[Abstract] The Impact of Democratic Deficits on Electronic Media in Rural Development

["Irfan Khan" <khania@super.net.pk>]

The Impact of Democratic Deficits on Electronic Media in Rural 
Development by Robin Van Koert 

First Monday, volume 7, number 4 (April 2002)


Abstract

In the second half of the 1990s the enthusiasm for the potential of 
ICTs, or electronic media, to facilitate, or even to create, economic 
development in developing countries was buoyant. In a sense, ICTs 
were expected to create information flows which would no longer be 
limited by geographical boundaries. As a result, experts on rural 
development in developing countries claimed that, finally, people in 
rural areas in developing countries would have access to huge amounts 
of information. Those same experts also typically envisaged the 
advent of free flows of information, which would elude conventional 
restrictions on information flows imposed by nation-states concerned 
with the impact of such free information flows on government power. 
Governments, so it seemed, would no longer be capable of denying 
their citizens access to the large pools of information available 
through the Internet.

Amidst the enthusiasm for the "liberating potential" of ICTs, I 
decided to conduct in-depth research on the validity of the widely 
accepted premise that the influence of the political situation in a 
nation-state on the free flow of information was rapidly diminishing. 
The basic assumption of my research was that the value of the 
"democratic deficit" of a nation- state would be more decisive for 
the actual role of ICT in rural development than the intrinsic 
interactivity of ICTs. In order to test the basic assumption, I 
conducted field research in Indonesia (1998), Peru (1999) and Vietnam 
(1998). The qualitative research data suggested that the level of 
interactive use of ICT in rural development efforts appears, to a 
large extent, to be determined by the state of democracy in a nation-
state. Unsurprisingly, the research data indicated that the value of 
the "democratic deficit" increased from Peru, through Indonesia, to 
Vietnam. At the same time, the level of interactivity of ICTs in 
rural development decreased in the opposite direction.

In this paper I will present the main results and conclusions of the 
research, which indicate that, despite the unique and acknowledged de-
centralizing features of the Internet, governments continue to be 
capable of controlling information flows, either through political or 
economic restrictions on the use of ICT, or electronic media. 
Although this may not be a revolutionary finding, it is a conclusion 
which serves as a reminder that the way technology 
eventually contributes to rural development by and large is still 
determined by the nature of the socio-political and economic context 
of a given nation-state.



read complete paper at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_4/koert/