Are we using the Web for sustainable and balanced development?

No. is answer from the Global village.

Make bandwidth available to all: Kalam
NEW DELHI: In the small but packed hall of a New Delhi hotel that hosted Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Infosys's Narayana Murthy and others, president Dr A P J Abdul Kalam gave the event’s opening keynote address on “Bridging the two Indias.”

Kalam said it was critical to make bandwidth available for inclusion, because “the less educated you are, the more bandwidth you need to communicate! The most educated can manage with asynchronous means like email…the less educated need voice--or video.”

NDTV’s Prannoy Roy moderated a discussion in which Ballmer, N R Narayana Murthy, Ashok Jhunjhunwala and Manvinder Singh of Ranbaxy participated.

Ravi Venkatesan kicked off the event, speaking of the contrasts in India: the millionaires and the malnourished children; the successful e-gov projects and the “graveyard of pilot projects.” Read the full news story

I thank Gail for identifying a new book:

Overselling the Web?: Development and the Internet, by Charles Kenny, Lynne Rienner Publishers 2006 [ Library of Congress catalog ]

"An important cautionary tale.... Kenny demonstrates that the irrational exuberance directed toward the internet as a tool for international development needs serious tempering."—Michael Best, Georgia Institute of Technology

I found some thing interesting and in the same direction (as above), to bring a balance in our thinking, in the following article:

A Critical Perspective on Access, Content and the Digital Divide
By: Oliver Moran | January 18, 2005
The current sense of urgency to adapt ICT in the social sphere, as opposed to the economic sphere where it is already prevalent and well integrated, is derived from the discourse of economic globalisation rather from a more practical desire to utilise the technology in socially-derived ways – building from the top down rather than from the ground up. This is not to discount the potential of the technology but to explain that, just as with the dot-com phenomenon, the technology on its own and certainly as it is presently provided is not good enough. It needs to be redesigned and fitted to benefit social practices and settings rather than be machines for business drafted-in for home or community use.

The above article illustrates the common ground, common concern to look the other way also--not just one way all the time everytime!!!!

I think both these sources talk almost same langugage---i.e., we must always have checks and balances in our developmental perspectives.

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