Internet Changing Society

604 Words3 Pages
Ten conclusions that might guide a country's development of a culturally appropriate Internet policy: 1. Resist the standard sales pitch for new technology. This sales pitch, which is found in every part of the world, plays on your fears of being left behind by technological change. It treats all of your experience and common sense as obsolete things of the past, and invites you to release your grip on the past by buying lots of technology. Unless you have a coherent plan that builds on your experience and common sense, however, buying a lot of machinery will not save you from being left behind. 2. Do not spend vast sums of money to buy machinery that you are going to set down on top of existing dysfunctional institutions. The Internet, for example, will not fix your schools. Perhaps the Internet can be part of a much larger and more complicated plan for fixing your schools, but simply installing an Internet connection will almost surely be a waste of money. 3. Focus on developing people, not machinery. Learning how to use the Internet is primarily a matter of institutional arrangements, not technical skills. Therefore, invite proposals for demonstration projects that enable your institutions to learn how to use the machinery. Once the institutions are ready to digest large amounts of machinery, the machinery will be cheaper. 4. Build Internet civil society. Find those people in every sector of society that want to use the Internet for positive social purposes, introduce them to one another, and connect them to their counterparts in other countries around the world. Numerous organizations in other countries can help with this. 5. Electronic mail is more important than technologies such as the World Wide Web that employ sophisticated graphics. You can get most of the social benefit of the Internet with low technology that works entirely with text,
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