of the “self” that could complement the Marxist interpretation at the socio-psychological level could be that of Erich Fromm, a member of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. He considers the “Self” to be constructed by a continuous day-to-day process of being in action/praxis which consists of both reflection and action. So, if a person is able to be in continuous passionate activity, then it means that he is being driven by the “self” and hence honest. But this may be very difficult for the person himself to realize. For example, a person who is driven by a great “alien“ ambition and appears to be in constant activity may be actually conforming to what society expects from him than the innate desires of his soul and hence his activity may be mechanical and not one that helps self-realization. But there is no easy way for the person himself to realize this.
So, the only duty that one has to satisfy is to be true to one ”self” in such a way that she understands that her “self” incorporates the other relevant extra-self entities or the “others” who are a part of her existence. One has to learn not only to be passionate about one’s life, one’s worldview/ideology but also passionate about reflecting and questioning her values in a process of engaging with social reality through continuous praxis in which her life’s central passions get reflected in each and every individual activity. This process of being “Being true to oneself” becomes complex and difficult and hence needs continuous and life-long practice. But herein lies the crucial answer to the question of how selfless/selfish a person should be and also the tragedy and the beauty of the human condition. One final caveat - The process of how to be honest to oneself may be much more complex that that which has been discussed in this article but this is what my own limited understanding permits.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Books Read
1. Art of Loving - Erich Fromm
2. Sane Society - Erich Fromm
3. Escape from Freedom- Erich Fromm
4. Indian Philosophy - JJ Mohanty
5. Communist Manifesto - Marx & Engels
2. Sane Society - Erich Fromm
3. Escape from Freedom- Erich Fromm
4. Indian Philosophy - JJ Mohanty
5. Communist Manifesto - Marx & Engels
Friday, April 24, 2009
Dancing in a Cultural Vacuum
“The human soul needs a fuller and a more richer culture than the one offered by Hollywood and Rock Music” – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian Writer
Prelude: It was a sultry day in Silvassa[1], April, 2008. I and a few of my fellow students had come there for a research project and were staying in a hotel. After dinner, we noticed that the hotel had a built-in discotheque and that some youth were dancing there. We cautiously approached the security guard there and asked whether we can enter the dance areana. He said yes and so we entered. I could not resist my desire to join in the dancing. By the way, coming from ultra-conservative Tamil Nadu where only cinema actors are allowed to dance, I had developed a love for dancing (A friend of mine used to say that Iam the most aweful dancer she has ever seen but I don’t let these trivial things deter me from dancing in public whenever I get an opportunity totally insensitive to whatever spectacle that I might be subjecting the onlookers to). I realized to my pleasant surprise, that the dancing in the discotheque is not very different from the “grinds” that happens in IRMA. As my fellow students were not willing to shake a leg, I went to a corner of the dance floor and started dancing alone. A group of three guys dancing a small distance away, on seeing my lonely dance, out of spontaneous friendliness, pulled me into their dancing ring. We four guys happily danced till the discotheque wound up for the night. We went out and mutually introduced ourselves. They said they were all undergraduate students from a college in Mumbai. We said bye and I came to my hotel room wondering at this beautiful cultural medium of dance which enables complete strangers to engage with each other with a feeling of spontaneous love and joy. I came back to my hotel room with my faith in humanity fully reinforced. But somewhere deep within myself I felt that some pertinent questions related to this experience needs to be answered.
A simple definition of “Culture” can be taken as those set of values that in sum constitutes the guidelines for human existence and that which enables us to exist at a higher and a more subliminal level than that of animals. The French Structuralist Levi Strauss says that the birth of the incest taboo demarcates the state of animals from the cultured state of human beings. Culture need not connote only good things. For that matter, Sigmund Freud claims that the first man threw an insult instead of a stone at his opponent started the human civilization. Culture denotes the sum total of all human values and not only the refined formal expression of these values through the arts like music, dance, cinema, drama etc. Finally, culture is the medium through which people find a meaning for their lives.
But what exactly seems to be the state of culture in the last few decades all across the globe? Two broad cultural trends seem to be in a dialectical interchange. One is the traditional culture across all societies and the other is the west-inspired modernist culture which forms the cultural component of the globalization process. This cultural clash should not be understood as the interplay between traditional and modern cultures which has been the hallmark of all ages but as something which is qualitatively different from other ages because of the radical nature of the globalization process which has been happening for the last 30 years.
We’ll now examine both these trends one by one. The first trend represented by traditional culture has ceased to satisfy the cultural urges of the human population as a whole in this era because it is not in sync with the changed and changing nature of the “mode of production”. Here by the phrase “mode of production” is taken from the Marxist epistemological understanding and it means the ever-evolving force of technology and the way in which economic production is organized around it. The second modernist trend is one which is in sync with the changed mode of production and is best described by the Hollywood culture and its numerous clones around the world. We can see that a considerable number of Bollywood movies are inspired by the problems of the NRIs and the wannabe NRIs. If one only sees only this genre of bollywood movies, he cannot be faulted for coming to the comfortable conclusion that the whole of India is driven by only one aim - To go abroad for a better life. Another closely related genre of Indian films like Dil Chatta Hai' and ' Devdas' have another related problem. In these films, ostentation has become an end in itself and opulence exists in celebration of itself. The old kind of stories where a 'poor girl falls in love with a rich boy' kind of movies are passe. By and large, the poor are out of the world view of these films. These new breed of movies deal exclusively with the concerns of the ' Beautiful people ' - the noveau rich , the rich and the bored super rich.
There are two problems with this cultural clash between the traditional and modern western culture. One is that it can adopt certain uncomfortable and violent overtones. The beating up of young couples on Valentine’s Day by right wing groups is an example of this. This is being done by a feeling of aggrievement caused by the globalization process which has left the majority of the population outside its cultural calculus. The cultural capital of modernization defines what is being “Civilized” in the current era. Deprived of that cultural capital, in the search for self-esteem and dignity, the dispossessed sections direct their anger against what they wrongly perceive as the symbols which caused their deprived undignified state. For this purpose, they take on the cultural weapons offered by the revivalist, revanchist ideologies of the right-wing religious groups who base their worldview on the real or imaginary state of cultural wellbeing that existed like say the “Ram Rajya” in India etc. The second problem is that even the groups who may mange to get this cultural capital through their education, jobs etc may suffer from an “Identity Crisis” because in their attempt to straddle two cultures, their cultural moorings gets properly shaken. For example, I knew one upper middle class Mumbaikar youth who used to believe in both traditional Hindu values as well as pre-marital relationships and doesn’t seem to detect the faintest sign of dissonance between the two. And ultimately this leaves them searching for a meaning for their lives.
Ok, assuming that a section of society manages to smoothly effect the cultural leap from the traditional to the modern, then is the problem solved for them? Definitely not. Because the problem is much deeper and is to do with the very nature of capitalism. In capitalism characterized by commodity production for the market, a person is estranged and alienated from his true essence. Marx termed this phenomenon as alienation. Because of alienation, a person tries to find solace only in things which are external to him like a revivalist God, a new car, fancy house etc. Moreover, in capitalism, a thing becomes valuable only by virtue of its unavailability. Once it becomes available, it will become not-so-worthy and the individual will start yearning for something which is not available. The system consciously cultivates mythical images through the media like the “Contented Consumer”, the “Obedient worker”, the “Brilliant Investment Banker”, the “Happy Married Couple” etc while superbly hiding the exploitative capitalist and patriarchal relations that underlie each of these constructs.
Additional complications are being created which are leading to a lot of cultural confusion. I knew some cultural activists in Tamil Nadu who used to profess a militant fringe left political ideology. I had read in a newspaper that a couple of their women activists had barged into a cinema theatre showing pornography and had torn the screen because of their belief that pornography insults women. There were all a band of dedicated, selfless and idealistic set of people. Well, one day I had the opportunity to talk with a male activist of theirs, a poor chap who was doing the profession of an auto driver for a living. He was saying that they had no money even to print their political posters and so were writing them by hand day and night. Even if uneducated, he was inspiring. But when I asked him about the content of those posters it was disappointing. It was about North Indian Marwadis “exploiting” Tamil Nadu. If tiny underdeveloped Manipur talks of development neglect and hence exploitation by the Indian state, that has more than an element of truth. But I simply could not get how Tamil Nadu which by any standards will be one of the most developed states in India can be “exploited” by north Indians. The only plausible explanation for their stance is that, after the collapse of the USSR, their earlier noble and inclusivistic communist ideology has now degenerated into a parochial cultural Tamil nationalism and it is not derived from the material facts of inter-regional development and exploitation. This is the trend internationally also. In Sri Lanka, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) inspired by the great internationalist Che Guevara waged a militant struggle for a communist Srilanka in the 1980s. 40,000 of their selfless Sinhalese cadres gave their lives for the cause of an egalitarian Sri Lanka comprised of both Sinhalese and Tamils cohabiting with equal rights. But now the very same JVP has transmorphed into a mainstream political party with a virulent ultra-nationalist ideology rooted in Sinhala majoritarianism and its attendant anti-Tamil minority connotations.
So, to put it in a nutshell, the whole of humanity seems to be dancing in a cultural vacuum. Caught between the proverbial devil and the deep sea, humanity is left desperately searching for a meaning for life worth living. But nature abhors a vacuum and it will be surely filled. So, what exactly is the solution? This is easier asked than answered. A new culture needs to be evolved.
Firstly, a progressive culture cannot leave out the aspirations of the majority and so the elite-mass cultural gap has to be bridged. At a personal level, people should understand that being 'cultured ' does not mean acting 'sophisticated' and imagining themselves to be the snobbish member of an elitist stratum. Being cultured means being broad and inclusivist in mind, spirit and action. This will enable the elites to connect with the masses. As Gandhi says, even self-suffering can have a culturo-spiritual value. The elites should realize that to share in the sum-total of human suffering is also an act of personal spiritual and cultural upliftment. Hence the popular culture needs to be dovetailed with the subaltern culture.
Secondly the reality-fantasy cultural gap has to bridged. In an abstract sense, being cultured means having the aesthetic capability to appreciate beauty. But what is beauty? Beauty is truth even if it contains certain ugly aspects of reality. A culture which provides a beautiful make-believe fantasy world into which people can escape, be “Happy” and forget these aspects is neither progressive for society and will only create mindless zombies out of these individuals.
Thirdly, in a society that is mutually constituted by an exploitative set of relations, there cannot be a passive culture which is not related to these relationships. A progressive culture has to combat these exploitative relationships. A kind of culture is needed that helps mass movements of the dispossesed millions connect to the mainstream middle class and get the legitimacy that they richly deserve. These movements can assume a plethora of cultural forms like street theatre, community media etc and can be creatively derived from a mix of traditional and modern cultural forms and they can use the latest in Information and Communication Technologies.
Finally, the cultural problems have to be linked with the other systemic problems to do with the political economy and the efforts has to be a joint and sustained one. In this essay certain terms used have been used more to prove the analytical points raised than to stand the test of rigid academic scrutiny from the sociological or the anthropological point of view. Moreover a broad sweep of issues have been covered at the expense of some coherence. But the objective was more to provide some useful insights and ask some pertinent questions.
[1] The Capital of the Union Territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, on the Gujarat-Maharashtra border
Prelude: It was a sultry day in Silvassa[1], April, 2008. I and a few of my fellow students had come there for a research project and were staying in a hotel. After dinner, we noticed that the hotel had a built-in discotheque and that some youth were dancing there. We cautiously approached the security guard there and asked whether we can enter the dance areana. He said yes and so we entered. I could not resist my desire to join in the dancing. By the way, coming from ultra-conservative Tamil Nadu where only cinema actors are allowed to dance, I had developed a love for dancing (A friend of mine used to say that Iam the most aweful dancer she has ever seen but I don’t let these trivial things deter me from dancing in public whenever I get an opportunity totally insensitive to whatever spectacle that I might be subjecting the onlookers to). I realized to my pleasant surprise, that the dancing in the discotheque is not very different from the “grinds” that happens in IRMA. As my fellow students were not willing to shake a leg, I went to a corner of the dance floor and started dancing alone. A group of three guys dancing a small distance away, on seeing my lonely dance, out of spontaneous friendliness, pulled me into their dancing ring. We four guys happily danced till the discotheque wound up for the night. We went out and mutually introduced ourselves. They said they were all undergraduate students from a college in Mumbai. We said bye and I came to my hotel room wondering at this beautiful cultural medium of dance which enables complete strangers to engage with each other with a feeling of spontaneous love and joy. I came back to my hotel room with my faith in humanity fully reinforced. But somewhere deep within myself I felt that some pertinent questions related to this experience needs to be answered.
A simple definition of “Culture” can be taken as those set of values that in sum constitutes the guidelines for human existence and that which enables us to exist at a higher and a more subliminal level than that of animals. The French Structuralist Levi Strauss says that the birth of the incest taboo demarcates the state of animals from the cultured state of human beings. Culture need not connote only good things. For that matter, Sigmund Freud claims that the first man threw an insult instead of a stone at his opponent started the human civilization. Culture denotes the sum total of all human values and not only the refined formal expression of these values through the arts like music, dance, cinema, drama etc. Finally, culture is the medium through which people find a meaning for their lives.
But what exactly seems to be the state of culture in the last few decades all across the globe? Two broad cultural trends seem to be in a dialectical interchange. One is the traditional culture across all societies and the other is the west-inspired modernist culture which forms the cultural component of the globalization process. This cultural clash should not be understood as the interplay between traditional and modern cultures which has been the hallmark of all ages but as something which is qualitatively different from other ages because of the radical nature of the globalization process which has been happening for the last 30 years.
We’ll now examine both these trends one by one. The first trend represented by traditional culture has ceased to satisfy the cultural urges of the human population as a whole in this era because it is not in sync with the changed and changing nature of the “mode of production”. Here by the phrase “mode of production” is taken from the Marxist epistemological understanding and it means the ever-evolving force of technology and the way in which economic production is organized around it. The second modernist trend is one which is in sync with the changed mode of production and is best described by the Hollywood culture and its numerous clones around the world. We can see that a considerable number of Bollywood movies are inspired by the problems of the NRIs and the wannabe NRIs. If one only sees only this genre of bollywood movies, he cannot be faulted for coming to the comfortable conclusion that the whole of India is driven by only one aim - To go abroad for a better life. Another closely related genre of Indian films like Dil Chatta Hai' and ' Devdas' have another related problem. In these films, ostentation has become an end in itself and opulence exists in celebration of itself. The old kind of stories where a 'poor girl falls in love with a rich boy' kind of movies are passe. By and large, the poor are out of the world view of these films. These new breed of movies deal exclusively with the concerns of the ' Beautiful people ' - the noveau rich , the rich and the bored super rich.
There are two problems with this cultural clash between the traditional and modern western culture. One is that it can adopt certain uncomfortable and violent overtones. The beating up of young couples on Valentine’s Day by right wing groups is an example of this. This is being done by a feeling of aggrievement caused by the globalization process which has left the majority of the population outside its cultural calculus. The cultural capital of modernization defines what is being “Civilized” in the current era. Deprived of that cultural capital, in the search for self-esteem and dignity, the dispossessed sections direct their anger against what they wrongly perceive as the symbols which caused their deprived undignified state. For this purpose, they take on the cultural weapons offered by the revivalist, revanchist ideologies of the right-wing religious groups who base their worldview on the real or imaginary state of cultural wellbeing that existed like say the “Ram Rajya” in India etc. The second problem is that even the groups who may mange to get this cultural capital through their education, jobs etc may suffer from an “Identity Crisis” because in their attempt to straddle two cultures, their cultural moorings gets properly shaken. For example, I knew one upper middle class Mumbaikar youth who used to believe in both traditional Hindu values as well as pre-marital relationships and doesn’t seem to detect the faintest sign of dissonance between the two. And ultimately this leaves them searching for a meaning for their lives.
Ok, assuming that a section of society manages to smoothly effect the cultural leap from the traditional to the modern, then is the problem solved for them? Definitely not. Because the problem is much deeper and is to do with the very nature of capitalism. In capitalism characterized by commodity production for the market, a person is estranged and alienated from his true essence. Marx termed this phenomenon as alienation. Because of alienation, a person tries to find solace only in things which are external to him like a revivalist God, a new car, fancy house etc. Moreover, in capitalism, a thing becomes valuable only by virtue of its unavailability. Once it becomes available, it will become not-so-worthy and the individual will start yearning for something which is not available. The system consciously cultivates mythical images through the media like the “Contented Consumer”, the “Obedient worker”, the “Brilliant Investment Banker”, the “Happy Married Couple” etc while superbly hiding the exploitative capitalist and patriarchal relations that underlie each of these constructs.
Additional complications are being created which are leading to a lot of cultural confusion. I knew some cultural activists in Tamil Nadu who used to profess a militant fringe left political ideology. I had read in a newspaper that a couple of their women activists had barged into a cinema theatre showing pornography and had torn the screen because of their belief that pornography insults women. There were all a band of dedicated, selfless and idealistic set of people. Well, one day I had the opportunity to talk with a male activist of theirs, a poor chap who was doing the profession of an auto driver for a living. He was saying that they had no money even to print their political posters and so were writing them by hand day and night. Even if uneducated, he was inspiring. But when I asked him about the content of those posters it was disappointing. It was about North Indian Marwadis “exploiting” Tamil Nadu. If tiny underdeveloped Manipur talks of development neglect and hence exploitation by the Indian state, that has more than an element of truth. But I simply could not get how Tamil Nadu which by any standards will be one of the most developed states in India can be “exploited” by north Indians. The only plausible explanation for their stance is that, after the collapse of the USSR, their earlier noble and inclusivistic communist ideology has now degenerated into a parochial cultural Tamil nationalism and it is not derived from the material facts of inter-regional development and exploitation. This is the trend internationally also. In Sri Lanka, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) inspired by the great internationalist Che Guevara waged a militant struggle for a communist Srilanka in the 1980s. 40,000 of their selfless Sinhalese cadres gave their lives for the cause of an egalitarian Sri Lanka comprised of both Sinhalese and Tamils cohabiting with equal rights. But now the very same JVP has transmorphed into a mainstream political party with a virulent ultra-nationalist ideology rooted in Sinhala majoritarianism and its attendant anti-Tamil minority connotations.
So, to put it in a nutshell, the whole of humanity seems to be dancing in a cultural vacuum. Caught between the proverbial devil and the deep sea, humanity is left desperately searching for a meaning for life worth living. But nature abhors a vacuum and it will be surely filled. So, what exactly is the solution? This is easier asked than answered. A new culture needs to be evolved.
Firstly, a progressive culture cannot leave out the aspirations of the majority and so the elite-mass cultural gap has to be bridged. At a personal level, people should understand that being 'cultured ' does not mean acting 'sophisticated' and imagining themselves to be the snobbish member of an elitist stratum. Being cultured means being broad and inclusivist in mind, spirit and action. This will enable the elites to connect with the masses. As Gandhi says, even self-suffering can have a culturo-spiritual value. The elites should realize that to share in the sum-total of human suffering is also an act of personal spiritual and cultural upliftment. Hence the popular culture needs to be dovetailed with the subaltern culture.
Secondly the reality-fantasy cultural gap has to bridged. In an abstract sense, being cultured means having the aesthetic capability to appreciate beauty. But what is beauty? Beauty is truth even if it contains certain ugly aspects of reality. A culture which provides a beautiful make-believe fantasy world into which people can escape, be “Happy” and forget these aspects is neither progressive for society and will only create mindless zombies out of these individuals.
Thirdly, in a society that is mutually constituted by an exploitative set of relations, there cannot be a passive culture which is not related to these relationships. A progressive culture has to combat these exploitative relationships. A kind of culture is needed that helps mass movements of the dispossesed millions connect to the mainstream middle class and get the legitimacy that they richly deserve. These movements can assume a plethora of cultural forms like street theatre, community media etc and can be creatively derived from a mix of traditional and modern cultural forms and they can use the latest in Information and Communication Technologies.
Finally, the cultural problems have to be linked with the other systemic problems to do with the political economy and the efforts has to be a joint and sustained one. In this essay certain terms used have been used more to prove the analytical points raised than to stand the test of rigid academic scrutiny from the sociological or the anthropological point of view. Moreover a broad sweep of issues have been covered at the expense of some coherence. But the objective was more to provide some useful insights and ask some pertinent questions.
[1] The Capital of the Union Territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, on the Gujarat-Maharashtra border
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Towards a New Feminist Identity
(Partly adapted from a poem in the “Analytical MONTHLY REVIEW’ titled “The Secret Of Being A Woman”)
Everybody realizes that ‘sex’ is a biological identity…
We only have to attend a biology class,
To realize the truth of the above statement…
Everybody realizes that gender is a social identity…
We only have to see the page 3 columns in fashionable magazines,
That are exclusively for “Him” or “Her”,
To realize the truth of the above statement…
Everybody realizes that gender is an economic identity…
We only have to see the commodification of women,
In the oldest profession in the world – prostitution,
And the sexual division of labour,
To realize the truth of the above statement…
The problem starts,
When gender is realized,
As a Political identity…
When a woman starts realizing that,
She being a woman,
Has got nothing to due with Biology,
But rather,
Is something to due with Sociology,
Because she is not born as a woman,
But through countless taboos and sanctions,
She is made into a woman…..
When a woman starts realizing that,
The ethereal orange flavoured perfume,
That so very nicely adorns her skin,
May be made by the same corporation,
That manufactures chemical weapons…
When a woman starts realizing that,
Her worth is not something,
That is decided by her beauty…..
And more so,
Her conception of her own beauty,
Is not a simple manifestation of her sense of aesthetics,
But is something that is increasingly decided,
By an alien and commercial cosmetics industry….
When a woman starts realizing that,
Her own sexuality,
Can also be made by a patriarchal society,
Into an instrument,
For her own oppression…
When a woman starts realizing that,
All through history and up till today,
That the feudal institution of the “Family”,
Represents the most structured origin and basis,
For her continual sub-ordination.….
When a woman starts realizing that,
That she cannot hope to realize her Identity
By winning Beauty pageants,
And by strutting in Fashion parades,
And by stressing the finer aspects of her ‘Feminity’,
But only by,
Affirming the deeper aspects of her innate Humanity…
When she realizes all these things,
She will cease to be a woman in herself,
And will truly become,
A real woman for herself
And will realize her identity…
Everybody realizes that ‘sex’ is a biological identity…
We only have to attend a biology class,
To realize the truth of the above statement…
Everybody realizes that gender is a social identity…
We only have to see the page 3 columns in fashionable magazines,
That are exclusively for “Him” or “Her”,
To realize the truth of the above statement…
Everybody realizes that gender is an economic identity…
We only have to see the commodification of women,
In the oldest profession in the world – prostitution,
And the sexual division of labour,
To realize the truth of the above statement…
The problem starts,
When gender is realized,
As a Political identity…
When a woman starts realizing that,
She being a woman,
Has got nothing to due with Biology,
But rather,
Is something to due with Sociology,
Because she is not born as a woman,
But through countless taboos and sanctions,
She is made into a woman…..
When a woman starts realizing that,
The ethereal orange flavoured perfume,
That so very nicely adorns her skin,
May be made by the same corporation,
That manufactures chemical weapons…
When a woman starts realizing that,
Her worth is not something,
That is decided by her beauty…..
And more so,
Her conception of her own beauty,
Is not a simple manifestation of her sense of aesthetics,
But is something that is increasingly decided,
By an alien and commercial cosmetics industry….
When a woman starts realizing that,
Her own sexuality,
Can also be made by a patriarchal society,
Into an instrument,
For her own oppression…
When a woman starts realizing that,
All through history and up till today,
That the feudal institution of the “Family”,
Represents the most structured origin and basis,
For her continual sub-ordination.….
When a woman starts realizing that,
That she cannot hope to realize her Identity
By winning Beauty pageants,
And by strutting in Fashion parades,
And by stressing the finer aspects of her ‘Feminity’,
But only by,
Affirming the deeper aspects of her innate Humanity…
When she realizes all these things,
She will cease to be a woman in herself,
And will truly become,
A real woman for herself
And will realize her identity…
A Voice Against Hindu-Muslim Communalism
Communalism is an ideology which survives on certain myths and false notions. Since it is an ideology, it has to be fought on an ideological plane because no force can crush an ideology. Communalism is not only a feeling which is possessed by certain misguided elements but it thrives on certain attitudes and prejudices which is present in most ordinary people like us. We'll start by analyzing certain myths. Myth No: 1 : Hindus are the natives of India while Muslims are foreigners.
This is false because the majority of the ancestors of Indian Muslims were living in India before the advent of Islam. Most of them were converted to Islam by Sufi Saints by peaceful means. Even the minority of Muslims who came from Central Asia are not 'foreigners' because if they are foreigners , are not the Aryans who came from Central Asia, the Huns from Central Asia who constitute the ethnic ancestors of most of the current Gujaratis and Rajputs and the Dravidians who came from the Mediterranean region foreigners? Man evolved from ape in Central Africa and then migrated to all parts of the world. So going by that, apart from the inhabitants of central Africa, all of us are 'foreigners'. Why can't we accept a people who have been living here for a minimum of 1000 years as natives of India? Myth No: 2 : Islam is a regressive religion compared with Hinduism In the 7th century AD, when we Hindus in India were burning our young widows in the name of 'Sati', Mohammed the Prophet himself married a widow. According to the Manu Smriti, there is no provision for divorce open to a woman. She has to live (and possibly die) with her husband. But this provision is there in Islam for a Muslim women. Moreover, theoretically Islam recognizes only one god ‘Allah’ before whom all are equal. But in Hinduism we have different gods for different castes, the status of the god increasing with the status of the caste. In Kerala, until recent times a man belonging to the 'Pulayan' caste had to maintain a distance of 64 feet from a 'Nambhoodri Brahmin' else he ' pollutes' him. These sort of obnoxious practices of untouchability were sustained on the basis of 'Varnashrama Vyavastha' or the doctrine of Theological Determinism. The caste system is definitely a blot on Hinduism, the remnants of which are still lingering well into in the 21st century. Seeing all this, how can we claim that we are following a more progressive religion than Islam? If the Taliban type of Islam is taken to represent the essence of Islam, then the Hinduism advocated by the killers of Graham Staines can be taken to be the essence of Hinduism. Both are virulent forms of Islam and Hinduism respectively and don’t represent the ‘Ideal type’ of either religion.Myth No: 3 : Muslims and other minorities enjoy some ‘privileges’ which the majority Hindu community does not enjoy. The percentage of Hindus in India who are below the poverty line is around 26%. This figure for Muslims is around 46 %. Muslims form 12% of India's population. But in no sphere of economic, social or political importance like say the number of MPs in Parliament, the number of IAS officers, the number of millionaires etc is the Muslim representation equal to this 12%. It is always less. If Muslims are enjoying special privileges, how come this is possible? The differential laws which Muslims have are related to the issue of marriage, divorce etc. Let us take the famous issue of the ‘Triple Talaq’ system of divorce allowed for Muslims. Because of this law, Muslim men are able to exploit Muslim women more than the extent to which Hindu men are able to exploit Hindu women. But if we come to a conclusion that due to this law, Muslims are dominating Hindus, then we are taking a tragically erroneous leap of logic and morality. These issues have to be debated and solved from other angles like Gender relations etc and not from the communalistic angle. The point to be noted here is that the average Muslim of India is worse off economically, socially and politically than the average Hindu of India. Myth No : 4 : Muslims were ‘foreign invaders’ of the Indian nation Now we have to define the term 'foreign invader'. We can have a concept of a 'foreign invader’ only when we have a concept of what is the ‘native country’.We were not a single nation when Muslims invaded India. We were divided into numerous countries each fighting with each other. And even if we assume that India was invaded by Muslim conquerors 1000 Years ago, how can we forget the fact that India was also ‘invaded’ by the ‘foreign’ Hindu Aryans 3500 years ago? So nobody is a ‘foreign invader’. Myth No: 5: Muslims are basically of a violent mindset and are more prone to acts of ‘Terrorism’. Presently we read about ' Islamic terrorists '. But before September 11 WTC attacks the terrorist group which was first in the list of terrorist groups (if the word ‘terrorist’ can be used here) drawn up by the US State department was the LTTE. The LTTE conducts pujas in temples on its leader's B'day. So it is as Hindu as any Hindu organisation can be. No only the LTTE, the ULFA, Bodo militant groups of Assam are Hindus, the Naga militants are christians. In Southern Sudan we have Christian fundamentalist militants or terrorists. One may ask that on an international level, it is Islamic terrorism which is in the news and not Hindu or any other religion’s terrorism. This is because Muslims form a considerable proportion of the population in 90 countries of the world stretching right from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific whereas Hindus are found only within the Indian sub-continent. So Hindu fundamentalism is localized and contained while Islamic fundamentalism is internationalized. So we cannot associate terrorism with any single religion. And even if a particular religious group turns violent, the root causes of terrorism have to be located in socio-economic factors rather than in religion per se. So the average Muslim is as violent / non-violent as the average Hindu or The average Christian. Myth No: 6 : About Muslims invaders destroying Hindu temples This is a fact in the sense that Muslim invaders did destroy Hindu temples. But any invader in those crude historical times would definitely have attacked Hindu temples because those temples were like treasuries which housed all kinds of precious items. Any invading army whether it is the army of Ghazni Muhammed attacking Somnath or the army of Hindu King Krishna Deva Raya attacking the neighbouring Muslim Bahmani Kingdom would ransack the host country. For this we cannot blame the Muslim invaders alone. The sad fact is that a considerable section of India seems to believe that most of India's problems is because somebody destroyed a temple 500 years ago. Myth No : 7 : India was ruled by Muslims This is the greatest myth. India was never ruled by Muslims but only by Muslim rulers. What is the difference? A world of difference is there. When we say that Muslims ruled India for 750 years, we mean that during those 750 years, Muslims as a whole were ruling and dominating over Hindus, Sikhs, Jains etc of India. That was not at all the case. It was only a tiny fraction of the Muslim community called the Ashraf Muslims which constituted the Muslim ruling class. The point is even when the Muslim rulers were ruling India, the average Muslim was worse off in the socio-economic sense than the average Hindu. So, inspite of India being ruled by Muslim rulers for nearly 750 years, the Muslim rulers, were not able to convert their political dominance into social and economic dominance for all Muslims and perpetuate it. So, the average Muslim continues to be in a marginalized state even now.
Myth No: 8: Muslims are getting the advantage of “Minority appeasement” which is against the interests of the majority community
For this first we have to define what we define as a “Minority”. A South Indian who does not know Hindi properly will be part of a miniscule minority in North India. A lower caste boy in most elite educational institutions of India dominated by upper castes will be part of a minority. A professionally successful woman will be part of a minority in most professions which are male-dominated. A poor chap who enters a mall meant for the rich poor chap will be a minority in that space. So, judging by these standards the vast majority of Indians will be a part of some minority or the other. So, how a nation and society views and treats its different minorities reflects the progressive and liberal character. Hence a pro-muslim perspective and policy will only strengthen the moral character of the majority community as well as liberal ethos of the Indian state.
It might seem that here an anti-Hindu, pro-Muslim stance has been taken. But that was not the objective. We are now living in a country in which majoritarian fundamentalism parades under the name of ‘Nationalism’ while minoritarian fundamentalism is always condemned as ‘Terrorism’. So it is necessary to know the other side of the story to get the complete picture of the truth. Islamic fundamentalism is not an answer to Hindu fundamentalism neither is Hindu fundamentalism an answer to Islamic fundamentalism. The answer for irrational communalism is rational humanism. We are humans prior to being the adherents of specific religious denominations. So it behooves that we shouldn’t lose our humanistic and rational faculties in a communalistic stupor.
This is false because the majority of the ancestors of Indian Muslims were living in India before the advent of Islam. Most of them were converted to Islam by Sufi Saints by peaceful means. Even the minority of Muslims who came from Central Asia are not 'foreigners' because if they are foreigners , are not the Aryans who came from Central Asia, the Huns from Central Asia who constitute the ethnic ancestors of most of the current Gujaratis and Rajputs and the Dravidians who came from the Mediterranean region foreigners? Man evolved from ape in Central Africa and then migrated to all parts of the world. So going by that, apart from the inhabitants of central Africa, all of us are 'foreigners'. Why can't we accept a people who have been living here for a minimum of 1000 years as natives of India? Myth No: 2 : Islam is a regressive religion compared with Hinduism In the 7th century AD, when we Hindus in India were burning our young widows in the name of 'Sati', Mohammed the Prophet himself married a widow. According to the Manu Smriti, there is no provision for divorce open to a woman. She has to live (and possibly die) with her husband. But this provision is there in Islam for a Muslim women. Moreover, theoretically Islam recognizes only one god ‘Allah’ before whom all are equal. But in Hinduism we have different gods for different castes, the status of the god increasing with the status of the caste. In Kerala, until recent times a man belonging to the 'Pulayan' caste had to maintain a distance of 64 feet from a 'Nambhoodri Brahmin' else he ' pollutes' him. These sort of obnoxious practices of untouchability were sustained on the basis of 'Varnashrama Vyavastha' or the doctrine of Theological Determinism. The caste system is definitely a blot on Hinduism, the remnants of which are still lingering well into in the 21st century. Seeing all this, how can we claim that we are following a more progressive religion than Islam? If the Taliban type of Islam is taken to represent the essence of Islam, then the Hinduism advocated by the killers of Graham Staines can be taken to be the essence of Hinduism. Both are virulent forms of Islam and Hinduism respectively and don’t represent the ‘Ideal type’ of either religion.Myth No: 3 : Muslims and other minorities enjoy some ‘privileges’ which the majority Hindu community does not enjoy. The percentage of Hindus in India who are below the poverty line is around 26%. This figure for Muslims is around 46 %. Muslims form 12% of India's population. But in no sphere of economic, social or political importance like say the number of MPs in Parliament, the number of IAS officers, the number of millionaires etc is the Muslim representation equal to this 12%. It is always less. If Muslims are enjoying special privileges, how come this is possible? The differential laws which Muslims have are related to the issue of marriage, divorce etc. Let us take the famous issue of the ‘Triple Talaq’ system of divorce allowed for Muslims. Because of this law, Muslim men are able to exploit Muslim women more than the extent to which Hindu men are able to exploit Hindu women. But if we come to a conclusion that due to this law, Muslims are dominating Hindus, then we are taking a tragically erroneous leap of logic and morality. These issues have to be debated and solved from other angles like Gender relations etc and not from the communalistic angle. The point to be noted here is that the average Muslim of India is worse off economically, socially and politically than the average Hindu of India. Myth No : 4 : Muslims were ‘foreign invaders’ of the Indian nation Now we have to define the term 'foreign invader'. We can have a concept of a 'foreign invader’ only when we have a concept of what is the ‘native country’.We were not a single nation when Muslims invaded India. We were divided into numerous countries each fighting with each other. And even if we assume that India was invaded by Muslim conquerors 1000 Years ago, how can we forget the fact that India was also ‘invaded’ by the ‘foreign’ Hindu Aryans 3500 years ago? So nobody is a ‘foreign invader’. Myth No: 5: Muslims are basically of a violent mindset and are more prone to acts of ‘Terrorism’. Presently we read about ' Islamic terrorists '. But before September 11 WTC attacks the terrorist group which was first in the list of terrorist groups (if the word ‘terrorist’ can be used here) drawn up by the US State department was the LTTE. The LTTE conducts pujas in temples on its leader's B'day. So it is as Hindu as any Hindu organisation can be. No only the LTTE, the ULFA, Bodo militant groups of Assam are Hindus, the Naga militants are christians. In Southern Sudan we have Christian fundamentalist militants or terrorists. One may ask that on an international level, it is Islamic terrorism which is in the news and not Hindu or any other religion’s terrorism. This is because Muslims form a considerable proportion of the population in 90 countries of the world stretching right from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific whereas Hindus are found only within the Indian sub-continent. So Hindu fundamentalism is localized and contained while Islamic fundamentalism is internationalized. So we cannot associate terrorism with any single religion. And even if a particular religious group turns violent, the root causes of terrorism have to be located in socio-economic factors rather than in religion per se. So the average Muslim is as violent / non-violent as the average Hindu or The average Christian. Myth No: 6 : About Muslims invaders destroying Hindu temples This is a fact in the sense that Muslim invaders did destroy Hindu temples. But any invader in those crude historical times would definitely have attacked Hindu temples because those temples were like treasuries which housed all kinds of precious items. Any invading army whether it is the army of Ghazni Muhammed attacking Somnath or the army of Hindu King Krishna Deva Raya attacking the neighbouring Muslim Bahmani Kingdom would ransack the host country. For this we cannot blame the Muslim invaders alone. The sad fact is that a considerable section of India seems to believe that most of India's problems is because somebody destroyed a temple 500 years ago. Myth No : 7 : India was ruled by Muslims This is the greatest myth. India was never ruled by Muslims but only by Muslim rulers. What is the difference? A world of difference is there. When we say that Muslims ruled India for 750 years, we mean that during those 750 years, Muslims as a whole were ruling and dominating over Hindus, Sikhs, Jains etc of India. That was not at all the case. It was only a tiny fraction of the Muslim community called the Ashraf Muslims which constituted the Muslim ruling class. The point is even when the Muslim rulers were ruling India, the average Muslim was worse off in the socio-economic sense than the average Hindu. So, inspite of India being ruled by Muslim rulers for nearly 750 years, the Muslim rulers, were not able to convert their political dominance into social and economic dominance for all Muslims and perpetuate it. So, the average Muslim continues to be in a marginalized state even now.
Myth No: 8: Muslims are getting the advantage of “Minority appeasement” which is against the interests of the majority community
For this first we have to define what we define as a “Minority”. A South Indian who does not know Hindi properly will be part of a miniscule minority in North India. A lower caste boy in most elite educational institutions of India dominated by upper castes will be part of a minority. A professionally successful woman will be part of a minority in most professions which are male-dominated. A poor chap who enters a mall meant for the rich poor chap will be a minority in that space. So, judging by these standards the vast majority of Indians will be a part of some minority or the other. So, how a nation and society views and treats its different minorities reflects the progressive and liberal character. Hence a pro-muslim perspective and policy will only strengthen the moral character of the majority community as well as liberal ethos of the Indian state.
It might seem that here an anti-Hindu, pro-Muslim stance has been taken. But that was not the objective. We are now living in a country in which majoritarian fundamentalism parades under the name of ‘Nationalism’ while minoritarian fundamentalism is always condemned as ‘Terrorism’. So it is necessary to know the other side of the story to get the complete picture of the truth. Islamic fundamentalism is not an answer to Hindu fundamentalism neither is Hindu fundamentalism an answer to Islamic fundamentalism. The answer for irrational communalism is rational humanism. We are humans prior to being the adherents of specific religious denominations. So it behooves that we shouldn’t lose our humanistic and rational faculties in a communalistic stupor.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
PAPER PUBLISHED IN BOOK – ‘BRIDGING DIGITAL DIVIDE’ McMillan India, Advanced Research Series, January 2007
ABSTRACT
DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES ON THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
The digital divide is a phenomenon that is discussed ad nauseum in the current discourses on development both at the national as well as the international level. It can be broadly understood as the difference in the way that different sections of the population are able to relate at different levels to the new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and the resultant disparity caused therein.
First a broad definition to ‘digital divide’ is given in the paper. In this attempt, the need to understand the digital divide by taking into account its multidimensional complexities is reiterated. Then, this divide is sought to be located within two major theories of development namely, the Dependency theory and the Modernization theory.
To get a holistic understanding of the digital divide, the different dimensions of the divide are seen. The democratic potential of cyberspace is analyzed to see if it can give a political voice to the hitherto marginalized sections. The economic dimension is then elaborated and is seen to be the most important dimension. The actual cultural dimension of the divide between English and non-English linguistic groups are then seen. The potential cultural divide is also explained. Then the link between the spatial development divide and the hierarchy of computer networks are then seen. The broad social dimensions like that of gender, of the digital divide are analyzed. The difference between exclusion from information and exclusion by information is then seen. The reason for the contrast between the enormous amount of discourses generated on this topic and the lack of substantive efforts being taken at the ground level has to be explained. Whether the digital divide builds on the existing fault-lines of society and whether it widens or narrows down that fault-line has to be analyzed.
There can be two extreme perspectives that can be applied to understand the digital divide. One is Technological determinism and the other is Social determinism. This paper tries to find out the most appropriate scientific perspective that can be applied for understanding the digital divide and arrives at the Social Shaping of Technology or the SST perspective. The validity of this perspective and the need for adopting this perspective is explained.
After getting an appropriate perspective, there is a need for understanding whether the digital divide is an effect or a cause of wider extra-digital socio-economic phenomena. For this, a framework for understanding the digital divide is evolved. This framework also tries to integrate the digital divide with the wider socio-economic development divide. The insights that can be got from the framework and the practical implications of this framework if any are analyzed.
CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
2. DEFINITION AND MEANING
3. MAJOR DIMENSIONS OF THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
4. DIGITAL DIVIDE AND THE THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT
5. TECHNOLOGY, SOCIETY AND THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
6. A FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
7. CONCLUSION
8. REFERENCES
1. INTRODUCTION
Currently, the developed countries of the world and the bulk of the developing countries seem to be in the Information Age or seem to be in the development trajectory that will take them to the Information age. The Information age is one that is characterized by the primacy of information in all spheres of society. There can be many reasons for this primacy being given to information but in the realm of technology, it is due to those technologies which can be broadly termed as the ICTs (the Information and Communication Technologies). The ICTs are those revolutionary kind of technologies which have evolved as a result of the fusion of two hitherto distinct kind of technologies, viz, the Information Technologies and the Telecommunication technologies.
Closely associated with this Information age is a concept which goes by the name of the "digital divide". In a very broad sense, digital divide can be said to denote the difference in the way different sections of the society relate at different levels to the ICTs and the resultant extra-technological disparities therein. The term "digital divide" appears to have originated in newspaper reports and was popularized in the 1995 U.S. government report "Falling through the Net. (Hawkins 2003).
Analyzing the digital divide becomes important for two reasons. The first is that if the digital divide is bridged, it may contribute to economic growth. The second and the more important reason is that the digital divide remains one of the most patent examples of an iniquitous fact of the current trajectory of global development. So, bridging this digital divide becomes an economic as well as a moral imperative. In the context of this paper, the term digital technologies and cyberspace are meant to connote not only internet but also all the telecommunications technologies in the broadest sense of the term. The context in which this paper has been written includes the global, the national and the local.
2. DEFINITION AND MEANING
Before a rigorous analysis is done, it may be instructive to define this concept at the very basic level.
The concept of the digital divide has three dimensions (Steyaert 2002) viz,
i) Physical access to the Information technologies.
ii) Technology-illiteracy: It refers to the knowledge to operate the technology.
iii) Information-illiteracy. This refers to the attitude to search for relevant information, translate that to one's own situation and implement the necessary actions. This is the most critical element that makes the 'digital divide' a societal issue of extreme importance.
Physical access has two components, firstly, direct access to the new ICTs and secondly, the possibility to actually use those ICTs even if there is access. For example, Indian Dalits may technically have physical access to an Information Kiosk but may not be able to access it due to caste restrictions. Although physical access to computers and networks appears to be problematic on the short run, in the long run, the other two are more critical.
Viewed analytically, the digital divide may be of different types. They are (Keniston & Kumar 2004).
a) The digital divide that exists within every nation
b) The digital divide between sections of the population which are differently enabled in the cultural sense. Even between the genders, there may be a definite cultural divide.
c) The digital divide between the rich and the poor nations.
3. MAJOR DIMENSIONS OF THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
Here, an analysis of the digital divide across its various dimensions like the spatial, political, economical, social and the cultural realm is done. In all of these realms, the analysis of the dynamics of the divide can be done by locating it in a historical timeframe. Across all these realms, the divide can be conceptualized in two ways, ie, how the access to ICTs is affected by the pre-existing divide in these realms and how this differential access shapes the existing extra-technological divide in these realms. The analysis can also be at different levels like the micro, national and the international level.
3.1. Economic Dimensions
The idea of bridging the digital divide in the literature reflects the developed world’s view of what is lacking in the developing countries, of what developed countries have and developing countries have not (IPTS 2001). This may be understood as a feature of the modernization paradigm of development.
Riggins (2004) states that the digital divide artificially segments the marketplace and bridging the divide can result in lower product quality and lesser service for low-type consumers. So, the patent aim of bridging the digital divide can also serve as a marketing strategy by the corporate sector for market segmentation. Regarding e-commerce, it requires a level of business acumen and support structures that are as yet rare in the world. (Wresch 2003). So, overall, the development of e-commerce may result in the deepening of the digital divide in spite of developments like e-chouppal of ITC which aim at using e-commerce to bring rural producers to the mainstream markets.
For Quah (1996), the defining feature of the new economy is the increasing variety of goods and services, from business computer software to music, that take the form and properties of knowledge goods, namely, ‘infinite expansibility’, ‘weightlessness’ or ‘dematerialization’, and ‘non-rivalrousness’. Infinite expansibility means that the marginal costs of production is minuscule, weightlessness signifies that goods can be distributed virtually, and non-rivalry means that one individual's consumption does not prevent another's. In principle, these features should lead to an increasingly egalitarian world but in practice, as Quah pointed out, social divisions are widening. How can this paradox be explained?
Within capitalist societies, infinite expansibility and weightlessness leads to economic concentration. Infinite expansibility means that knowledge goods are subject to increasing economies of scale and therefore a tendency to monopoly, because the low marginal cost means that firms can always lower their prices temporarily to eliminate new competitors. Quah (1996). Infinite expansibility of the knowledge goods without an attendant increase in access may mean that the digital divide may increase to infinite proportions. Another issue is that being digitally connected has an influence on the international economic attractiveness of countries by making them targets for FDI and other investments. (Steyaert 2002). This means that countries which are not able to achieve the critical mass necessary, will lag behind in the digital race in a qualitative manner.
Telecommunications costs are inversely related to the number of subscribers (“network effect”) and so the developing countries will have to increase their telecom capacities at a higher cost because in most developing countries there are proportionately fewer subscribers to the telecommunication system than in industrialized countries (Campbell 2001).
This economic factor of the digital divide outweigh all others in predicting cross-national differences in access to the information society. (Norris 2001). One study says that the gap between developed and developing countries has continued to widen since the early 1990s. (Guillén & Suárez 2004).
Sometimes, the discourses on bridging the digital divide become one that aids the process of liberalization, privatization and globalization. The need for the government loosening its control over this ICT industry and allowing the free operations of the private players is posited as a technological need, something that will take the technology to the masses. In the case of India, T.H Chowdary says, ‘In 1998, the Internet Service Policy (ISP) was first enunciated which ended the monopoly of the government company, VSNL in the area of internet service provision. The licence conditions were fantabulously different from those that were for the other services like the fixed and mobile telephony, radio paging, e-mail etc. In the light of this, the previous licences for those other services appeared ridiculous.’ (Chowdary 2004). We find that, over here, the rhetoric is couched in a language that promoted de-licensing and hence liberalization and its twin cousin of privatization.
The discourses at both the national and the international level which are apparently aimed at bridging the digital divide, often become proposals for increasing the growth of the IT business (Keniston & Kumar 2004). The software industry may actually widens the economic gap between the digerati (the newly affluent elite) and the other people of the developing nations. This means that there is a lot of credibility in the thesis that, the discourses at the national level of developing countries may actually benefit only the newly formed elite of the Information age.
Economic dimension of the digital divide
Formation of monopolies.
Development divide between different nations widens.
‘Digital divide’- a strategy for creating markets
E-commerce induced disparity between different firms.
Techno –economic problems compound it.
Entry of ICTs -coupled with privatization
Figure 1
3.2. Political Dimensions
Most internet communications occurs along fiber-optic lines leased from telecommunications companies (which carry 80% of international communications), many of which are state regulated, in contrast to the largely unregulated state of the internet itself. (Warf 2001). So, it means that there is considerable scope for the government’s political influence vis-à-vis the digital divide. But the governments of different nation states don’t seem to be influencing the digital divide in the right direction. Their initiatives regarding deregulation in telecommunications, started with the breakup of AT&T by the US government and the privatization of British Telecommunications by the British government. This has spread rapidly in many countries and this will most likely lead to more use-based pricing and fewer cross-subsidies a trend that is likely to make access to cyberspace less affordable. (Warf 2001).
The constraints to internet access are not only economic but also political, given that the electronic dissemination of knowledge, by making people aware of their rights and by disseminating news and views about the injustices of society can challenge established relations of power (Warf 2001). This may mean that the provision of internet facilities may not be in the interest of the dominant powers that be. Theoretically, in a technical sense, the internet can enable everyone to participate in the political process on a more or less equal footing. Further, it can give a political voice to the numerous marginalized groups across the world by allowing them to network with each other and by broadcasting their plight to the rest of the world. The internet can also qualitatively quicken up the different political processes like elections, referenda, recall etc. Thus the internet has an enormous democratic potential. But, this potential may not be realized because the internet may only mean democracy for a chosen few. “While a relatively small, educated, and affluent elite in a few countries and cities would have access to an extraordinary tool for accessing information and for political participation, actually enhancing their citizenship, the uneducated, switched off masses of the world, and of the country, would remain excluded from the new democratic core, as were slaves and barbarians at the onset of democracy in classical Greece'' (Castells, 1997).
Indeed, cyberspace may open up ‘public spheres’ in the Habermasian sense which stand for a space where citizens can interact and one that can provide an operating platform for democratic communication systems. And this public spheres may provide for unfettered political discourses. But the problem is that, in an age in which social life is not only increasingly mediated through computer networks but fundamentally altered by them, the annihilation of public spaces and their reconstruction around the increasingly commodified, privatized spaces of cyberspace has disturbing implications for those without the wealth and power to gain access to the internet.(Grossman, 1995). So, the political divide seems to have assumed newer and deeper dimensions rather than being obliterated by cyberspace.
Political dimensions
Democracy for a chosen few.
Potential for government regulation.to bridge the divide
Potential for ICTs to challenge the dominant political powers.
Figure 2
3.3. Spatial Dimensions
There is a hype that cyberspace spells the `end of geography' because of the instantaneous communication that it can offer to its users. Cyberspace also promises universal, democratic entree to the electronic highways of the world economy. But contrary to these claims, access to the internet is very unevenly distributed both socially and spatially (Warf 2001). The spatial dimensions of the divide can be understood by seeing that more than 97% of all internet hosts are in developed countries that are home to only 16% of the world's population (Okoli et al 2003).
Regarding the distribution of ICT firms, there could still theoretically be a widely spatially dispersed pattern of large ICT firms supplying global markets. However, because external economies of scale are important for these knowledge firms, there are only a limited number of clusters, such as the "milieu of innovation" found in New York (Manhattan), San Francisco, the City of London, Paris (Quartier de l'opera), Tokyo (Shibuya), or Sao Paulo (Nova Faria Lima), that connect with the entire world (Castells 2001, 228-29). Moreover, so far, the ICT sector has developed largely by attracting people to these spatial "milieus of innovation", rather than by developing local skills, and thus this region-specific development has become a part of, rather than challenging, the digital divide. (Perrons 2004). Thus the development divide between these milieus of innovation and the rest of the geographical spaces tends to increase.
The term ‘digerati’ denotes the nouveau riche classes cutting across the developing countries who got their new status due to their professional association with ICTs. (Brockman, 1996). The development of the internet is likely to cause the global `digerati' become increasingly disconnected from the local environments of their own cities and countries. Since its inception at the hands of the US military, the very architecture of the internet has revolved around a handful of nodes that route internet traffic, all of which have been clustered in cities of academic or governmental significance. The resulting patterns of service provision became steadily restructured by corporate Internet Service Providers in partnership with backbone providers (such as AT&T, MCIWorldcom, and Sprint), generating a geography centered largely in metropolitan areas, whose concentrations of affluent users generate economies of scale that lead to the highest rates of profit (Warf 2001). This seems to be the trend in the third world countries also. The implications could be that the ICTs exacerbate the spatial development divide in all countries.
Access to the internet is deeply conditioned by where one is, which is in turn a reflection of relations of wealth and power. Long-standing categories of core and periphery are all too apparent within cyberspace, such as the divisions between developed and less-developed nations, or cities and rural areas. Thus, electronic systems simultaneously reflect and transform existing topographies of class, gender, and ethnicity, creating and recreating hierarchies of places mirrored in the spatial architecture of computer networks (Warf 2001). Thus there seems to be a two-way causality between spatial architecture of computer networks with its hierarchies and the hierarchies of geographical spaces.
Global access to the internet is deeply conditioned by the density, reliability, and affordability of national telephone systems, which form the heart of the architecture of cyberspace. During the Cold War: Soviet-backed regimes distrusted the telephone, which allows two-way communication, and preferred television, which allows only one-way flows of information (Warf 2001). So, the countries of the erstwhile Eastern block have to grapple with the baggage of history while contending with the problem of the digital divide.
Spatial dimensions
Access to ICTs - unevenly distributed
Limited number of ICT innovation clusters concentrated in metropolises
Innovation clusters exacerbate the spatial development divide
Two-way causality between spatial architectural hierarchies of computer N/Ws and hierarchies of geographical spaces.
Figure 3
3.4. Social Dimensions
Scholars have noted that the internet tends to reinforce existing class and social relations both within and across countries (Mosco 1996; McChesney 1999; Everett 1998). The digital divide does not create new fault lines in society, but by and large replicates the existing social stratification (at least when defined in terms of physical access). (Steyaert 2002). This should hold good for telecommunications also to a smaller extent. Further, certain sectors and societies are completely excluded from the new networks of information, effectively creating ’black holes of informational capitalism’. These black holes constitute the Fourth World, which comprises ‘large areas of the globe, such as sub-Saharan Africa...impoverished rural areas of Latin America and Asia’ (Castells, 2000).
A recent paper from demos (an UK based think-tank) argues that the real challenge is not exclusion from information, but exclusion by information. If there is information about a person, then the dominant powers that be can decide whether to include or exclude that person in other networks of power, influence or wealth. “ The rise of a digital economy based on detailed personal profiles means that organisations - public, private and voluntary - are increasingly able to exclude large numbers of people from access to basic services and opportunities on the grounds that they constitute 'bad risks'”. (Gourova 2001). This exclusion may happen even if these excluded people, by themselves, have technical access to the ICTs.
Nowadays, talking about the ‘digital divide’ is fashionable not only in the international multilateral agencies, but in national policy formulation circles, in academic discourses and in other multilateral fora. ‘The digital divide–the gap between those sections of the population with and those without access to information technology (IT)–is a highly debated social issue’ (Norris 2001). But there seems to be more of intellectual debates and discussions going on about the ‘digital divide’ than substantive efforts being taken to bridge the divide. This may just be taken as just another example of the fractured relationship between theory and practice in any aspect of human development. But a closer analysis may reveal something else. We are currently in a phase of history which is unprecedented in the levels of economic inequality seen. So, as a society the ‘collective conscience’ as Emile Durkheim would say, has to be satisfied that there is no grave injustice being done and that everything is fine (Haralambos 1980). This is needed because only then can society function as it is. So, the huge amount of discourse about the need for bridging the digital divide may serve this purpose of a self-fulfilling legitimizing mechanism which helps to maintain a healthy collective conscience at the national and the global realm, which helps to legitimize the status-quo.
Internet use is heavily gendered (Doheny-Farina, 1996; Miller, 1996). In a patriarchal culture, the socialization of girls does not make them friendly to technology. To them, technology is said to be a `guy thing' and the internet is no exception to this rule. So, they are frequently under-confident when working with machines.
Discourses about digital divide - a means to soothe society’s collective conscience.
Normal fault lines of society replicated in cyberspace
Exclusion by Information
Gender divisions carried on to the digital realm.
Some sections completely
excluded.
Social dimensions
Figure 4
3.5. Cultural Dimensions
Language is a definite barrier since roughly 90% of all internet content today is in English (Roussel, 1999). So, one cultural dimension of the divide is currently manifested as a divide between the English and the non-English speakers. But for those huge regions that share common languages and thus have big linguistic groups like the Arab world and much of Latin America – the internet can be the great unifier and creator of business opportunities and hence of higher living standards.(Cattaui 2001). But a digital divide may potentially emerge between these big linguistic groups and the rest of the small linguistic groups which don’t have such a common critical cultural mass.
Cultural dimensions of the digital divide
Between English and Non-English groups of users. (actual)
Between big linguistic groups and small linguistic groups of users. (potential)
Figure 5
4. DIGITAL DIVIDE AND THE THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT
Here, we’ll see how digital divide, as we broadly understand it, can be located within two major theories of development, viz, the modernization theory and the dependency theory.
4.1 Digital divide and the Modernization theory
The modernization theory of development assumes that there is a single goal of ‘modernity’ and ‘development’ towards which all societies have to ‘progress’. Presented as a detached rationality capable to improve human condition, the modernization discourse creates a regime of truth, which passes judgment on social groups, determines their needs, prescribes how they should change and towards what goals they should change (Avergou 2000).
Applying this idea of modernization, we realize that the theme underlying the digital divide is one that considers the developed countries to be at an advanced stage of informatization and these countries are seen to be a model for the developing countries which have to bridge the ‘gap’ or ‘divide’ between themselves and the developed countries as regards the information technologies. The modernization paradigm of development gives an important role to technology in the process of development. ‘The modernization discourse conceives social life as a technical issue, and its improvement is entrusted to technical experts, capable of rational decision making and management’. (Avergou 2000). This agrees with the underlying importance given to technology in the discourses on the digital divide.
Moreover, modernization theory believes that the transfer of foreign technologies from developed countries to developing countries is a costless process which happens automatically and this results in positive knowledge externalities that serve as a public good available for free. This can solve the problem of technological backwardness and this can usher in modernization. (Rothboeck 2000). So, according to the modernization paradigm, the digital divide can be bridged by simple transfer of technology from the developed to the developing countries. But this kind of an understanding does not seem to cover the complex reality of the process of technology transfer.
4.2. Digital divide and the Dependency theory
Here, we’ll see how digital divide, as we broadly understand it, can be located within the dependency theory of development. The weltanschuang of this school sees the world as divided into the ‘Centre’ and the ‘Periphery’. The countries of the Centre are the advanced capitalist countries and the countries of the Periphery are the developing and the least developed countries. Dependency theory says that the developing countries are dependent on more advanced ones for capital, technology and access to information. As a result, peripheral countries become relatively more impoverished (Pritchett 1997). Into this dependency relationship, if the factor of ‘Information dependency’ is also introduced, then it may enhance the dependency relationship in a qualitative manner and thus exacerbate the development divide. Research has shown that the geographical distribution of high-technology exports, computer power, and internet hosts follows the hierarchical pattern of the core-periphery system. (Gunaratne 2002).
As regards the information technologies, Communication scholars attuned to dependency theory have long pointed out that the development of the media and the digital revolution are driven by politico-economic forces, including the activities of media corporations and the policies of the dominant nation-states in the world (Davidson 2002; McChesney 1999; Mosco 1996; Schiller 1996). This means that the development of these information technologies and hence the divide associated with these technologies is something that is not the natural outcome of the operation of economic forces but is an integral part of the associated political processes.
Information technology, by making it simpler to ship off individual parts of the economic production process overseas, has contributed to the de-industrialization of parts of the developed world and has rendered much more complex the division of labour between the developed and the third world countries, which can no longer be analyzed in terms of a simple distinction between the ‘head’ and the ‘hands’ as in the classical Dependency theory (Brusco, Siegel, Bluestone, Harrison 1982). It seems that we are on the threshold of a world that is divided on digital fault-lines. That fault-line need not correspond with national boundaries but may lie very well within nations of both the centre and the periphery. Digital divide within nations and the digital divide between the digitally empowered enclaves of the world from the rest may become an area of greater concern than the digital divide between nations.
In recent times, there is a hope evinced in certain quarters that the rapid development of the ICT sector in some developing countries of Asia may serve as an engine of growth for the rest of the economy. But while industrial production has been internationalized, strategic planning and lucrative pace-setting innovations in the ICT sector are still concentrated in a few dominant regions mainly in the USA, Japan and in certain cases in Europe. (Bornschier and Chase-Dunn 1992; Hein 1995). For example, in the software industry, India’s competitive advantage lies not in the innovative field of complete software packages production but in standardized programming and data entry (Rothboeck 2000). Even South Korea, has not been yet been able to overcome the problem of technology dependency (OECD 1996a,b). So, it may not be possible for the ICT enabled thrust given to economic growth in the periphery, will enable it to break the chains of dependency that bind it to the core.
5. TECHNOLOGY, SOCIETY AND THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
A correct understanding of the digital divide needs a correct scientific perspective. The notion of restructuring society on more egalitarian lines with the help of ICTs cannot be compared to the alleged “deep“, or “fundamental“ modernization suggested by the rhetoric of “radical“ change, the IT-“revolution“, the complete “reengineering“ of whole societies, etc., as emphasized in a multiplicity of local and supra-local discourses. (Ilyes 2003). The process of restructuring through ICTs appears to be a similar to a process called ”conservative modernization“ wherein politically induced reforms or restructuring did not lead to a new distribution of property, as hoped for, but perpetuated traditional concentrations of income, and by that the traditional pattern of inequality (Ilyes 2003; Graziano 2002).
There can be three different perspectives on the relation between development and technology. One on the one extreme, we have Technological determinism and on the other, we have Social determinism of technology.
Technological determinism means that it is the development of technology that determines the evolution of social institutions. All through history we have seen that many technological innovations have been closely associated with major changes in the evolution of society. For example, the invention of the plough was closely associated with settled agriculture and the rise of ancient river valley civilizations like Sumeria, Indus valley etc, the invention of the printing press was closely associated with the Renaissance and the subsequent Reformation in Europe. But the singular fact that technological innovations happen in the same period of history as social transformations does not suggest even a causality between the two leave alone giving us the liberty to assume that technological transformations cause social upheavals.
Social determinism means that it is the social institutions that shape the evolution and usage of technology. It says that technology is just a tool of the class or the section or institution of society that uses it and that it does not have autonomy of its own. For example, in ancient Egypt, the invention of the technology of writing helped to form an elite class of clerks which helped to further consolidate the powers of the Egyptian Pharaoh. But the weakness of this perspective is that it completely ignores the autonomy that technology per se might be having in determining the change in the evolution of social institutions.
In contrast to both the perspective of Technological determinism and the Social determinism of technology, there is this SST or Social Shaping of Technology perspective which takes a middle ground (Russell & Williams, 2002). It says that technology can have some autonomy of its own. The general position regarding social shaping may be enunciated as follows: social processes shape not only the form and features (i.e., the content) of particular technologies, but also the patterns, general characteristics, and direction of technologies across whole areas of development and application (Russell & Williams, 2002). Central to the social shaping approach is the idea that there are 'choices' (though not necessarily conscious choices) inherent in both the design of individual artefacts and systems, and in the direction or trajectory of innovation programmes (Williams & Edge, 1996). Choices between different socio-technical options potentially available at every stage are highlighted (Genus & Nor 2005). Application of a social shaping perspective draws attention to other factors of significance towards bridging the international digital divide. They have been cited above to include skill and self-efficacy to use ICTs effectively, intellectual, social and human capital, and technological culturation. (Genus & Nor 2005).
Under this SST approach, cyberspace can be viewed as a socially constructed discourse that simultaneously reflects and constitutes social reality. So, the social institutions constituting society as such and cyberspace have a two-way dialectic relationship with each other with each influencing the evolution and dynamics of the other. The evolution of cyberspace and its dynamics are influenced by forces from inside the sphere of social relations and not from some alien force outside it.
SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
CYBERSPACE
Direction of influence
Figure 6
The SST perspective seems to strike the correct balance between the two extreme positions of Technological determinism and Social determinism of technology. It gives a place for all kinds of social institutions in the analytical framework that can be employed to understand the interaction of technology with social reality. So, it seems that this is the most epistemologically sound of all perspectives to understand the place of technology in social reality.
TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM
SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
TECHNOLOGY
SOCIAL DETERMINISM OF TECHNOLOGY
SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
TECHNOLOGY
SOCIAL SHAPING OF TECHNOLOGY
SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
TECHNOLOGY
Direction of influence
Figure 7
6. A FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
The digital divide is, a varying landscape which manifests itself in a range of indigenous factors and external structures. (Gourova 2001). It has been found that the digital divide can be defined in terms of the technology and infrastructure that forms the base of ICTs, ICT tools, ICT content, ICT related knowledge and skills, and in terms of international power relations. (Gourova et al 2001). But such approaches are clearly lacking in depth and by and large don’t provide a very scientific analysis because they don’t realize the social embeddedness of technology and the multifarious complexity of the problem. Most of these approaches tend to take a techno-managerial view of the problem.
Here a theoretical framework for understanding the digital divide is developed. The digital divide should be seen as a dynamic phenomenon and should not be viewed with an ahistorical perspective. A scientific understanding of the digital divide will need us to take a middle-path between the socio-technological structure, human agency and the social institutions. Hence the framework to be proposed is best situated in the SST or the Social Shaping of Technology perspective. The digital divide, if analyzed under the Social Shaping of Technology perspective can be analytically understood as both a cause and effect, with it being first a cause and then an effect and then this effect becomes a cause for further widening of the digital divide.
From Steyaert’s (2002) definition of the digital divide, it consists of three dimensions, they are,
a) Physical access
b) 'Informacy'
c) Information-illiteracy
The above mentioned three dimensions constitute the ‘Cause’ Dimension of the digital divide. The ‘Cause’ dimension of the digital divide will influence a part of the existing development divide and this can be termed as the ‘Effect’ dimension of the digital divide. This ‘Effect dimension’ will be of different types like economic, social, political, cultural, spatial divide etc. All these development divides are inextricably linked with each other and influence each other. All these aspects of the development divide feedback into the ‘Cause’ dimension of the digital divide.
DIGITAL DIVIDE
CAUSE
EFFECT
PHYSICAL ACCESS
INFORMACY
INFORMATION ILLITERACY
DEVELOPMENT DIVIDE COMPONENTS
Economic
Cultural
Political
Spatial
Direction of influence
Social
Figure 8
The advantage of this framework is that, it tries to reflect the multidimensional complexity of the problem. By providing for the reverse influence of social institutions on technology, it also avoids the mistake of ossifying technology and freezing it for the purpose of understanding its effects. By bringing in a human-influenced dynamism into the relation between the different elements that constitute the framework, it avoids committing the fallacy of reification, ie, of considering the relation between people to be a relation between extra-human “things”. The lines of influence between the different components of the framework should not be taken as connoting a rigorous causality because in the complex process of development, cause and effect relations cannot be established easily.
7. CONCLUSION
Digital divide is a complex phenomenon. At this stage in the evolution of ICTs and their integration into social production and social life, it cannot be said with certainty whether the digital divide is decreasing or increasing at all levels. Regarding a solution to bridge the divide, there is no simple or single solution. The attempt at bridging the digital divide will need us to think beyond ICTs and reflect on the wider extra-digital divides in society. That attempt has to be dovetailed with the other attempts at bridging the numerous other divides at the national as well as the global level. The framework that has been proposed will help in this regard. The solution proposed also has to come as much from social science as from management or technology per se.
The framework proposed, because of its circular causation, foretells that there may be a danger of a ever-widening digital divide. This should alert policy makers and other concerned citizens and business houses to the gravity of the problem and make them take steps which might be of a radical nature. The framework can give broad pointers to policy makers to tackle this phenomenal problem.
REFERENCES:
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ADDITIONAL REFERENCES:
Anonymous 2001, “OECD and developing countries join Dot.force to tackle digital divide”, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, The OECD Observer. Paris: Mar 2001, Iss. 225; pp. 48, 1
Bluestone, B. and Harrison, B. 1982, The Deindustrialization of America, New York: Basic Books
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Brockman, J. 1996, Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite (Hardwired, New York)
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Wresch, W. 1996, Disconnected: Haves and Have-Nots in the Information Age, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES ON THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
The digital divide is a phenomenon that is discussed ad nauseum in the current discourses on development both at the national as well as the international level. It can be broadly understood as the difference in the way that different sections of the population are able to relate at different levels to the new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and the resultant disparity caused therein.
First a broad definition to ‘digital divide’ is given in the paper. In this attempt, the need to understand the digital divide by taking into account its multidimensional complexities is reiterated. Then, this divide is sought to be located within two major theories of development namely, the Dependency theory and the Modernization theory.
To get a holistic understanding of the digital divide, the different dimensions of the divide are seen. The democratic potential of cyberspace is analyzed to see if it can give a political voice to the hitherto marginalized sections. The economic dimension is then elaborated and is seen to be the most important dimension. The actual cultural dimension of the divide between English and non-English linguistic groups are then seen. The potential cultural divide is also explained. Then the link between the spatial development divide and the hierarchy of computer networks are then seen. The broad social dimensions like that of gender, of the digital divide are analyzed. The difference between exclusion from information and exclusion by information is then seen. The reason for the contrast between the enormous amount of discourses generated on this topic and the lack of substantive efforts being taken at the ground level has to be explained. Whether the digital divide builds on the existing fault-lines of society and whether it widens or narrows down that fault-line has to be analyzed.
There can be two extreme perspectives that can be applied to understand the digital divide. One is Technological determinism and the other is Social determinism. This paper tries to find out the most appropriate scientific perspective that can be applied for understanding the digital divide and arrives at the Social Shaping of Technology or the SST perspective. The validity of this perspective and the need for adopting this perspective is explained.
After getting an appropriate perspective, there is a need for understanding whether the digital divide is an effect or a cause of wider extra-digital socio-economic phenomena. For this, a framework for understanding the digital divide is evolved. This framework also tries to integrate the digital divide with the wider socio-economic development divide. The insights that can be got from the framework and the practical implications of this framework if any are analyzed.
CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
2. DEFINITION AND MEANING
3. MAJOR DIMENSIONS OF THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
4. DIGITAL DIVIDE AND THE THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT
5. TECHNOLOGY, SOCIETY AND THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
6. A FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
7. CONCLUSION
8. REFERENCES
1. INTRODUCTION
Currently, the developed countries of the world and the bulk of the developing countries seem to be in the Information Age or seem to be in the development trajectory that will take them to the Information age. The Information age is one that is characterized by the primacy of information in all spheres of society. There can be many reasons for this primacy being given to information but in the realm of technology, it is due to those technologies which can be broadly termed as the ICTs (the Information and Communication Technologies). The ICTs are those revolutionary kind of technologies which have evolved as a result of the fusion of two hitherto distinct kind of technologies, viz, the Information Technologies and the Telecommunication technologies.
Closely associated with this Information age is a concept which goes by the name of the "digital divide". In a very broad sense, digital divide can be said to denote the difference in the way different sections of the society relate at different levels to the ICTs and the resultant extra-technological disparities therein. The term "digital divide" appears to have originated in newspaper reports and was popularized in the 1995 U.S. government report "Falling through the Net. (Hawkins 2003).
Analyzing the digital divide becomes important for two reasons. The first is that if the digital divide is bridged, it may contribute to economic growth. The second and the more important reason is that the digital divide remains one of the most patent examples of an iniquitous fact of the current trajectory of global development. So, bridging this digital divide becomes an economic as well as a moral imperative. In the context of this paper, the term digital technologies and cyberspace are meant to connote not only internet but also all the telecommunications technologies in the broadest sense of the term. The context in which this paper has been written includes the global, the national and the local.
2. DEFINITION AND MEANING
Before a rigorous analysis is done, it may be instructive to define this concept at the very basic level.
The concept of the digital divide has three dimensions (Steyaert 2002) viz,
i) Physical access to the Information technologies.
ii) Technology-illiteracy: It refers to the knowledge to operate the technology.
iii) Information-illiteracy. This refers to the attitude to search for relevant information, translate that to one's own situation and implement the necessary actions. This is the most critical element that makes the 'digital divide' a societal issue of extreme importance.
Physical access has two components, firstly, direct access to the new ICTs and secondly, the possibility to actually use those ICTs even if there is access. For example, Indian Dalits may technically have physical access to an Information Kiosk but may not be able to access it due to caste restrictions. Although physical access to computers and networks appears to be problematic on the short run, in the long run, the other two are more critical.
Viewed analytically, the digital divide may be of different types. They are (Keniston & Kumar 2004).
a) The digital divide that exists within every nation
b) The digital divide between sections of the population which are differently enabled in the cultural sense. Even between the genders, there may be a definite cultural divide.
c) The digital divide between the rich and the poor nations.
3. MAJOR DIMENSIONS OF THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
Here, an analysis of the digital divide across its various dimensions like the spatial, political, economical, social and the cultural realm is done. In all of these realms, the analysis of the dynamics of the divide can be done by locating it in a historical timeframe. Across all these realms, the divide can be conceptualized in two ways, ie, how the access to ICTs is affected by the pre-existing divide in these realms and how this differential access shapes the existing extra-technological divide in these realms. The analysis can also be at different levels like the micro, national and the international level.
3.1. Economic Dimensions
The idea of bridging the digital divide in the literature reflects the developed world’s view of what is lacking in the developing countries, of what developed countries have and developing countries have not (IPTS 2001). This may be understood as a feature of the modernization paradigm of development.
Riggins (2004) states that the digital divide artificially segments the marketplace and bridging the divide can result in lower product quality and lesser service for low-type consumers. So, the patent aim of bridging the digital divide can also serve as a marketing strategy by the corporate sector for market segmentation. Regarding e-commerce, it requires a level of business acumen and support structures that are as yet rare in the world. (Wresch 2003). So, overall, the development of e-commerce may result in the deepening of the digital divide in spite of developments like e-chouppal of ITC which aim at using e-commerce to bring rural producers to the mainstream markets.
For Quah (1996), the defining feature of the new economy is the increasing variety of goods and services, from business computer software to music, that take the form and properties of knowledge goods, namely, ‘infinite expansibility’, ‘weightlessness’ or ‘dematerialization’, and ‘non-rivalrousness’. Infinite expansibility means that the marginal costs of production is minuscule, weightlessness signifies that goods can be distributed virtually, and non-rivalry means that one individual's consumption does not prevent another's. In principle, these features should lead to an increasingly egalitarian world but in practice, as Quah pointed out, social divisions are widening. How can this paradox be explained?
Within capitalist societies, infinite expansibility and weightlessness leads to economic concentration. Infinite expansibility means that knowledge goods are subject to increasing economies of scale and therefore a tendency to monopoly, because the low marginal cost means that firms can always lower their prices temporarily to eliminate new competitors. Quah (1996). Infinite expansibility of the knowledge goods without an attendant increase in access may mean that the digital divide may increase to infinite proportions. Another issue is that being digitally connected has an influence on the international economic attractiveness of countries by making them targets for FDI and other investments. (Steyaert 2002). This means that countries which are not able to achieve the critical mass necessary, will lag behind in the digital race in a qualitative manner.
Telecommunications costs are inversely related to the number of subscribers (“network effect”) and so the developing countries will have to increase their telecom capacities at a higher cost because in most developing countries there are proportionately fewer subscribers to the telecommunication system than in industrialized countries (Campbell 2001).
This economic factor of the digital divide outweigh all others in predicting cross-national differences in access to the information society. (Norris 2001). One study says that the gap between developed and developing countries has continued to widen since the early 1990s. (Guillén & Suárez 2004).
Sometimes, the discourses on bridging the digital divide become one that aids the process of liberalization, privatization and globalization. The need for the government loosening its control over this ICT industry and allowing the free operations of the private players is posited as a technological need, something that will take the technology to the masses. In the case of India, T.H Chowdary says, ‘In 1998, the Internet Service Policy (ISP) was first enunciated which ended the monopoly of the government company, VSNL in the area of internet service provision. The licence conditions were fantabulously different from those that were for the other services like the fixed and mobile telephony, radio paging, e-mail etc. In the light of this, the previous licences for those other services appeared ridiculous.’ (Chowdary 2004). We find that, over here, the rhetoric is couched in a language that promoted de-licensing and hence liberalization and its twin cousin of privatization.
The discourses at both the national and the international level which are apparently aimed at bridging the digital divide, often become proposals for increasing the growth of the IT business (Keniston & Kumar 2004). The software industry may actually widens the economic gap between the digerati (the newly affluent elite) and the other people of the developing nations. This means that there is a lot of credibility in the thesis that, the discourses at the national level of developing countries may actually benefit only the newly formed elite of the Information age.
Economic dimension of the digital divide
Formation of monopolies.
Development divide between different nations widens.
‘Digital divide’- a strategy for creating markets
E-commerce induced disparity between different firms.
Techno –economic problems compound it.
Entry of ICTs -coupled with privatization
Figure 1
3.2. Political Dimensions
Most internet communications occurs along fiber-optic lines leased from telecommunications companies (which carry 80% of international communications), many of which are state regulated, in contrast to the largely unregulated state of the internet itself. (Warf 2001). So, it means that there is considerable scope for the government’s political influence vis-à-vis the digital divide. But the governments of different nation states don’t seem to be influencing the digital divide in the right direction. Their initiatives regarding deregulation in telecommunications, started with the breakup of AT&T by the US government and the privatization of British Telecommunications by the British government. This has spread rapidly in many countries and this will most likely lead to more use-based pricing and fewer cross-subsidies a trend that is likely to make access to cyberspace less affordable. (Warf 2001).
The constraints to internet access are not only economic but also political, given that the electronic dissemination of knowledge, by making people aware of their rights and by disseminating news and views about the injustices of society can challenge established relations of power (Warf 2001). This may mean that the provision of internet facilities may not be in the interest of the dominant powers that be. Theoretically, in a technical sense, the internet can enable everyone to participate in the political process on a more or less equal footing. Further, it can give a political voice to the numerous marginalized groups across the world by allowing them to network with each other and by broadcasting their plight to the rest of the world. The internet can also qualitatively quicken up the different political processes like elections, referenda, recall etc. Thus the internet has an enormous democratic potential. But, this potential may not be realized because the internet may only mean democracy for a chosen few. “While a relatively small, educated, and affluent elite in a few countries and cities would have access to an extraordinary tool for accessing information and for political participation, actually enhancing their citizenship, the uneducated, switched off masses of the world, and of the country, would remain excluded from the new democratic core, as were slaves and barbarians at the onset of democracy in classical Greece'' (Castells, 1997).
Indeed, cyberspace may open up ‘public spheres’ in the Habermasian sense which stand for a space where citizens can interact and one that can provide an operating platform for democratic communication systems. And this public spheres may provide for unfettered political discourses. But the problem is that, in an age in which social life is not only increasingly mediated through computer networks but fundamentally altered by them, the annihilation of public spaces and their reconstruction around the increasingly commodified, privatized spaces of cyberspace has disturbing implications for those without the wealth and power to gain access to the internet.(Grossman, 1995). So, the political divide seems to have assumed newer and deeper dimensions rather than being obliterated by cyberspace.
Political dimensions
Democracy for a chosen few.
Potential for government regulation.to bridge the divide
Potential for ICTs to challenge the dominant political powers.
Figure 2
3.3. Spatial Dimensions
There is a hype that cyberspace spells the `end of geography' because of the instantaneous communication that it can offer to its users. Cyberspace also promises universal, democratic entree to the electronic highways of the world economy. But contrary to these claims, access to the internet is very unevenly distributed both socially and spatially (Warf 2001). The spatial dimensions of the divide can be understood by seeing that more than 97% of all internet hosts are in developed countries that are home to only 16% of the world's population (Okoli et al 2003).
Regarding the distribution of ICT firms, there could still theoretically be a widely spatially dispersed pattern of large ICT firms supplying global markets. However, because external economies of scale are important for these knowledge firms, there are only a limited number of clusters, such as the "milieu of innovation" found in New York (Manhattan), San Francisco, the City of London, Paris (Quartier de l'opera), Tokyo (Shibuya), or Sao Paulo (Nova Faria Lima), that connect with the entire world (Castells 2001, 228-29). Moreover, so far, the ICT sector has developed largely by attracting people to these spatial "milieus of innovation", rather than by developing local skills, and thus this region-specific development has become a part of, rather than challenging, the digital divide. (Perrons 2004). Thus the development divide between these milieus of innovation and the rest of the geographical spaces tends to increase.
The term ‘digerati’ denotes the nouveau riche classes cutting across the developing countries who got their new status due to their professional association with ICTs. (Brockman, 1996). The development of the internet is likely to cause the global `digerati' become increasingly disconnected from the local environments of their own cities and countries. Since its inception at the hands of the US military, the very architecture of the internet has revolved around a handful of nodes that route internet traffic, all of which have been clustered in cities of academic or governmental significance. The resulting patterns of service provision became steadily restructured by corporate Internet Service Providers in partnership with backbone providers (such as AT&T, MCIWorldcom, and Sprint), generating a geography centered largely in metropolitan areas, whose concentrations of affluent users generate economies of scale that lead to the highest rates of profit (Warf 2001). This seems to be the trend in the third world countries also. The implications could be that the ICTs exacerbate the spatial development divide in all countries.
Access to the internet is deeply conditioned by where one is, which is in turn a reflection of relations of wealth and power. Long-standing categories of core and periphery are all too apparent within cyberspace, such as the divisions between developed and less-developed nations, or cities and rural areas. Thus, electronic systems simultaneously reflect and transform existing topographies of class, gender, and ethnicity, creating and recreating hierarchies of places mirrored in the spatial architecture of computer networks (Warf 2001). Thus there seems to be a two-way causality between spatial architecture of computer networks with its hierarchies and the hierarchies of geographical spaces.
Global access to the internet is deeply conditioned by the density, reliability, and affordability of national telephone systems, which form the heart of the architecture of cyberspace. During the Cold War: Soviet-backed regimes distrusted the telephone, which allows two-way communication, and preferred television, which allows only one-way flows of information (Warf 2001). So, the countries of the erstwhile Eastern block have to grapple with the baggage of history while contending with the problem of the digital divide.
Spatial dimensions
Access to ICTs - unevenly distributed
Limited number of ICT innovation clusters concentrated in metropolises
Innovation clusters exacerbate the spatial development divide
Two-way causality between spatial architectural hierarchies of computer N/Ws and hierarchies of geographical spaces.
Figure 3
3.4. Social Dimensions
Scholars have noted that the internet tends to reinforce existing class and social relations both within and across countries (Mosco 1996; McChesney 1999; Everett 1998). The digital divide does not create new fault lines in society, but by and large replicates the existing social stratification (at least when defined in terms of physical access). (Steyaert 2002). This should hold good for telecommunications also to a smaller extent. Further, certain sectors and societies are completely excluded from the new networks of information, effectively creating ’black holes of informational capitalism’. These black holes constitute the Fourth World, which comprises ‘large areas of the globe, such as sub-Saharan Africa...impoverished rural areas of Latin America and Asia’ (Castells, 2000).
A recent paper from demos (an UK based think-tank) argues that the real challenge is not exclusion from information, but exclusion by information. If there is information about a person, then the dominant powers that be can decide whether to include or exclude that person in other networks of power, influence or wealth. “ The rise of a digital economy based on detailed personal profiles means that organisations - public, private and voluntary - are increasingly able to exclude large numbers of people from access to basic services and opportunities on the grounds that they constitute 'bad risks'”. (Gourova 2001). This exclusion may happen even if these excluded people, by themselves, have technical access to the ICTs.
Nowadays, talking about the ‘digital divide’ is fashionable not only in the international multilateral agencies, but in national policy formulation circles, in academic discourses and in other multilateral fora. ‘The digital divide–the gap between those sections of the population with and those without access to information technology (IT)–is a highly debated social issue’ (Norris 2001). But there seems to be more of intellectual debates and discussions going on about the ‘digital divide’ than substantive efforts being taken to bridge the divide. This may just be taken as just another example of the fractured relationship between theory and practice in any aspect of human development. But a closer analysis may reveal something else. We are currently in a phase of history which is unprecedented in the levels of economic inequality seen. So, as a society the ‘collective conscience’ as Emile Durkheim would say, has to be satisfied that there is no grave injustice being done and that everything is fine (Haralambos 1980). This is needed because only then can society function as it is. So, the huge amount of discourse about the need for bridging the digital divide may serve this purpose of a self-fulfilling legitimizing mechanism which helps to maintain a healthy collective conscience at the national and the global realm, which helps to legitimize the status-quo.
Internet use is heavily gendered (Doheny-Farina, 1996; Miller, 1996). In a patriarchal culture, the socialization of girls does not make them friendly to technology. To them, technology is said to be a `guy thing' and the internet is no exception to this rule. So, they are frequently under-confident when working with machines.
Discourses about digital divide - a means to soothe society’s collective conscience.
Normal fault lines of society replicated in cyberspace
Exclusion by Information
Gender divisions carried on to the digital realm.
Some sections completely
excluded.
Social dimensions
Figure 4
3.5. Cultural Dimensions
Language is a definite barrier since roughly 90% of all internet content today is in English (Roussel, 1999). So, one cultural dimension of the divide is currently manifested as a divide between the English and the non-English speakers. But for those huge regions that share common languages and thus have big linguistic groups like the Arab world and much of Latin America – the internet can be the great unifier and creator of business opportunities and hence of higher living standards.(Cattaui 2001). But a digital divide may potentially emerge between these big linguistic groups and the rest of the small linguistic groups which don’t have such a common critical cultural mass.
Cultural dimensions of the digital divide
Between English and Non-English groups of users. (actual)
Between big linguistic groups and small linguistic groups of users. (potential)
Figure 5
4. DIGITAL DIVIDE AND THE THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT
Here, we’ll see how digital divide, as we broadly understand it, can be located within two major theories of development, viz, the modernization theory and the dependency theory.
4.1 Digital divide and the Modernization theory
The modernization theory of development assumes that there is a single goal of ‘modernity’ and ‘development’ towards which all societies have to ‘progress’. Presented as a detached rationality capable to improve human condition, the modernization discourse creates a regime of truth, which passes judgment on social groups, determines their needs, prescribes how they should change and towards what goals they should change (Avergou 2000).
Applying this idea of modernization, we realize that the theme underlying the digital divide is one that considers the developed countries to be at an advanced stage of informatization and these countries are seen to be a model for the developing countries which have to bridge the ‘gap’ or ‘divide’ between themselves and the developed countries as regards the information technologies. The modernization paradigm of development gives an important role to technology in the process of development. ‘The modernization discourse conceives social life as a technical issue, and its improvement is entrusted to technical experts, capable of rational decision making and management’. (Avergou 2000). This agrees with the underlying importance given to technology in the discourses on the digital divide.
Moreover, modernization theory believes that the transfer of foreign technologies from developed countries to developing countries is a costless process which happens automatically and this results in positive knowledge externalities that serve as a public good available for free. This can solve the problem of technological backwardness and this can usher in modernization. (Rothboeck 2000). So, according to the modernization paradigm, the digital divide can be bridged by simple transfer of technology from the developed to the developing countries. But this kind of an understanding does not seem to cover the complex reality of the process of technology transfer.
4.2. Digital divide and the Dependency theory
Here, we’ll see how digital divide, as we broadly understand it, can be located within the dependency theory of development. The weltanschuang of this school sees the world as divided into the ‘Centre’ and the ‘Periphery’. The countries of the Centre are the advanced capitalist countries and the countries of the Periphery are the developing and the least developed countries. Dependency theory says that the developing countries are dependent on more advanced ones for capital, technology and access to information. As a result, peripheral countries become relatively more impoverished (Pritchett 1997). Into this dependency relationship, if the factor of ‘Information dependency’ is also introduced, then it may enhance the dependency relationship in a qualitative manner and thus exacerbate the development divide. Research has shown that the geographical distribution of high-technology exports, computer power, and internet hosts follows the hierarchical pattern of the core-periphery system. (Gunaratne 2002).
As regards the information technologies, Communication scholars attuned to dependency theory have long pointed out that the development of the media and the digital revolution are driven by politico-economic forces, including the activities of media corporations and the policies of the dominant nation-states in the world (Davidson 2002; McChesney 1999; Mosco 1996; Schiller 1996). This means that the development of these information technologies and hence the divide associated with these technologies is something that is not the natural outcome of the operation of economic forces but is an integral part of the associated political processes.
Information technology, by making it simpler to ship off individual parts of the economic production process overseas, has contributed to the de-industrialization of parts of the developed world and has rendered much more complex the division of labour between the developed and the third world countries, which can no longer be analyzed in terms of a simple distinction between the ‘head’ and the ‘hands’ as in the classical Dependency theory (Brusco, Siegel, Bluestone, Harrison 1982). It seems that we are on the threshold of a world that is divided on digital fault-lines. That fault-line need not correspond with national boundaries but may lie very well within nations of both the centre and the periphery. Digital divide within nations and the digital divide between the digitally empowered enclaves of the world from the rest may become an area of greater concern than the digital divide between nations.
In recent times, there is a hope evinced in certain quarters that the rapid development of the ICT sector in some developing countries of Asia may serve as an engine of growth for the rest of the economy. But while industrial production has been internationalized, strategic planning and lucrative pace-setting innovations in the ICT sector are still concentrated in a few dominant regions mainly in the USA, Japan and in certain cases in Europe. (Bornschier and Chase-Dunn 1992; Hein 1995). For example, in the software industry, India’s competitive advantage lies not in the innovative field of complete software packages production but in standardized programming and data entry (Rothboeck 2000). Even South Korea, has not been yet been able to overcome the problem of technology dependency (OECD 1996a,b). So, it may not be possible for the ICT enabled thrust given to economic growth in the periphery, will enable it to break the chains of dependency that bind it to the core.
5. TECHNOLOGY, SOCIETY AND THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
A correct understanding of the digital divide needs a correct scientific perspective. The notion of restructuring society on more egalitarian lines with the help of ICTs cannot be compared to the alleged “deep“, or “fundamental“ modernization suggested by the rhetoric of “radical“ change, the IT-“revolution“, the complete “reengineering“ of whole societies, etc., as emphasized in a multiplicity of local and supra-local discourses. (Ilyes 2003). The process of restructuring through ICTs appears to be a similar to a process called ”conservative modernization“ wherein politically induced reforms or restructuring did not lead to a new distribution of property, as hoped for, but perpetuated traditional concentrations of income, and by that the traditional pattern of inequality (Ilyes 2003; Graziano 2002).
There can be three different perspectives on the relation between development and technology. One on the one extreme, we have Technological determinism and on the other, we have Social determinism of technology.
Technological determinism means that it is the development of technology that determines the evolution of social institutions. All through history we have seen that many technological innovations have been closely associated with major changes in the evolution of society. For example, the invention of the plough was closely associated with settled agriculture and the rise of ancient river valley civilizations like Sumeria, Indus valley etc, the invention of the printing press was closely associated with the Renaissance and the subsequent Reformation in Europe. But the singular fact that technological innovations happen in the same period of history as social transformations does not suggest even a causality between the two leave alone giving us the liberty to assume that technological transformations cause social upheavals.
Social determinism means that it is the social institutions that shape the evolution and usage of technology. It says that technology is just a tool of the class or the section or institution of society that uses it and that it does not have autonomy of its own. For example, in ancient Egypt, the invention of the technology of writing helped to form an elite class of clerks which helped to further consolidate the powers of the Egyptian Pharaoh. But the weakness of this perspective is that it completely ignores the autonomy that technology per se might be having in determining the change in the evolution of social institutions.
In contrast to both the perspective of Technological determinism and the Social determinism of technology, there is this SST or Social Shaping of Technology perspective which takes a middle ground (Russell & Williams, 2002). It says that technology can have some autonomy of its own. The general position regarding social shaping may be enunciated as follows: social processes shape not only the form and features (i.e., the content) of particular technologies, but also the patterns, general characteristics, and direction of technologies across whole areas of development and application (Russell & Williams, 2002). Central to the social shaping approach is the idea that there are 'choices' (though not necessarily conscious choices) inherent in both the design of individual artefacts and systems, and in the direction or trajectory of innovation programmes (Williams & Edge, 1996). Choices between different socio-technical options potentially available at every stage are highlighted (Genus & Nor 2005). Application of a social shaping perspective draws attention to other factors of significance towards bridging the international digital divide. They have been cited above to include skill and self-efficacy to use ICTs effectively, intellectual, social and human capital, and technological culturation. (Genus & Nor 2005).
Under this SST approach, cyberspace can be viewed as a socially constructed discourse that simultaneously reflects and constitutes social reality. So, the social institutions constituting society as such and cyberspace have a two-way dialectic relationship with each other with each influencing the evolution and dynamics of the other. The evolution of cyberspace and its dynamics are influenced by forces from inside the sphere of social relations and not from some alien force outside it.
SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
CYBERSPACE
Direction of influence
Figure 6
The SST perspective seems to strike the correct balance between the two extreme positions of Technological determinism and Social determinism of technology. It gives a place for all kinds of social institutions in the analytical framework that can be employed to understand the interaction of technology with social reality. So, it seems that this is the most epistemologically sound of all perspectives to understand the place of technology in social reality.
TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM
SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
TECHNOLOGY
SOCIAL DETERMINISM OF TECHNOLOGY
SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
TECHNOLOGY
SOCIAL SHAPING OF TECHNOLOGY
SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
TECHNOLOGY
Direction of influence
Figure 7
6. A FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
The digital divide is, a varying landscape which manifests itself in a range of indigenous factors and external structures. (Gourova 2001). It has been found that the digital divide can be defined in terms of the technology and infrastructure that forms the base of ICTs, ICT tools, ICT content, ICT related knowledge and skills, and in terms of international power relations. (Gourova et al 2001). But such approaches are clearly lacking in depth and by and large don’t provide a very scientific analysis because they don’t realize the social embeddedness of technology and the multifarious complexity of the problem. Most of these approaches tend to take a techno-managerial view of the problem.
Here a theoretical framework for understanding the digital divide is developed. The digital divide should be seen as a dynamic phenomenon and should not be viewed with an ahistorical perspective. A scientific understanding of the digital divide will need us to take a middle-path between the socio-technological structure, human agency and the social institutions. Hence the framework to be proposed is best situated in the SST or the Social Shaping of Technology perspective. The digital divide, if analyzed under the Social Shaping of Technology perspective can be analytically understood as both a cause and effect, with it being first a cause and then an effect and then this effect becomes a cause for further widening of the digital divide.
From Steyaert’s (2002) definition of the digital divide, it consists of three dimensions, they are,
a) Physical access
b) 'Informacy'
c) Information-illiteracy
The above mentioned three dimensions constitute the ‘Cause’ Dimension of the digital divide. The ‘Cause’ dimension of the digital divide will influence a part of the existing development divide and this can be termed as the ‘Effect’ dimension of the digital divide. This ‘Effect dimension’ will be of different types like economic, social, political, cultural, spatial divide etc. All these development divides are inextricably linked with each other and influence each other. All these aspects of the development divide feedback into the ‘Cause’ dimension of the digital divide.
DIGITAL DIVIDE
CAUSE
EFFECT
PHYSICAL ACCESS
INFORMACY
INFORMATION ILLITERACY
DEVELOPMENT DIVIDE COMPONENTS
Economic
Cultural
Political
Spatial
Direction of influence
Social
Figure 8
The advantage of this framework is that, it tries to reflect the multidimensional complexity of the problem. By providing for the reverse influence of social institutions on technology, it also avoids the mistake of ossifying technology and freezing it for the purpose of understanding its effects. By bringing in a human-influenced dynamism into the relation between the different elements that constitute the framework, it avoids committing the fallacy of reification, ie, of considering the relation between people to be a relation between extra-human “things”. The lines of influence between the different components of the framework should not be taken as connoting a rigorous causality because in the complex process of development, cause and effect relations cannot be established easily.
7. CONCLUSION
Digital divide is a complex phenomenon. At this stage in the evolution of ICTs and their integration into social production and social life, it cannot be said with certainty whether the digital divide is decreasing or increasing at all levels. Regarding a solution to bridge the divide, there is no simple or single solution. The attempt at bridging the digital divide will need us to think beyond ICTs and reflect on the wider extra-digital divides in society. That attempt has to be dovetailed with the other attempts at bridging the numerous other divides at the national as well as the global level. The framework that has been proposed will help in this regard. The solution proposed also has to come as much from social science as from management or technology per se.
The framework proposed, because of its circular causation, foretells that there may be a danger of a ever-widening digital divide. This should alert policy makers and other concerned citizens and business houses to the gravity of the problem and make them take steps which might be of a radical nature. The framework can give broad pointers to policy makers to tackle this phenomenal problem.
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