Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

130 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
Poverty reduction is one of the fundamental Millennium Development
Goals of the United Nations (see Table 5.2) and is ratified by every country
in the world. ICTs and the Information Society are often claimed to
have a significant impact or potential in the alleviation of poverty but this
is yet to be proven, especially when determining the use of and access to
ICTs does derive from the very people ICTs are supposed to help. Indeed
India and Southeast Asia have shown signs of positive growth but one has
to examine other factors such as the sustainability of these sectors and the
redistributive consequences in terms of gender and class have to be examined.
These concern the conditions of work and prospects of mobility
for the largely female workforce employed in manufacturing micro-chips
or as data-processing and call-centre workers versus the largely male and
privileged domain of computer programming and research and design
(Ng and Mitter 2005b). We also must consider the displacement of the
global manufacturing sector and once again the negligence of the agricultural
sector, which is the place where the poorest people of the world
and the majority of women find themselves labouring.
As a ‘way out of poverty’ for the developing world dominant policy
claims, largely inspired by transnational lobbies, bring attention to
e-commerce and generally to the commercial potential of ICTs. Apart
from the fact that one ‘sector’ alone would not be enough to provide decent
salaries and working conditions in a country, the potential for economic
recovery would depend on a number of factors, such as whether
ICTs are used by communities to export crafts and goods that would
then subsidize agriculture, education and health care; whether craftspeople
and other labourers would be able to determine their creative
expression or have control over the production process; and whether
welfare nets and mechanisms are in place to maintain social cohesion.
According to the OECD (2004), computers and ICT/IT employment
is at its strongest in the service sector and much lower in the manufacturing
and other similar sectors. IT employment, however, includes not
only analysts and programmers but also users of computer software for
retailing or data input (travel) as well as jobs that are normally classified
as manual or generally non-IT such as installers of equipment. IT
employment and use density also seem to be on the low side for the
EU and the USA in the retail sectors, although the USA has slightly
higher rates. These are examples from those regions of the world whose
economies tend to benefit most from ICTs. The potential of the IT sector
in general to generate wealth for the global South – and not for
small elites – depends on the terms and conditions specific to individual
regions.