Digital Diaspora

Taming the Internet

Race for Cyberspace /photo TL Blair

The words - race for cyberspace - conjure up images of Black cyber organisers and communities crossing a digital chasm .Their skills and literacy are often questioned. Few books or tapes meet their needs. Tech experts say there is still a vast digital divide along lines of race, class and power.

This is the picture on three continents.

• Only 23.9 per cent of African American homes are online compared with 50.3 per cent among whites, according to US government analysis.
• Black Londoners in poor inner city areas are at least twice as likely to have no home Internet access as whites.
• Africa, with an 800 million population, has the fewest Internet users in the world.

But yet, Black communities are learning to use the planet's new instruments of communication as a social Internet for sharing information and increasingly for empowerment.

Shaping and sharing information
One little known fact is that new Black Internet users aren't just mutely absorbing the new technologies. They are shaping them.

Driving the creative boom is a compelling awareness of their digital heritage. Black pioneer computing scientists, engineers and linguists include the Nigerian prize-winning supercomputer Philip Emeagwali; the Senegalese ethnomathematician Sakir Thiam; and the African American Mark Dean, IBM Fellow and Vice President of Systems in IBM Research.

Black people in Toledo, Ohio, are adapting information technology to pull their communities back from the brink of drug abuse, poverty and despair. Wired up community centres, maths academies, hairdressing parlours, churches and family researchers are all using the Internet's vast storehouse of information for community uplift.

Philadelphia's African American Chamber of Commerce proposes wireless internet access to strengthen the city's Black neighbourhoods and economy.

In London, web masters for the Black Information Link and the 1990 Trust seek to protect and promote the interests of Black communities. The online journal, Black Britain, delivers information services that counter the negative images that are all to common in the mainstream media.

Another surprise is that new initiatives are mushrooming across Africa, too. From cyber cafés, businesses and middle class houses to villages and squatters settlements, people are adding value to their lives by using the Internet.

Having said that there is growing evidence of Black youth's success linked to computers, web sites and e-mail. From graphic design to digital music mixing and video animation, they are sharing and shaping the latest technology.

In Afro-America, "We are exposing kids to technology so that they can use their minds, and be creative," says Dale Kelly, director the YMCA's info-tech facility in Chicago. "This is a way of empowering them with the valuable skills they will need as adults and in the workforce," he told Jet the national weekly Black magazine.

This view is echoed in Britain. Arun Kundnani of the Institute of Race Relations argues that youth have a chance to show their potential as they use multimedia software and the Internet.

"Enriching our children's education is our goal," says Gina Wessie, manager of the Milky Way Internet café in Yeoville, Johannesburg.

"The limits of our digital creativity are expandable," says Prof Abdul Alkalimat of the University of Toledo African Studies department. His study group has produced the first example of "academic hip-hop". The group's CD titled Re-boot melds Internet-savvy with the angst of the ghetto. Alkalimat calls it an "improvisational metaphor" of Black spirits soaring.

Digital creativity in Africa is equally evident. Computer scientists, educators and graduate students in western Nigeria can now converse with their wired up communities using a Yoruba keyboard and grammar. Some government officials are pushing their linguists and ethnographers to digitise indigenous languages.

In these various ways, the power of Internet access and usage advances in waves of acceptance. One cyberorganiser starts a project, and others take it up and add a creative twist. Then a network develops, drawing people into debate and action.

Projects that empower
Empowerment is crucial to all these efforts. Imagine for a moment some essential ingredients for Internet-community projects that can be used to measure empowerment.

Inclusion is one. The best designed projects should bring all the key networks and resources together. These include local communities and leaders in partnership with social service agencies, businesses, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), government and international voluntary and donor agencies.

Capacity building is another ingredient. Project leaders should identify untapped talents, train cyber organisers and promote community ownership and equity in Internet enterprises.

Corporate responsibility is important, also. African Americans say that corporations should be accountable to the communities they work with, and engage with trade unions and voluntary associations in alliances for change.

Dr Joseph Okpaku of the Technology Assessment Project of the University of Ghana calls on transnational corporations (TNCs) to implement "more fully" their social commitments.

In Britain, cyber organisers demand that positive digital inclusion policies form part of e-government activities and Internet strategies.

But these Internet-community projects must be capable of measurement, not just pious hopes. The bottom line of empowerment is how many Internet social networks have been organised, communities served, schools equipped with telecentres, infant lives saved, and more jobs and gainful economic activities created.

Empowerment means also that people gain the Internet skills to participate in politics and policy formation. Central to this is the right to hold and transmit opinions and demands without interference. People must be able to seek and receive information and ideas through all media, regardless of frontiers, say cyberorganisers.

Looking ahead
The digital future of Black communities in America, Britain, and in Africa south of the Sahara is at a pivotal moment. The problem of the 21st century is the problem of creating cyberpower for progress and equality in the information age.

Of course, the threat remains that commercial and state forces will strengthen their hold on the Internet, and that profiteers,misinformers and hucksters will pollute the information highway. And no one expects that the Internet is the panacea for deep societal prejudices and divisions.

Nevertheless, the Internet has an overwhelming potential for uplifting information poor communities. And there are a number of reasons why.

• The electronic nature of the web supports people's interaction and freedom of expression in the online public sphere

• The web is global and immediate

• The Internet belongs to every one

• The web thrives on alternative and irreverent views

• Internet access cannot be prevented or stilled, without gross violation of human rights.

This potential is endorsed by eminent international humanitarians, "Our mission must be to ensure access as widely as possible. If we do not, the gulf between the haves and the have-nots will be the gulf between the technology-rich and the technology-poor," says Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations.

The vision of a social Internet fits well within the framework of a liberatory principle put forward by Britain's National Black Caucus.

"The inventions of humankind are not the property of any one race to be used to gain artificial superiority. Technology can be as much an instrument of liberation as it is of domination. Liberators must gain control of these new technologies and employ them for the proper advancement of all humanity."

This is an extract from Race for Cyberspace: How social action tames the new technologies by Thomas L Blair, to be published. For further information e-mail: tb@thechronicle.demon.co.uk