Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

120 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
students, struggle to keep up with technology and make meaningful use
of computer-mediated communication, because of structural and organizational
constraints (Seiter 2005). For example, although the number
of pupils per instructional computer at schools has fallen from twelve in
1998 to five in 2002, more than half of the country’s pupils (55 per cent)
do not use a computer for their coursework. Furthermore, although the
vast majority of teachers working at schools with computer and internet
access has been given support to integrate computers in their teaching,
poor funding for schools in low-income neighbourhoods, failing technologies,
lack of time and general overload of work for teachers, and
policy reforms designed around market-based incentives and penalties
for educators constrain or prohibit the use of ICTs (see OECD 2004;
Seiter 2005; Virnoche and Lessem 2006).
From history to a ‘New World’ future: the dominance
of market visions
In the US, the IS vision grew as an extension of shifts in telecommunications
policy discourse that led to the deregulation of the industry
in 1984 followed by liberalization in 1996. As examined in Chapter 3,
telecommunications constitute the backbone of the IS, the infrastructure
upon which the more symbolic, ‘ethereal’ world of cybercommunication
is based. Mattelart (2001) claims that anti-trust efforts against AT&T’s
private monopoly prepared the way for the gradual withdrawal of public
accountability over the private communications infrastructure. As we
have argued in the previous chapter, regulatory shifts originating in the
US in the 1980s undermined the ‘modern infrastructure ideal’ associated
with public ownership or oversight of transport, energy and telecommunications
(Graham and Marvin 2001). At the same time, however, IBM’s
monopoly came out of these changes unharmed, as this (computer and
technology production) was a field where the government did not see the
need to regulate. In 1991, the achievements of militarized IS technologies
found a testing ground with the first Gulf War (and second phase later in
1993). Star Wars that had been temporarily suspended were again revived
by President of the USA George W. Bush in 2001. Indeed, the direction
for the militarization of much of the IS project is a criticism echoed by
NGOs and grassroots organizations at the World Summit on Information
Society (WSIS Civil Society 2003). Initially, the NII programmatic conceptions
of the Clinton era Democratic Party included strong references
to the potential of using telematics for social purposes in the early 1990s.
Telemedicine and educational and training centres became for a brief
period part of the comprehensive agenda of a ‘New World Information