FORUM (Spotlight Weekly)

‘Consumers’ And Nepal's Coming Information Infrastructure

By David Bellin, Ph.D.

Many days I am afraid to open the newspaper, for fear that it will contain yet another hyperbolic piece on the "Information Superhighway". It seems these articles assume a great deal about what "the consumer" wants from the internet. Topping the newspaper lists, it seems, are always shopping at home. Sometimes this is followed up with music on demand, movies on demand, or perhaps the benefits of being diagnosed by a doctor at a distant hospital.

MacWorld recently continued in its tradition as one of the industry magazines willing to critically examine such issues. They commissioned a public opinion survey, described in the article "DeamNet: Consumers want more than TV overload from the Information Highway". And the results may

pleasantly surprise jaded readers of this newspaper.

Instead of home shopping, the consumers surveyed ask for voting in elections, searching reference books, distance learning, and obtaining school information highest on the list. Video on demand does show up tenth of the twenty-six item list, after participating in opinion polls and in electronic town halls. It is even lower than the desire to obtain government information. Gambling and video dating appear in the bottom two slots, which should surprise many of our cynics!

It is interesting to me, that the services most desired require two way interactivity, with asymetric bandwith demand. And they generally do not call for fiber: they can probably be met by ISDN based copper service. This means that a country such as Nepal can achieve the necessary infrastructure for the information superhighway in the foreseeable future. If the focus in on providing what the consumer really wants. On the other hand, the so-called "advanced cable" systems envisioned by the multinational corporate champions, demand a much more sophisticated and expensive network infrastructure.

The relevance of the poll has been challenged by some network activists, who point to statistics on newsgroup popularity as contradictory to the survey. However, this is not necessarily the case. The most popular newsgroup is news.announce.newusers, read by 12% of newsreaders. Alt.sex.stories and alt.sex follow, with news.answers coming in third. These have 8.8, 8.7. and 7.9 percentages respectively. However, newsgroups are by nature two way interactively based, with both topics and content determined by the user community. The success of the Kathmandu Post internet polls and the rapid rise of VOP indicate what internet consumers want. Video on demand and home shopping, the most commonly mentioned uses of the net by global corporate promoters, seem to me entirely the opposite. They depend on a model where the consumer is seen as a source of profit, not of creativity. In fact, such models see production by the consumer as a threat to the system. However, it is exactly this "threat" that is essential to a democracy. The network infrastructure should provide citizens the ability to run their government, not the other way around.

David Bellin is Fulbright Professor, in Software Engineering, working with Kathmandu University and living in Tangal, and the author of several computer books. His email is dbellin@acm.org and personal website is www.cs.ncat.edu/bellin/.