On Cyberspace and Human Communication

Faraz:

Met you briefly once at Uncle Riaz`s house in

Boston...

How is father Samir and mother Khatoon...

good article...

give them my salams and best wishes.....

Uncle Ghazi

Faraz,

As you know in Pakistan, the PTC controls who gets to become an ISP and who doesn`t. And thus owing to constraints, IT is not developing as fast as it is in other countries. Who will break this barrier?

The reason why everybody is writing software in English is that the non-english societies are playing catch up. If the urdu speaking Pakistanis were the first to develop the internet, everyone would be writing web software in urdu. Thus it is imperative that we develop IT in Pakistan and catch up with the rest of the world. In an article in NY Times, Thomas Friedman says

``First, in the old days Israel grew oranges, Morocco grew oranges, Spain grew oranges. So if importing countries were upset with Israel they could easily punish it by buying someone else`s oranges. But what happens when there is only one Mirabilis (a software company just bought by AOL for 287 million dollars)? What happens when an Israeli company near Tiberias is the only one in the world that makes a key Ethernet switching chip? What happens when Israeli companies start to dominate a key tech sector like on-line tools for Internet security, which are built around algorithms developed in the Technion and Israeli Army? What happens is that everyone comes courting Israel, no matter where the peace process is. Japan, which always shied away from Israel fearing Arab retaliation, is now the second-largest venture capital investor in Israel, after the U.S. Japan is weak in software design and has been gobbling up Israeli software companies. China now has 52 scientists doing research at Israel`s renowned Weizmann Institute. India also has 52.``

So developing IT is a must. But the question is, can the Pakistan govt just open up the internet to everybody? As an example, what happens when the religious leaders start protesting the easily available porn on the internet? So it is a catch-22 right now, as there is really too much information on the internet. You certainly can`t live without it but being a conservative society can you live with it??

Interesting article though. Makes you think, how one should make internet common in Pakistan where for a common man it is hard to afford a computer, an ISP line and the phone bills.

Mofeez

murtam@rpi.edu

Thanks Faraz for very important thoughts. I wanted to add in a few paisas of my own:

Regarding the effect of IT on traditional cultures, and on human sociology in general, I would like to present two things that affect the power of IT in different ways. One increases it, and the other renders it not very useful.

Before I get into those two points, let me say that I view I.T as a NEW TOOL that will be used and abused by HUMANS. The new tool, through its new capabilities will stretch humanity in certain aspects, and will also be limited by more permanent human concerns. Some good examples are the Industrial Revolution and the Nuclear Age.

(1) The first thing that we have to keep in mind, especially for the sustenance of traditional societies, is that in the rapidly changing world of IT, the biggest winners will be those who jump into the game early. This is an age of monopolies. In a fast growing system, there are many many inter-dependencies, which quickly become standards and lead to monopolies. Microsoft, Intel etc. are excellent examples of this. There will be definite effects on all societies, but those societies will win big who embrace this tool first. It is imperative that all ``traditional`` societies, instead of waiting too long to evaluate the effects of IT, embrace it fully and make it a functioning, and eventually, an influential part of themselves.

Again, I would look at the example of the Industrial Revolution: The monopolies created during the 18th and the 19th centuries persist until today, and define the border between developed and developing countries.

Therefore, developing countries will have to embrace IT fully, and to restructure their emphases so that this is available to their citizens at large. Otherwise, they will face an inevitable cultural extinction.

(2) Although my first point would emphasize the immense power of this new tool, my second point would be to say that the effect of this tool will be limited by one crucial factor: HUMAN BANDWIDTH. A person, even with flawless multi-Gbs optical networks, can only absorb as much information as his or her mind can handle. Therefore, instead of seeing a truly global virtual society in the near future, I see very well connected individual societies all over the world. Undoubtedly these societies will have the capability of intimately connecting individuals from different societies, but largely they will remain separate. Sure over long time periods, there will be a deep inter-mingling of different individual societies, but their mutual differences will not vanish.

For example, one can expect to see virtual businesses and markets. An overwhelming majority of them will be (and stay) local in a massively interconnected society. We may be able to buy eggs over the internet, but they will not be delivered from Wisconsin to Pakistan, but from somewhere within Pakistan. The same will apply to cultures, with internet taking the place of passive media like the television. TV for example, did not quite eradicate the differences across the world, but rather, proved to be a new tool in the hands of different cultures for their own projection. The same will happen with IT.

Nicely written! Enjoyed reading this. And I agree with your basic premise of the potential power of this media in areas where free communication is suppressed, but that this comes at a certain price. Somewhere I read that web traffic is doubling every hundred days, and this has been the fastest media to reach a mass audience (less than 7 years) as opposed to radio and TV which took decades. From a personal perspective, I am disturbed that The Jenny Cam Page (a site that has snippets from the ordinary life of a 23 year old woman who has installed a camera in her bedroom to let the world peek in) would be the third most visited website worldwide with over a half a million hits per day - I mean what does that say about society? Also, although I love the fact that e-mail, for example, has revived the lost art of letter-writing, and has put far-flung people in touch, I feel that it has really cut into people`s limited amount of free-time. It`s another thing on the to-do list, not to mention all the false intimacies created.

Anita