Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 11:30:08 +0530
From: Subbiah Arunachalam
Friends:
Here is a posting to the GKD97 list I sent in early 1997. I wonder if things
have cahnged much.
Regards.
Arun
Dear GKD97 members:
Mr P Jayarajan, British Council Division, British High Commission,
New Delhi, asked me to give my comments on the impact of electronic
publishing on the developing countries, for inclusion in a
discussion at a forthcoming World Bank Conference. I thought many
members of this forum might be interested in this question (even if
they might not care for my views on it!). I reproduce my letter to
Jayarajan. Your comments are welcome.
My address:
Arun
[Subbiah Arunachalam]
Dear Jay:
Here are some random thoughts on Electronic Publishing and its
impact on the developing countries. As bullet points, of course!
* The transition to electronic publishing from print will widen the
gap between the advanced countries and the developing countries,
especially in the field of production and dissemination of
knowledge.
* Many developing countries, especially those with large
populations, do not have the necessary infrastructure (computer
terminals, networks, communication channels, bandwidth, etc.) and
will take a long time to have it in place to be able to take part as
equal partners in the worldwide enterprise of knowledge production
and exchange.
* While communication revolution is perceived as a liberating
influence, what is more likely to happen is that in many developing
countries (including India, I am afraid) scientists and scholars
will be among the last to be reached by the revolution and therefore
the relative disadvantage they now suffer from (in the matter of
access to information and knowledge) will only increase. The number
of institutions and individual scholars having access to Email and
Internet in developing countries and the rate at which this access
has grown over time will support this contention.
* The transition to electronic publishing will make it much easier
for scientists and scholars in the advanced countries to interact
with colleagues and invisible colleges, and most Third World
scientists and scholars are most likely to be excluded from this
"worldwide" network, not because they are intellectually inferior but
because they do not have the technological backup. The already
existing gaps in the levels of science and technology performed in
the advanced and the poorer countries will be widened further and
this could lead to increased levels of brain drain and dependence on
foreign aid of a different kind (knowledge imperialism).
* Mastery of technology has led the West to dominate the world to
such an extent that even in areas where the traditional societies of
the poorer countries had a lead of millennia (such as ethnobotany and
plant-based medicine), now it is the West which is exploiting this
knowledge base and converting it into products (of modern medicine)
and profits. What has happened in the area of plants and medicine
will happen with even greater vigour in the area of knowledge
production and dissemination (including publishing and patenting).
* Most journals and databases are produced in the advanced countries
and developing country scientists read articles written by their own
countrymen in expensive journals produced by commercial publishers
in the West and gain access to the same articles through
exhorbitatntly priced secondary services produced in the West!
Electronic publishing and online access will only make the situation
even worse.
* There is another very serious problem. The traditional knowledge
systems, because their practitioners are not well-versed in
electronic communication, will die out very soon. This has already
happened, even before the arrival of electronic publishing, thanks to
the homogenising effect of western cultures which made many facets of
other cultures extinct.
-----------------------
