Digital divide gets deeper
Try explaining Pokémon Go to kids in war-torn areas.
AMONG the many alluring promises of modern technology is the claim – repeated often enough – that it can bring the world closer together and create a new globalised world where human beings can feel and see themselves as members of the same family.
There is some truth to this claim, and it cannot be denied that the modern communicative architecture that we see today has indeed brought individuals and communities closer together in more ways than one.
We live in a world where people across the globe can play games together at the same time – think of Pokémon Go or Candy Crush – as they enter a common virtual world that connects people who have never met face-to-face or even know what each other’s voices sound like.
But the unstated assumption behind all this is that we all live in a world that is somehow flatter than it actually is and that there is some kind of universal standard of normality that we all enjoy.
Sadly, that is not the case for millions of people the world over, where normality is understood and framed in terms that are starkly different to what we may be used to.
Imagine, for instance, a child born in Iraq in the late 1990s. Such a child would have, by now, lived through almost two decades of incessant bombings, civil conflict and religio-ethnic unrest.
Normality for such a child would certainly be different from what many of us have grown accustomed to and it would be a normality predicated on routine violence and bloodshed, almost on a daily basis.
The very idea of being able to enjoy several weeks of peace would seem like a distant pipe dream, something one sees only on TV or at the cinema.
But that, unfortunately, is what the daily lived realities for millions of people in the world today is like.
Technology racing ahead
This gulf between states and societies that experience radically different and contrasting norms is one of the salient features of globalisation as we know it today.
Despite the advances we have made in terms of technological and scientific development, the benefits of such progress have never been shared equally.
This is as true today as it was in the past and it could be argued that in the not-too-distant past that technological gap was put to use to ensure that the gap remained: The history of colonialism in the 19th century is a record of how advanced societies used whatever technological advantages they had to stay above and ahead of other societies, which were, in turn, colonised and dominated using the most advanced methods of conquest, appropriation, domination and social engineering available at the time.
Today’s cutting-edge technology is also reflective of the great divide that continues to cleave a gulf between societies the world over, for among the conditions of possibility that allow technological advances to occur are peace and stability.
It is not an accident that the innovations we see today – from the Internet to online popular games like Pokémon Go – emanate from societies that have reached not only a certain point of economic-industrial advancement, but also of peace and stability where innovation can take place unmolested by radically contingent variables.
This, in effect, means that innovation remains a First World prerogative and entitlement, while in other parts of the world that have been laid low by war and strife, it remains a luxury beyond reach.
Many of these innovations also do not take into account the basic – and brutal – fact that some of these First World innovations would