ICT INCLUDES MORE THAN TELEPHONES AND PERSONAL COMPUTERS

I hope I am wrong, but I sometimes feel that a lot of my colleagues say “information and communication technologies” (ICT) but mean “telephones, computers and the Internet”. I have also seen some references to the “Old” ICT (telephone, radio and TV) versus the “New” ICT (Internet and computers). Are computers new? Babbage started working on the Difference Engine in 1821!

Of course, telephones are not “your plain, old telephone” anymore. The term would seem to include not only wire telephone, but also cellular phones, and satellite phones. But behind the phone system there are technologies of satellite communications, microwave transmission, fiber optic cables, etc. The system of networked computers that manage telephone traffic is perhaps the most complex, single, man-made device in the world. We find phone handsets now having sufficient computer power to support computer games, including sensors such as video cameras, and including display screens. Moreover, automated telephone based systems using voice mail and computer technologies are only beginning to be explored in the context of social and economic development. See for example, the Voxiva system.

The term “communications” in ICT must include broadcast communications – radio and television. New forms of these household media are coming, such as digital radio, high-definition TV, Internet radio, and satellite radio. Moreover, advances in electronics makes it possible to produce micro-radio station transmitters that are small and affordable, making community radio a realistic possibility for even poor communities. Behind the broadcast, there is also a wealth of technology in the form of recording devices and Internet media services.

The wealth of “consumer electronics” also includes tape recorders, video cassette recording, CDs, DVDs, TiVo, etc. These technologies too have potentially important applications in areas such as education, health (education), and public awareness that have only begun to be explored, and should be more fully exploited.

The personal computer is so often treated as a black box that we fail to recognize its data processing power, and its information storage capacity. Used as a word processor, we fail to recognize the data processing that is going on in spell checking, grammar checking, and the like. When we have better language translation, we will probably also forget that it too takes analytic power. The information storage and retrieval functions of the computer underlie the power of the World Wide Web to make huge libraries available on hundreds of millions of desktops, but even CD-ROMs libraries for stand-alone PCs can make large libraries available where books never existed in the past.

But I wanted to go beyond these examples, to talk more about other functions such as computing, data gathering and control. Bio-computing, for example, has made possible the decoding of the human genome, and its exploration for the purpose of development of new pharmaceuticals. Medical imaging and medical instrumentation represent important areas of capital investment in health service facilities, as well as major advances in biomedical technology.

Electronic sensors are pervasive: from those embedded in the control of household heating and air conditioning, to those embedded in automobiles engine and brake systems, to those used in monitoring industrial processes, to those in weather stations and ocean buoy systems monitoring currents and surface temperatures, to satellite remote sensing. I would suggest that the environmental movement would not have occurred, and issues such as climate change, deforestation, desertification, and coastal zone destruction would not be understood without the deployment and use of networks of environmental sensors.

The use of computer power has been of great importance, and there are huge networks of supercomputers grinding away 24/7, out of sight and apparently out of mind for most of us. They predict the weather, design our high performance aircraft and plain, old motor vehicles. Simulation programs draw their accuracy from finer and finer disaggregation of models, and thus ever more computer power. Language processors, from speech recognition to automated translators, also draw on the power of computer processing.

Electronic control provides higher speed, tireless, highly accurate responses. We fail to see it in the black boxes of our toasters and microwave ovens, automobile engines, and other every day items. It also make possible the newest generation of high performance aircraft and space vehicles. More important perhaps for our economic life, it is the basis of industrial control – managing oil refineries, chemical processing plants, food processing lines, industrial metallurgy, and a host of other processes. Robotics, while still limited to a few manufacturing applications, is in my opinion a major application of control technology in the future.

There are many other applications of the technology. Financial institutions have been revolutionized by ICTs, that automated the processing of checks using bar code readers, introduced ATMs, and perhaps more importantly automated clearing house functions and the inter-bank transfers of funds. The study of human, animal and plant diseases and their distribution and history, epidemiology in the broad sense, has been revolutionized by hand held survey instruments, telecommunications, computer processing of data, automated laboratory analyses, GIS, and remote sensing.

ICT for Development includes each and all of the applications discussed above. When we talk about the Digital Divide, we are not simply talking about the availability of telephone services, but the divide in industrial control technology, or remote sensing, or satellite communications.