Cyber Utopia? Only the Usual Candidates Need Apply

Among the hype for everything online it is easy to forget that 80 per cent of the population of the world has never even used a tele­phone, let alone sent an email message.

To cyber Utopians, the next industrial revolution — the fusion of computers and communications in the internet — will bring huge rewards in productivity gains and higher growth. The internet is the fastest-growing communication tool invented.

The rapid spread of the new technology owes much to the tre­mendous advances made in computing power over the past decade, combined with falling costs. If the motor industry had enjoyed the kind of productivity growth the computer industry has experienced since 1990, a car would cost only about $3 today.

But the benefits of this revolution are in danger of being cap­tured by the rich, according to the UN human development report, leaving the poor further marginalised. Most internet users live in the West, and 30 per cent have a university degree. The United States has more computers than the rest of the world combined.

When it comes to logging on, the disparities are even more strik­ing. The industrialised countries, with only 15 per cent of the world's population, contain 88 per cent of all internet users. South Asia, home to a fifth of the world population, has less than 1 per cent of the internet users.

Even if the telecommunications systems were in place, without literacy and basic computer skills most of the world's poor would still be excluded. In Benin, for example, more than 60 per cent of the population is illiterate. Even if they could read, they would dis­cover that four-fifths of websites are in English, a language under­stood by only one in 10 people in the world.

" The typical internet user, worldwide is male, under 35 years old, with a university education and high income, urban-based and Eng­lish-speaking — a member of a very elite minority, " says the UN.

The widening global gap between haves and have-nots is turning into a division between know and know-nots, the UN says. In a world where wealth is increasingly dependent on developing ideas, those left out of technological loop are likely to fall further and fur­ther behind. Knowledge is the new asset. More than half the annual output of the West comes from knowledge-based industries.

Market forces alone will not solve these imbalances. " The market alone will make global citizens only of those who can afford it, " the UN says.

To close the knowledge gap the first step is to tackle the educa­tion deficit in the third world, where in 24 countries a fifth of pri­mary school age children are not in education.