Information Society Watch

September 2005, Anita Gurumurthy, World Economy and Development in Brief

The author contends that even as the IT revolution did open up new job avenues, and IT-enabled outsourcing harked in the promise of a level playing field of a globalised world, the experience of many developing countries can at best be described as mixed. Most of the benefits accrued through technology have been concentrated in pockets of the North and even in countries of the South, like India, geographic concentration of benefits has occurred. Further, the author highlights that countries of the South continue to struggle with resource mobilisation imperatives that can make way for IT to be experienced as a meaningful tool by communities for their own vision and efforts towards social change. She argues that the global community needs to recognise that the terrain of new technologies – dynamic and fluid as it is - requires concerted public policy support, and a specialised agency with resources and authority to guide and govern real world developments ushered in by digital technologies. She specifically flags internet governance as only the first major information age contestation in efforts to create an information society in which all nations have an equitable stake to share in the benefits from the IT revolution. The fight for equal control of the playing field to harvest the IT opportunity therefore needs to be fought not only in the international arena, between nations, but also between classes and groups within nations. Such control of the playing field is necessary to ensure that IT opportunity brings about positive social change (Adapted from author).

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