“But fathers should not be guided by sons. My son also makes suggestions to me, but I don’t like most of what he suggests. The father should not listen to the son. It undermines authority. I told my son to read the Internet less and to study more.”
In reading Friedman, I was impressed by how much credence he seems to give to anecdotes and to the people he interviews. Indeed, he seems to cite people as if their fame were correlated with their credibility. I found myself wishing that Friedman had fewer anecdotes, and more data; that he had relied more on analysis and less on opinion.
The ICT Revolution Changes Cultural Patterns of Authority
The Internet is a prototypical example of a technology changing where we go for information. The judge now gets information from his son, who gets it from the Internet; the judge's cultural expectation is that his son would get information from him, and he would get that information from his training and his experience with the world. The judge's world is turned upside down!
Culture institutionalizes where we go for credible information, and changing that cultural pattern is a fundamental cultural change. Think about some of the current controversies. For credible information on the creation of the world, do we go to church where the authorities in turn have gotten that information from sacred texts and professional theologians or do we go to school where the teachers in turn have gotten their information from science texts and professional scientists? Are environmental NGOs or business leaders to be believed about the environment? Do we believe political leaders or do we believe the media when they seem to tell different stories?
The word “authority” has two different meanings. On the one hand, the word refers to the power to give directions – as in the debate on the limits of presidential authority. On the other, it refers to the credibility – as in the authority of religious versus scientific texts. But the two are linked. We hesitate to give power to people who we do not believe, and indeed we tend to believe people to whom we have given power.
Examples of implications:
· Poor people in poor countries have learned on the job, starting work as children. If we want them to go to schools, the schools must be credible sources of useful knowledge. But if the school are the authoritative sources for knowledge, what does that do to the authority of the elders and the community leaders from whom children were supposed to learn in the past?
· People have gotten health advice from family members, neighbors, and traditional practitioners. If we want them to use new health services, those services must be credible sources of health advice. But what does the medical authority of the health auxiliary and doctor do to the traditional authority of older family members and traditional practitioners? How will they react to a potential diminution of their authority.
· Farmers have gotten advice from neighbors and leaders in their farming community. If we want them to seek advice instead from extension workers, that advice should be credible. If farmers do indeed seek the advice of the extension worker instead of that of the community leaders, what does that do to the role of the latter in the community?
It is increasingly possible to replace person-to-person communication with ICT mediated communication in all these situations. Distance education via radio, television or the Internet can substitute for school based education. Health information can be disseminated via radio, television, or other electronic means, and telemedicine is increasingly accessible. Agricultural information is increasingly being disseminated via radio and even via Internet kiosks in rural communities in developing nations. What are the social implications of replacing person to person channels with disembodied channels?
ICT can empower people to seek information from disembodied sources when previously they would have had to resort to personal contact with experts. To what degree can we make the disembodied source credible? (Certainly with expert systems, we can go much further than is possible with mass media.) How do we change the authoritativeness attributed to books, libraries and ICT sources, versus traditional sources, versus professionals from modern systems (such as schools, medical services or agricultural extension services)?
ICT can also be used to improve the information provided by traditional or modern institutions. We can use technology to help the midwives or to help the health auxiliaries, to help the agricultural cooperative leaders or to help the agricultural extension workers, to help the school teachers or to help the traditional councilors in the community. I suspect that those who introduce ICT are modernizers, who naturally think of working with the schools, health centers and agricultural extension services, and do not give appropriate attention to using the technology to help more traditional sources of information. Can this approach always be right?
How do we analyze and understand the social and cultural repercussions of the changes in credibility patterns that are induced by the Information Revolution? More importantly, how do we empower people to control the processes of institutional change in order to ameliorate the undesired impacts of the Information Revolution?
The ICT Revolution Changes the Epistemological Standards We Use to Judge Credibility
There is a lot on the web about the evaluation of information available on website, the credibility of Wikipedia, etc. That is not my subject here.
We all act all the time on information which we feel is “credible enough”. After all, it cost time and effort, and sometimes money, to collect and analyze information. We have to balance the potential benefits and costs of seeking more information (which may not be available or if available still not be accurate) with the likely benefits and costs of acting now with the information we have.
ICT can radically reduce the costs of gathering and analyzing information. It should therefore significantly change the criteria of “good enough”. We should make decisions now on the basis of more and better information, and better analysis of that information, than was appropriate in the past.
Indeed, we should insist that our information sources provide better information, since they too can benefit from technological advances to improve their own information gathering and analysis.
Since the ICT revolution is continuing, the criteria for “good enough” should continue to evolve. Education should prepare people to extend their information gathering and analysis activities in the future, and to appropriately modify their “good enough” criteria in that future.
Mass media includes many more channels, and the Internet and the blogosphere expand and change the nature of the mass media available to us. The changes in communication technology allow us easier point-to-point than even the recent past; we should ask more questions of more carefully chosen informants in our search for information. The Internet makes stocks of information readily available, and digital libraries are coming on line that will make well vetted information more accessible; we should look things up more and more carefully. Computers allow us not only to search text and mine data, but to use quantitative analytic techniques – including statistical analysis and modeling – to improve our understanding of data; we should analyse more and more quantitatively.
More and better information is transforming markets. It is transforming the way organizations are run, including governments, businesses and NGOs. Citizens should demand more and better information on their governments, and demand that more an better information on their views be available to and used by legislators and government administrators. More and better information is transforming health care and educational service systems. And ultimately, more and better information will transform society and culture.
The question is, how do we improve the process by which these transformations are taking place? How do we create appropriate levels of demand for more and better information? How do we disseminate continually increasing demands? How are the demand and supply of more and better information to be coordinated? Education to equip people in all their roles as information consumers to evaluate information well is an important element of the strategy. But what other public policies and institutional changes are required?
Monitoring and Evaluation
What are the indicators to be used of the quality and quantity of information used in decision making? How does one attribute changes in the use of information in decision making to project or program interventions? These are difficult issues, but I suggest they are critical issues for those of us interested in social and economic development.
Even more difficult are the issues of deciding what is good or bad. Do we ask the judge or the son whether it is good that the father is now getting more advice from the son? Do we ask the traditional or the modern source of education and advice whether the substitution of the latter by the former is good or bad? It is not only a situation in which “where you stand depends on where you sit”. The values a culture holds dear change as that culture changes. As the ICT revolution changes culture, it will change the values held by the members of that culture.
Clearly, foreigners do not understand cultural values as well as the members of teh culture itself, and consequently (as we have learned from hard experience) they foreigners should be hesitant to induce technological changes with major cultural impacts! I see no good alternative but to seek to help people within a culture understand the institutional changes that the ICT revolution is to bring, and to try to empower them to exert some control over the introduction of ICT into their own societies. Given how difficult it has been in my own culture to project the impacts of ICT, how controversial those impacts have been, and how difficult it is to change the course of the ICT revolution, I am not optimistic about the chances of so empowering the peoples of developing nations to make good decisions on the technology they will adopt and the cultural changes that they will encourage.
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