Information gap

The new information and communication technologies have conferred monopoly privileges on the industrialized countries and rendered obsolete certain cherished principles concerning national sovereignty. Information about what is available in other developing countries is scarce and difficult to find, but information about the advanced countries is available daily in newspapers and on the television.

In whatever form, the data is slanted in favour of the interests represented by the vendors, which are invariably inimical to those of the developing countries. The latter are not only becoming enmeshed in the global networks of multinational corporations, but are also being automatically forced to conform to their procedures and perceptions through the adoption of their programmes and data bases. Without the resources to compete on an equal footing, importation of hardware, software, experts and data can only result in increased dependence.

The immense quantitative increase in the capacity to store, recall and transmit information has brought about a radical, qualitative change in its use. Multinational corporations and governments are the main users of computerized communications. With their global operations and subsidiaries around the world, multinational corporations are increasingly networking their computers through satellites and industrial channels to ensure centralized control and supervision of their operations. The collection, control and use of information has become an area in which governments of the industrialized countries work closely with business in their country. Any foreign control achieved through businesses headquartered in their country thus achieves full support through the government's own network of satellites, radar stations, remote sensors and early warning systems.

Least developed and developing countries have long depended on the developed nations' media. The BBC, Radio France, the Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, Radio Netherlands, Radio Moscow, and RAI, for example, have been the radio sources for information coverage on the Third World taken comprehensively, as there are of course, many highly developed national media in these countries, although limited in international scope. The neo-colonial distortion of news by these radio sources exacerbated by their official connection to their respective governments, is not much more excessive than the type of cultural propaganda, and perpetrations of misinformation by developed countries films, news agencies, publishers and periodicals.