Social engineering of the Internet in developing areas

Communication among researchers is fundamental to the development of knowledge in both developed and developing areas. Internet connectivity is now a precondition for participation in research communication. Establishing reliable and efficient connectivity at reasonable bandwidth is a task that is assumed to be relatively easy and straightforward in developed countries, but is surprisingly difficult in developing areas. Our project has sought to establish connectivity for university departments and government research institutes in India, Ghana, and Kenya but has yet to experience an unqualified 'success' for a variety of institutional and relational reasons. The concept of 'reagency' is used in preference to 'development' to explain the priority of personal relations introducing significant constraints that must be faced directly to establish connectivity in developing areas. " Engineering the knowledge society " is a large and beautiful concept that resonates with—indeed, underlies—the World Summit on the Information Society. My topic today centers on the Internet in developing areas, particularly in the educational and research sectors, and the ways in which we need to be particularly attentive to the character of the connectivity initiatives that are undertaken under the rubric of the " digital divide ". If we are not careful, they will fall prey to the same problems of face-to-face interaction between donors and recipients that have characterized prior initiatives. What I want to emphasize before discussing our Louisiana Internet Project is the close correspondence between the idea of " engineering the knowledge society " and the approach generally taken by those in the field of " STS ". (The Louisiana Internet Project is sometimes referred to as the World Science Project but that is a misnomer—it is because the domain name (http://worldsci.net) is a placeholder web page for a follow up event now being planned for the Tunis phase of the Summit.) " STS " once meant " Science, Technology, and Society " and now means, for many of us in this field " Science and Technology Studies ". This is an interdisciplinary field Science), professional society (the Society for Social Studies of Science), annual meetings, handbooks, and all the other apparatus one expects from a scholarly area. The reason that I bring this up is that this change of name—one should properly say this ambiguity in the meaning of the initials " STS " —reflects a long term shift in the way that scholars have come to view technology: not as …