Globalization is a fluid and much-debated term. In general, it indicates the increasing interdependence of economic, cultural, and social relations across the world, and it is at once a cause and consequence, together with technology, of the compression of time and space that has been seen as the defining factor of the “information age.” While the roots of globalization reach deep down in history, the real acceleration of global entanglements began with the new economic world order that emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the technological and informational revolutions that followed.
Early on in this period, globalization was perhaps most visible in the rapid diffusion of American (popular) culture across the world. Film, music, television and radio programs, and advertising were the tools of American soft power in the ideological battles of the Cold War, forming the content of the electronic mass media carried through to populations in the Western, Soviet, and nonaligned spheres, and beginning the creation of what Marshall McLuhan called the global village. This phase of cultural globalization is ongoing and increasingly diverse, with many more centers emerging, large and small, to challenge the United States as the primary source of global cultural trends. Another visible form of globalization, trade and finance, also garners considerable public attention and thrives, despite a continuing backlash against it. However, the globalization of technology and information arguably exerts the more profound and lasting influence on society, and it is worth exploring its origins.
Beginning with the diffusion of manufacturing outward from the United States and Europe, the increasing complexity of truly global supply chains, made possible by faster *internet-supported flows of information, connected the various production and consumption nodes in a worldwide network. Information itself is a term just as ambiguous, fluid, and contested as globalization. It used to be a fairly local concern, generated and used within small geographical boundaries, and its meaning was tied to particular localities. Now, however, it is not only one of the enablers of globalization; it has become itself a global commodity, portable, sellable, and immaterial. Its origins as a material product of social relations, whose value and meaning stem in part from these very relations, is forgotten; it can now be frictionlessly applied anywhere in the world, its qualities unchanged even though detached from their original locale.
In the dominant narrative of globalization in the information age, there are centers, for the most part advanced economies in the West, and there are peripheries, the so-called global South of emerging, developing, and less developed countries. Information has been singled out as the resource that is lacking in the global South, and that, accessed and deployed correctly, can change poor countries’ position in the global economy. This is the “idea gap,” in the formulation of the Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Romer, as distinct from an “object gap” (i.e., a lack of factories, machinery, and other material resources) as an explanation of poverty: ideas that generate wealth are not available in poor countries, contributing to their underdevelopment. Ideas are abstract and independent of local circumstances, thus can travel and be effective anywhere, and are transmitted in the form of information, framed as an all-powerful commodity that can unlock access to the global economy; acquiring it, passive observers at the periphery are transformed into nodes in the network. Access is chiefly provided by information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as computers, mobile phones, and the internet, which allow information to be reproduced and to reach every corner of the world at negligible cost. The barriers to access are lowered, and the potential benefits for those who were previously excluded from it—or at least perceived to be excluded—potentially life changing.
This is the familiar narrative of “haves” and “have-nots” that emerged in the early days of the internet as part of the debate on the *digital divide. Some people had access to ICTs and thus could bridge the idea gap by accessing information and leveraging it to improve their lives, but others did not. Closing the gap between the haves and have-nots became then a matter of providing access to information, especially by building infrastructure and programs to bring hardware such as computers into schools and libraries that did not have them. Once again, the debate and policies on the digital divide started within the United States but were soon reproduced globally, particularly in the global South. Lack of access to information, and thus to education, resources, and markets, became one of the key problems to tackle in order to unlock the potential of poorer countries. Blurring the lines between information technologies, information/information society, and knowledge/knowledge economy, international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank began in the 1990s to codify “expert knowledge,” that is, knowledge that came from Western experts and institutions, into databases and programs that would allow its transfer from the information rich to the information poor (note the interchangeability of “information” and “knowledge,” which is a common feature of the plans and documents from this period).
In the 1990s, information- and ICT-related projects in the field of development were scattered and left to the initiative of individual organizations. In the early 2000s, however, the United Nations began to organize projects and actors that were related, however vaguely, to information and information-driven economic development under the umbrella of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). The summit started as two general conferences, held in Geneva in 2003 and in Tunis in 2005, with representatives of governments and civil society, to discuss the role that ICTs and access to information could play in reducing the gap between rich and poor countries, thus providing new areas of economic growth for the global South. These summits resulted in eleven “Action Lines” that emphasized the potential of ICTs to trigger and support economic development, the need to build adequate infrastructure and provide access to all citizens, and the benefits for both individuals and nations that come from “access to information and knowledge” (Action Line Three). Those years also saw the beginning of ambitious programs to bring digital devices to poor places, programs such as the high-profile One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). The brainchild of the exuberant MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, who once enthusiastically proposed to airdrop OLPC laptops off helicopters to remote villages to give rural children a chance to access education, the quirky and cheap green-and-white machine was designed to be a low-cost computer able to go online but also function off grid. The OLPC prototype was in fact presented at the WSIS meeting in Tunis, where its most distinctive feature, the crank handle that was supposed to power it, promptly fell off. Despite the perplexity expressed by some of the summit participants as to how appropriate the device was for the reality of the rural global South, given the US-centric assumptions about infrastructure, education, time, and “useful information” inherent in it, the OLPC was hailed as a game changer that could solve thorny educational issues in resource-poor areas. Whether the OLPC was successful or not in changing the course of education in the countries where it was deployed is a debatable (and still heatedly debated) matter. But the philosophy behind it—to give direct access to information to those who do not have it, through ICTs—persists, embodied in a succession of new digital technologies, each imagined to overcome the flaws that led to the failure of its predecessors.
The first wave of post-WSIS ICT deployments was followed by a certain disillusionment, when it became clear that maintaining open-access technology in low-resource and environmentally challenging places was an expensive and labor-intensive endeavor. But this was quickly forgotten once mobile phones became widespread. The same rhetoric deployed in the early 2000s, when computers were the technology that would give access to information to the “have-less,” was now repurposed for mobile phones. These had the advantage of being cheaper and more portable than computers, and they spread quickly even in poorer and more rural areas of the global South—although it is useful to keep in mind that about 42 percent of the world, as of 2020, still did not have access to any kind of mobile phone, much less an internet-connected one; and that the ways of using mobile phones among rural, marginal communities in the global South differ substantially from how they are used in urban areas everywhere. Still, the dream of connecting those who are at the margins of the global economy remains, now best captured by the philanthropic efforts of technology corporations racing to bring connectivity and access to information to increasing numbers of previously neglected people, who are not only information have-less, but also potentially lucrative customers.
In the examples above, information is explicitly framed as badly distributed across the world, as difficult to access, and at the same time as the key to development—the source of knowledge about agriculture, education, and health care, but also the source of (better) jobs and increased participation in the value-added parts of the global economy. Information is concentrated in some places and among some groups (the information rich), but lacking or kept inaccessible by gatekeepers in other places and among other people, the information poor. Once the barriers to access are eliminated, then information has the potential to unlock growth, in particular economic growth. Information is also posed as binary: it exists, or it does not; it is the right information, or the wrong; and it is, once again, abstracted from any social interaction.
So far, this has been the story of information as global commodity as told from the perspective of the center, that is, the countries that are considered information rich and ICT rich, and as such the source of information for those without. From the periphery’s perspective, this narrative has been embraced by some countries in the global South. In the years following WSIS in Tunis, there has been a surge of national strategies on information, and on digitization and informatization (another vague term that indicates strategies to increase the weight of information technologies and jobs connected with the digital and knowledge economy). The content of these strategies varies from vague gesturing toward creating a more digital economy to very detailed goals such as increasing the percentage of the global flow of information that should pass through a country. Still, perhaps as a side effect of often being written by global consultancies, these strategies remain remarkably similar in embracing the idea of information poverty, and ICTs and information as the essential ticket to escaping the periphery and joining those at the center(s) of the global economy.
Countries that try to forge their own path vis-à-vis globalization and information, and so provide alternatives to Western-driven models, are few. China is one of them, helped of course by its size, but also by the fact that it has struggled with issues related to development, center-periphery relations, and technologies for over a century. In fact, already in the 1880s, during the last imperial dynasty, whose sovereignty had been severely challenged by Western powers, Chinese intellectuals had developed a strategy for reforming the nation that would rely on what they referred to as Chinese “essence” and foreign “means,” following the dictum that originated in the mid-nineteenth century: “Chinese knowledge as a basis, Western technology for practical use” (xi yong zhong ti). What Chinese intellectuals of that age had focused on was the need to appropriate Western technologies, and eventually develop native ones, but repurpose them in a manner that reflected local values and cultural norms, and focused on national priorities. Policies in the Republican era (1912–49) and especially the postrevolution years (1949–76) continued to emphasize technology and self-reliance in developing technology as important tools for the nation to forge its own path, independent from other countries. From Mao’s death in 1976 through the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in the early 1980s, there was a sudden surge of interest in information. Alvin Toffler’s book The Third Wave was translated into Chinese (and made into a popular television program), and Toffler himself visited the country to present to enthusiastic audiences his ideas on the postindustrial society, where information processing would be a primary economic activity. Although the success of Deng’s economic reforms was founded on the exploitation of physical labor—the industrial workers in the factories that the global logistics chain had located in China—the idea of increasing automation in production and thus moving up the value chain to more “informational” and less physical work was already taking form. Information became the theme of many science fiction stories published around that time, while some of the scientific ideas developed in the wake of The Third Wave’s popularity went back to earlier cybernetic tropes of the human body as a complex information system, to be integrated with computers and synchronized with information flows. Other ideas, however, found their way into concrete policies that went on to shape the future of the country. While the South and the East of the country were from 1980 on becoming the factory of the world, the government started infrastructure investments and policies aimed at becoming a driver of globalization, not just a peripheral part of it, especially after the political upheaval of Tiananmen began to settle in the early 1990s. Information and informatization were at the center of a series of policies—or rather long-term programmatic documents—that began with the Tenth Five-Year Plan 2001–5. This plan made informatization of the national economy a strategic priority and included the creation of a national informatization index evaluation center, the first such place in the world. In 2006, the Building a New Socialist Countryside framework focused on bringing ICTs to rural areas in order to give farmers more and better access to information, in particular about markets and agricultural technology, and thus decrease the income gap that existed between urban and rural areas. In 2006, the government also launched a National Informatization Development Plan 2006–20, which aimed at setting up “a scientific concept for information resources, that is, to raise the importance of information resources development to equal that of energy and materials, thereby creating the necessary conditions for the development of a knowledge-intensive industry,” making it clear that information and access to information is as important for the future of the country as natural resources. Even though many of the technologies and much of the information that is at the core of these plans was still coming from foreign (that is, Western) sources, each subsequent version increased the emphasis on the need for self-reliance. The latest plan, Made in China 2025, thus stresses the necessity to develop indigenous technology, and to create technological standards that are adopted outside China. In the global whirlwind of information, China is thus carving its own path and trying to position itself as a source, rather than a recipient, of information and ICTs, still within the parameters of globalization, but with “Chinese characteristics,” such as strong state control over the direction of the economy and a belief in the primacy of politics over economics.
Whether articulated in neoliberal or in Chinese terms, however, both versions of a global information system see information as an abstract, tradable type of knowledge. The reality on the ground, at the periphery of the network, however, is that information remains stubbornly attached to local meanings and interpretations, even when it comes from far away, and it resists detachment from the bodies and social relations that produce it. Market information systems that attempt to bring market price information to global South farmers have more often than not failed; information about prices, it turns out, is not necessarily what is lacking, nor what, as such, farmers prize most. Countries that adopt the sleek information strategies produced by global consultants are also places where information labor, the glue that holds together the global network of capitalist production, is the domain not of the desired highly skilled “value added” worker, but rather of blue-collar workers toiling in cottage factories effectively indistinguishable from piecework manufacturing sites. Information laborers in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and other global South countries are low-paid workers spending their days creating social media accounts and commenting, liking, or clicking on behalf of their clients, or “farming gold” by playing massive multiplayer online games to acquire virtual currency and then selling it for real money. They might have the ICTs and the connectivity to access the “right” information, but their livelihoods remain strictly dependent on using an essentially manual set of skills, while the world they live in remains dependent on local information, tied to the workplace and the social and economic relations around it. Information—global, abstract, immaterial, and tradable—has not made a significant impact: in rural China farmers might play Farmville online, but they are still farmers. Whether in the future they will also be able to leverage the opportunities always promised by the information society, and yet still not delivered, remains to be seen.
Elisa Oreglia
See also computers; cybernetics/feedback; data; digitization; governance; knowledge; learning; media; networks; quantification; telecommunications; travel