From Rural Village to Global Village: Telecommunications for Development in the Information Age
By Darlington, JoAnne DeRouen
From Rural Village to Global Village: Telecommunications for Development in the Information Age, by Heather E. Hudson, Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2006. 179 pp. $24.50 (paper). ISBN: 0-8058-6016-9.
From Rural Village to Global Village: Telecommunications for Development in the Information Age examines how access to telecommunications as a means to obtain and share information is critical to the development process. While access to voice services has improved dramatically in recent years in developing countries- thanks largely to newly available and more affordable wireless services-Internet access is still very limited, and broadband (a key requirement for productive use of many Internet resources) is still largely unavailable and/or unaffordable in many countries. These conditions could severely hamper developing countries’ competitiveness and limit utilization of the Internet’s potential for social and economic applications. Hudson examines the current status of information and communication technologies (ICTs) including Internet and broadband access as well as wireless access in developing regions, with data from Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. She examines lessons learned from the growth of wireless that may be relevant for broadband including the impact of competition on innovative services and pricing, the enormous pent-up demand for communication services, and the irrelevance of past regulatory distinctions. She proposes strategies to increase investment in Internet access including broadband through such means as limiting exclusivity periods in licenses, encouraging resale, facilitating use of broadband wireless technologies, reducing local barriers such as permits and fees, and using incentives and targeted subsidies to extend service to schools and rural and isolated communities while paying particular attention to issues of program sustainability. She states “the purpose of the book is to analyze the role of ICTs for social and economic development in rural areas and developing regions, and then to examine techniques and strategies to close communications gaps so that the electronic means to access and share information will be available throughout the developing world” (p. 2).
This monograph represents a major contribution from an academic who has participated in telecommunications policy analyses in many countries over the last three decades. Hudson has worked as a consultant to planning and evaluating telecommunications projects for telecommunications firms, international organizations, and national governments. She is uniquely qualified to present a practical and theoretically informed assessment of the key issues facing telecommunication policy and regulation.
The strength of the book is in the presentation of recent technological developments, the consideration of telecommunication’s contribution to development, and the range of case studies the book provides. It is a readable, comprehensive, and thoroughly documented tutorial covering the policy aspects of voice, data, video, and Internet services. It forms a useful analysis of telecommunications policies and infrastructure development, focusing on technical, policy, and economic issues faced in the creation of the “global village” by means of the global information infrastructure.
Although Hudson examines some of the benefits of telecommunications in social and economic development, a more thorough discussion would be useful about the concerns of those debating what democratic participation in development means. Hudson’s argument that a discourse that constructs information and communication technologies (ICT) as an inclusive development tool that can be deployed in strategies for modernizing underdeveloped regions is one that has become hegemonic among development donors and telecommunications organizations. Sociologists take issue with this discourse and suggest that the geographies of inclusion and exclusion created by ICTs are more complex. For developing nations’ ICT elites, the Internet, for example, will shape the population into knowledge- and marketseeking, productive citizens, stimulating national growth. For Internet cafe users and non-users, the Internet stands as a marker of modernity, a way for people and places to indicate their relative level of development, and Internet use is currently dominated by leisure, communication, and information relating to global popular culture.
Across the developing world, the ICT explosion is causing anxiety that expresses itself more and more in public debate: how to prevent a new gap between North and South, the ‘info rich’ and the ‘info poor’. The anxiety is justified if we look at the figures for ‘connectivity’ in various regions of the world, but the issue that receives insufficient attention is the risk that, even within developing countries, a gap may grow between the center and the periphery in terms of access to ICTs. Furthermore, development interventions that turn the symptoms of poverty into technical problems to be solved with technological responses are inherently flawed, since the failure to deal with the causes of poverty means that the majority of citizens outside of the developed world continue to be excluded from the ‘information society’.
This comprehensive volume is a valuable resource for scholars, researchers, and students in communication and development fields. Sociologists are likely to be critical of its atheoretical treatment of the social, cultural, and economic consequences of technical responses to social problems of poverty and underdevelopment.
Reviewed by JoAnne DeRouen Darlington
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Copyright Rural Sociological Society Mar 2007
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