Featured Fellow - Mike Best
This is the second of a series of posts on Berkman's fellows. The Berkman Center is home to approximately thirty fellows, all of whom focus their time and energy on issues concerning the Internet, including Internet governance, privacy concerns, intellectual property rights, antitrust issues, electronic commerce, the role of new media and journalism proper, and digital media.
Michael Best is a fellow at the Berkman Center where he focuses on the use of computes and communication technologies in social and economic development. Mike is also a jointly appointed Visiting Assistant Professor at the Georgia Tech Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and College of Computing. A Ph.D. graduate from the MIT Media Lab, Mike serves as Editor-in-Chief of Information Technologies and International Development, an MIT publication, and also frequently consults on behalf of the World Bank, ITU, and USAID.
You can check out Mike's bio here. Below is a Q&A with Mike about his work conducted by Berkman intern Alex Berengaut.
Question: What have you been working on recently?
Mike: I am interested in the internet in low-income countries, especially in Africa and South Asia. I’ve been trying to explore the way the internet may or may not go towards social and economic development in those environments.
Recently I’ve been working on some new projects: on the role of the internet in post-conflict national peace and reconciliation. For instance, I am interested in the question of whether the net can be an instrument for progress in the post-genocidal truth and reconciliation activities in Rwanda.
Q: When you say the internet can play a role in post-conflict societies, do you mean as an adjunct to formal legal proceedings such as war crimes trials? Or as more of a grassroots instrument for interpersonal reconciliation?
Mike: Both. So for instance one thing that might seem less profound, but might have much of an impact is how do you manage document storage, retrieval, and archiving in a truth and reconciliation (or more generally justice system) post-conflict. So that might be an almost administrative function the Internet can have.
But, what you describe as grassroots is also an important role the Internet can play. One thing we know about the process of national reconciliation is that there is a re-identification that takes place amongst the actors within the civil conflict. Their identities have to be reconsidered and redefined in the post-civil war era. That process has to essentially be a grassroots process -- a process of connections, of community -- and it is clear that the Net could or should play a positive role in that process.
Q: As a practical matter – an engineering matter – what are some of the greatest obstacles to actual provision of internet in these countries such as Rwanda or other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa?
Mike: As purely engineering matter, that is in some ways the easy part. If you mean merely getting the bits to rural Rwanda, it is simply a matter of laying a reasonable fiber backbone through a small (although geographically challenging) country. Then, the next step is to leverage a lot of state-of-the-art terrestrial wireless technologies – WiMax and others.
For instance, there is a lot of activity right now in Rwanda to provide internet through terrestrial microwave and fiber networks.
What becomes difficult is developing human capacity and the institutional structures to sustain use of those bits over time in ways that are empowering and important to these communities throughout Rwanda.
Q: Do you find that when access is provided that the people who are able to utilize it are already relatively advantaged within the country? For example, whether the literacy rates in impoverished and rural parts of the country are even high enough to allow the people living there to benefit from the potentially valuable role the Internet can play in truth and reconciliation?
Mike: That is actually something I’ve studied quite closely in a number of countries, although not quite yet in Rwanda – despite it being an important question there. I might add parenthetically that the projects we are working on at the moment in rural Rwanda deal with coffee growers. These are communities of folks who are often illiterate or semi-literate, who are economically disadvantaged relative to other members of their communities, and so there are these challenges in that context.
The place I’ve studied your question most closely is in India. The short answer is that you are right: the first adopters of any new technology in a developing country tend be advantaged in terms of economics, education, and -- in the case of India -- caste status.
This does of course not mean that this is an acceptable model for the adoption of the Internet – or any technology for that matter – by a developing country. In fact, it is the reason why our interventions strive explicitly to be pro-women, pro-poor, and pro-scheduled communities (meaning castes that Gandhi would have called the ‘children of god’ and that used to be called the ‘untouchables.' Through these targeted interventions we have been able to make sure that the introduction of the Internet did not only benefit elites.
For example, in the case of scheduled communities in India, one great way to make sure that they are not excluded from community Internet access centers is to physically place those access centers in the hamlets occupied by the scheduled communities.
Q: In that vein, I noticed your involvement in the Sustainable Access in Rural India project. Could you talk a little about the project and how you got involved in it?
Mike: Ah, that’s a rather old project. When I mentioned these gender projects and scheduled community internet access projects, that is something that came out of the SARI project.
It was started in 2000, I believe, by Colin Maclay, myself, a colleague from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and a colleague from McKinsey. We aimed to deploy the Internet at these community centers – rural village community centers – in the state of Tamil Nadu in Southern India. At its peak we had over a hundred internet facilities in over fifty villages, and it was an extraordinary opportunity for me – on the research side – to discover how to get women to use it, how they’ll use it, how to get the politicians to agree, and what to do when they don’t agree. It was a long-term study over many years.
We were proximally interested in how to make these facilities financially self-sustaining. Ultimately, we were interested in the question of whether the placement of these centers would lead to economic growth and political empowerment.
Q: How did you originally become interested in this area – essentially the intersection of internet engineering and economic development?
Mike: I’m trained as an engineer, and spent quite a lot of my early career doing standard engineering computer science stuff. I worked at a supercomputer company here in Cambridge called Thinking Machines, and there it was the standard engineering questions: how do you make it smaller, faster, cheaper, whizzier. I found that it was intellectually deeply challenging, but emotionally (or philosophically) only got me to a point. I think I’ve always had a social motivation, and have always been interested in issues of poverty, economic development, and social justice.
I’ve also always had a bit of a travel bug, and so when the opportunities began to come when I was a graduate student at MIT to study these engineering issues under the rubric of development (in places like Thailand or Ghana) it brought together those three threads of intellectual fascination, social motivation, and a real pleasure in traveling the globe!
Q: In some recent work you’ve published, you suggest that there is a rather strong correlative relationship between a country’s extent of internet penetration and its level of democratization. Could you talk a little about the study? Do you draw any policy lessons from its conclusions?
Mike: So certainly since the dawn of the internet as a de-commercialized network of networks, but even going back to earlier communication networks (such as voice telephony, or telegraphy, or satellite communications), there has always been this question: does the diffusion of these communication networks within a country lead to increased political and civil liberties?
This question has generally been put forward with the assumption that the answer is ‘yes.’ Especially with the internet. The internet was designed by a bunch of libertarian-minded democracy advocates. Even the technologists themselves saw the network as having a democratizing effect. All voices were to be equal: the net could reach all people in a non-discriminatory fashion and serve as a platform for political and civil discourse. Perhaps coming out of those engineering philosophies and the personal politics of these early technologists, there was a great deal of cyber-euphoria that the net would be this powerful instrument for political development and result in a rise of civil and political liberties globally.
The question I’ve been trying to answer with some students is, “okay, fine, when the rubber has met the road has the net in fact gone towards a global rise in civil and political liberties?”
In trying to make some modest steps towards answering that question, we did some basic statistical analysis on global datasets of metrics of civil and political liberties and correlating that with internet diffusion metrics. The basic finding – this actually echoes different scholars who have argued this point at a qualitative level – is that the net is great in developing political liberties in countries that are in the middle-ground in terms of their democratic development. Latin America, for instance, has many emerging democracies and the net has shown itself to be a powerful instrument in those types of contexts.
Where the statistical analysis and qualitative writings agree is that in strongly authoritarian regimes, the net has yet to demonstrate significant impact on political or civil liberties. In strongly democratic countries that is also true; in the U.S. the net has not demonstrated a fundamental shift in civil or political discourse or political activities. (Although there have been examples where it has – such as the Howard Dean campaign or Moveon.org).
In highly authoritarian regimes like Burma, the net has had a similarly weak (or even weaker) impact.
Q: To what degree would you attribute the failure of the net in countries such as Burma to authoritarian regime success in internet filtering and other technical means of restriction? To what degree would you attribute it to non-technical government restrictions?
Mike: Burma does not do internet filtering with much sophistication that I am aware of. Burma has a much more powerful approach to internet censorship which is merely to deny physical access to the net to anyone but high-party cadre. Very effective solution, and it does not require a lot of technical sophistication. Just means that you don’t give the bits to anyone but the chosen few.
That has probably shown itself to be the most effective way. Burma does it well, Cuba does it well, and a few other regimes. Note that this is in comparison to a place like China, where access is common across all strata of the societies, but the government has implemented quite a sophisticated technical regime of internet filtering.
Q: To take you for a minute back to your earlier days as a pure engineer, I was very interested to note that you’ve done some work in the area of ‘memetics.’ I wonder if you could explain a little what the idea is and perhaps use this opportunity to mention a meme or two that you think deserves greater diffusion than it currently enjoys.
Mike: Memetics is an evolutionary theoretic consideration of the spread of ideas. It thinks of the spread of ideas the way a Darwinian thinks of the spread of traits of biological organisms. Feathered wings are good amongst all these many birds, for example, and therefore that trait has enjoyed success. Similarly, the wheel is an engineering meme that is quite effective in transport and motive energy and so it has also enjoyed considerable success in the space of ideas. So the study of memetics is trying to put a bit of science to understanding that process.
Q: Any new projects or hints at what you are going to be doing in the future?
Mike: Well definitely I hope this work on national reconciliation is going to be moving forward in the future.
I am also ramping up my acitivies in Africa, and currently have projects in Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Mozambique. Some of that is at a national public policy level and some of it is at a village level – with small interventions in some specific communities.
Another thing that I’m excited about that I’m working on this term and hope to continue is integrating the epistemic community that works on HCI (“human computer interaction”) and the community working on ICT for D (Information and Communication Technologies for International Development). This is something that if you look at the intersection of those two programs there is very little work.
For example, people who think about putting the internet in Rwanda view the problem as completed if a windows-running PC using English is receiving bits from the Net. The modes of interaction between user and computer are not considered, and it would be useful to analyze interface metaphors that are effective and empowering in given contexts. So I’ve been working with some HCI students who understand how you might rethink the Windows metaphor in rural Rwanda where perhaps the desktop metaphor is powerless because the community might not value desks.
Family-based agriculture-based metaphors might be more suitable in these environments. So this is another area I hope to make a contribution in – the intersection of HCI and ICT for D.