Digital Divide or Something Else?

What a difference a decade makes.

In reading Helen Milner’s 2006 article The Digital Divide:  The Role of Political Institutions in Technology Diffusion I was initially struck by the fact that her thesis was based on information collected between 1991 and 2001.  This was worrisome because most observers agree that evolutions in technology, are extremely rapid.  Not too far into my reading, I noted a couple of other problems in Milner’s analysis.—first among these was the idea that the Internet is in itself a single technology.  Secondly, she seems to use China as an example of internet adoption in contradictory ways.

First the tech analysis.

Despite our common tendency to express our activities in online communications and computing as being “On the Net”, the Internet isn’t a single technology.  Never has been.  Many of us use the term internet or just the “net” when we are talking about all sorts of activities that we do when we are “online”—email, look at web sites, using search engines, transfer files over FTP, share files on peer to peer networks or play video games to name just a few.  These activities were common by 2001 when Milner’s data set ends.

Many of these activities shared a common foundation technology—TCP/IP protocol.  TCP/IP is the backbone of the HTTP system of transferring and receiving information over the internet, but each of these different uses had (and still have) a discreet technological system that counts as a unique technology in itself.  Today we have even more advanced technologies online that might still be based on TCP/IP but are even more technologically distinct than before:  shared document resourcing (cloud computing), social network systems (Facebook), content management systems (blogs) and mobile application systems (iOS and Android).  Yes, they still make use of the internet, but they are technologically so advanced from the basic internet of the 80’s and 90’s that I believe that they are new technologies all together.

Mobile access to text,VOIP and the internet in particular is so transformational that it almost completely negates the use divide that Milner’s article states in her thesis—that political regimes drive or control internet access as much as, or even more so, than technological development.  Just look at the prevalence of mobile users in parts of the world that were/are underdeveloped.  In particular the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) have benefitted from the spread of mobile telephony and mobile access to online networks.  In China and India in particular this has increased access to various technologies that were once limited to TCP/IP access over established phone networks and then hard wired broadband systems.  Wireless mobile has made the reliance on wired telephone networks not essential to growing internet use among citizens.

For China (and to some degree Putin era Russia) autocratic regimes have encouraged rapid Internet expansion as part of economic modernization.  This is a paradox that defies what most of us think about openness and technology.  Milner’s thesis makes complete sense in a context that is informed by twentieth century experience—command and control regimes like China and Russia failed as much as they succeeded in industrializing under ideological autocratic regimes.  But the modern versions of these countries have adopted more flexible ideological approaches (or in Russia’s case—little ideology at all) to economic development while maintaining strict ideological control over information.

The question for 2010 and beyond is how are these regimes able to bifurcate their political and economic attitudes towards openness?

The only historical answer that  I can think of is Nazis Germany.  The Nazis were able to embrace a form of state capitalism (National Socialism—more nationalist than socialist) that encouraged entrepreneurship under government regulation.  Simultaneously, the state maintained nearly complete control over public information through regulating mass media.  We assume that since most media at the time were delivered through print, radio and motion pictures that it was easier to control outlets than it is in today’s electronic and mobile-networked media.  That might be true to some degree, but the China example proves that it is not impossible.

China is still a one party ideological state that maintains nearly complete control over all legacy media—print, radio, television and motion pictures.  China is also the country that has the most internet users in the world (it still lags based on per capita users but is growing).  Chinese language web sites are second only to English language websites worldwide.  If Milner is right that autocratic regimes limit access to the internet (and internet related technologies), than how do the Chinese do it?  Milner cites China’s example as a basis for her thesis and shows how China could theoretically encourage economic modernization through technology while clamping down on unsanctioned uses of that technology.  Milner cites eight ways that an autocratic regime can “squelch” internet openness. Of the eight, China uses five to varying degrees:  firewalls, router control, software filters, Internet policing and coercion.

What is even more fascinating about China (and that differs from Nazis Germany and to some degree Russia) is the reliance on foreign contractors to host, distribute and innovate online access for Chinese citizens and industry.  Just look at the trials and tribulations tech giants like Microsoft and Google have gone through recently in China.  How effective the Chinese government is at squelching openness on the internet ebbs and flows.  According to a New York Times article from April 2010, the Chinese are both very good and very bad at monitoring Internet content:  very good because they can throw a lot of time, money and labor at the problem; very bad because efforts at control can slow down, make inefficient and beguile normal, non political use of internet technologies.  But perhaps the Chinese have also hit upon a formula that escaped the Nazis when Hitler decided that he was going to go to war with half of the World in 1939.

I was in China in 2008 working on a documentary and got to spend unsupervised time with many Chinese in Beijing and Shanghai.  Other than my email getting hacked, I wasn’t knowingly followed around or visibly discouraged from socializing with the Chinese that I met in my travels.  I did have my camera confiscated for a time, but other than that, I had many conversations with people that I would think of as being open and honest over a broad range of topics.  In general I did find older people a little more circumspect in their opinions while young people were more open.

What was particularly fascinating about talking with Chinese youth was their enthusiasm to talk about (as well as their knowledge of ) Chinese internal and foreign affairs.  Invariably these conversations would revolve around me gently probing into freedom of speech issues and politics. Often the younger Chinese I was talking to would see themselves as very free in purely economic terms and their ability to voice personal expression in terms of the clothes they wore.  They were also really, really patriotic and expressed a sentiment that the Chinese government was the very best on earth.

It is true that the Chinese government has created an economy that is bringing a great deal of material comfort to many Chinese citizens.  The Chinese also aren’t sending their young off to fight in international wars.  In that way, the Chinese have hit open a formula that eluded Hitler and other 20^th century autocrats.  Keep your people happy, fed, clothed and out of war and they will reward you with loyalty, productivity and a general disinterest in politics.  Even so, I would still caution a Chinese internet user to go easy on overt criticism and to avoid Googling things like democracy, protesting or Tienanmen Square.  Just to be safe.