Knowledge Is A Double Edged Sword - A View From South
Asia
By Kunda Dixit, Director, Panos South Asia
Every day in countless homes across the developing world, knowledge
makes the difference between life and death
KATHMANDU (PANOS) - The scriptures were right: "Knowledge is a sword,
and wisdom is a shield." Perhaps nowhere is the raw power of knowledge
as relevant today as it is for the two-thirds of the world's people
who live in the countries of the South.
A Nepali child in a remote hamlet in the Himalayas is dehydrated by
diarrhoea, but his young mother is brought up to believe that under
no
circumstances should water be given to her child. Information
countering this belief is contained in posters at rural health
centres, and is broadcast over Radio Nepal every day, but the
knowledge has not reached her.
In a country where 80 percent of all children who die are killed by
water-borne diseases, this knowledge gap means the death of thousands
of children every month. In all of South Asia, five million children
die every year before their fifth birthday from diarrhoeal
dehydration, simple infections and measles. Most of these deaths can
easily be prevented if knowledge about prevention is more readily
available.
The challenge is to get the information to where it is needed as
cheaply as possible. Only when information helps people communicate,
participate and allows them and their rulers to make informed choices
does that information become knowledge.
As new technologies make it possible to move more information faster
than ever before, we are dazzled by the millions of gigabytes that
move across the world in nanoseconds. We are infatuated by bandwidth,
by digital television and gadgets and gizmos. Yet we hardly question
the quality of the information: what is it that we are communicating?
Is it relevant? Will it make the world a better place? And does all
this information add up to knowledge?
South Asia, home to a fifth of the world's population, is today within
the footprint of at least 50 broadcast satellites. In India, Pakistan
and Bangladesh alone there are more than 70 million households with
television sets, adding up to a total viewership of 300 million. By
2007, there will be 550 million television viewers in these countries.
Half of them will be hooked up to cable - able to watch the 350
channels that will be available by then.
Advances in information technology are supposed to shrink distances,
but they don't necessarily bring people together. Better
communications through satellite may give people a wider array of
programming to choose from, but it does not guarantee greater
tolerance to diversity. In the short term, better communications
appear to highlight differences between peoples.
In India and Pakistan, people tune in to each other's television, but
what Indians watch on Pakistani TV and what Pakistanis watch on Indian
TV today has deepened hatreds, making it more difficult to spread the
word about peace in a newly nuclear region.
When these prejudices about the "other" have been nurtured from
childhood through textbooks that portray the neighbouring country as
the enemy, one has to ask whether governments take the holy saying
about knowledge being a sword a little too literally.
Satellite television in its own way has diluted the impact of strident
domestic broadcast media, not for any altruistic reasons, but because
it has audiences (or markets) on both sides of the border. But even
here, the enormous potential for irresponsible satellite broadcasts
to
spread volatile knowledge has already been seen in the speed with
which communal riots spread across India and Pakistan - and beyond,
to
Europe - after the 1992 destruction of a mosque by Hindu zealots in
the Indian town of Ayodhya was broadcast in near-real time via
satellite.
Knowledge may be a sword, but it is double-edged. The delivery
mechanisms for knowledge are today in the hands of fewer and fewer
people. Globally, media ownership reflects the supranational ownership
patterns of other worldwide businesses. More and more of the message
propagates a global consumer monoculture that generates waste,
perpetuates economic disparities and is environmentally disastrous.
It also leaves more and more poor people out of the knowledge loop.
They have lost the knowledge they had, and what has replaced it is
neither relevant nor useful.
In a lot of ways, it is just like the loss of genetic diversity.
High-yield hybrid seeds have replaced a rich variety of local cereals
across the world, improving harvests but also making the crops more
susceptible to disease and dependent on costly inputs of
agrochemicals. Globalisation of media subliminally spreads information
that eats into traditional knowledge bases and indigenous processes
that are best equipped to deal with local conditions.
New information technologies offer a chance for South Asia to leapfrog
technology, level the playing field and democratise information so
to
usher in an era where better communications will spread useful
knowledge. But going by past examples, the chances of this happening
appear slim: the poor will be the last to use the technologies, or
benefit from them.
History teaches that technology by itself is never the answer. The
corporate values that drive the Information Age are the very values
that drove the Industrial Age. Things will be no different with the
Internet or satellite television: it all depends on who gets to use
these these technologies and who gets to control them.
http://www.oneworld.org./panos
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