Pragmatic Fragility of Information Technology in Latin America: Case studies

Information technologies (IT) have a substantively differential effect in developed countries than in less developed countries. This is illustrated through case studies of public and private institutions from Venezuela, Brazil, and Panama. The case method is used because it provides a richer understanding of the phenomenon and because there are factors structurally linked to the lesser development that both hinder a quantitative analysis and obstruct a proper managerial analysis that would permit a similar profiting from the technology. An analysis of the commonalities in the cases shows how the theoretical concepts of pragmatic, semantic, and syntactic dimension of information can be used to conceptualize why less developed countries cannot benefit from the use of IT in the same way as developed countries do. Thus, we conclude that due to the pragmatic fragility present in less developed countries, advanced IT will not reduce but increase the digital divide.