Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

THE INFORMATION SOCIETY 133
that is imposed upon national policies and across the developing world
with only a few exceptions in the degree of liberalization. At the national
level, and in particular in countries with weak infrastructure such as the
African continent, the pressure for privatization is felt more strongly.
First, as Audenhove et al. argue, the very ‘quality’ of national companies
and infrastructure – and especially telecommunications – does not correspond
to investors’ criteria, which is something that makes the position
of negotiation of even countries such as South Africa, with probably the
best telecoms in the continent, problematic. At the time of writing, the
best rate of Internet use in the African continent belongs to the Seychelles
with nearly 15 per cent of Internet use and South Africa with 7 per cent
(ITU 2005) compared to the USA with 55 per cent and Australia with
56 per cent (ITU 2005). Figure 5.6 provides a comparative listing of the
situation in African countries in 2003 regarding Internet use and availability
of PCs. As the reader will immediately become aware, even the
wealthiest economies are far behind any conceivable approximation to the
rates and pace of Internet access and ICT use of the post-industrialized
world. Within the African context, at the lowest end of the scale, Ethiopia,
Niger, the Central African Republic and Sierra Leone are reporting between
10 and 14 Internet users per 10,000 inhabitants while countries like
Egypt, Botswana and Tunisia have between 2 and 4 personal computers
per 100 people.
Many African nations continue to negotiate crippling debts which reduce
state autonomy to intervene through social policy as well as the
legacies of colonial division that have fostered civil war, genocide and
discrimination. Under external pressures, these governments have used
privatization of their national sectors as a ‘symbolic’ gesture, a ‘positive
signal to private local and foreign investors’ (Nulens and Van Audenhove
1999: 397–8). They have also tried to reduce other debts through the sale
of what effectively is or has been regarded as national or public property.
As we have argued previously, telecommunications and other infrastructural
industries like air transportation have been at the centre of this
liberalization wave because of their role in allowing access to markets
and, in particular, linking production to distribution sites in the North.
Any policy for ‘development’ should take into account the voices of these
nation-states and their citizens. Instead, global policies are drafted within
closed consultative contexts and limited scope. Writing about the Digital
Opportunity Task Force (DOT), a policy with the principal aim to
expand the domain of e-commerce, Shade argues that this, as do other
top-down policies, adheres to the modernization paradigm. She notes
‘the legitimization of global capitalism as a natural and vaunted state of
affairs needs to be questioned, particularly when the discourse of the