Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

128 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
Number of PCs per 100 inhabitants
50
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
44.88
29.02
22.43
10.13
1.44
4.58
Africa Americas Asia Europe Oceania World
Figure 5.2 Number of PCs: latest data available 2003
Source: ITU (2005).
located in the EU and the USA. However, the ‘networked’ capacity of
Japan, the Asian Newly Industrialized Countries (NICS), along with the
enormous expansion in large ‘emerging economies’ like China, India and
Brazil, reveals new kinds of divisions that criss-cross national boundaries.
Looking at the national scenario we find that while seven more countries,
including Japan, South Korea and China, form 38 per cent of the world’s
users another 160 countries make up the remaining 6 per cent. The
promise of jobs and the high-tech hopes of ‘leapfrogging’ development
associated with ICTs is certainly a powerful vision in the global cities of
the South, where local and regional administrations compete to attract
foreign firms with the most promising terms of investment and access
to a skilled but ‘affordable’ labour force. Generating new employment
is vitally important to nations in the South, and the expansion of ICTbased
pink-collar and white-collar jobs are appealing precisely because
in theory they offer better employment opportunities in terms of wages
and work conditions compared to other existing employment opportunities,
especially for women workers. But much of the giddy accounts of
personal and corporate success generated by the computer programmers
of Bangalore, the call-centre workers of Manila or the data-processors
of Barbados overlook the fact that many of these jobs are flexible to
the detriment of workers’ interests and offer little long-term mobility or
stability. 5 More significantly, jobs in these sectors are often limited to
a tiny middle-class minority with questionable impact on greater urban
and rural unemployment, and much larger unintended consequences in
terms of environmental pollution (often referred to as a new form of environmental
racism). 6 The need to balance public policy concerns around