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Andries Botha answers the following question

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Question

How can the Internet as a global informational tool that criss-crosses entire continents, serve to enhance our own communities? mSTELMACKER


Answer

Andries Botha: This is a repeated question. It keeps coming up. You know I think there needs to be an appreciation that the majority of communities do not have access to any form of electronic information. And it’s going to be some time until they do have access. And very much you know the empowered, or the wealthy, or the middle classes, or the educational middle classes, really are the people who access to information technology. And so, how will it enhance our own communities? I’m not exactly sure at this particular point in time how that’s going to work. But I do believe that there’s a disparity in resources which would always render the vast majority of people outside of that net incapable and unable to have access to this. So we mustn’t just simply, you know, we mustn’t just simply assume that this great boom in global information technology is going to be a form of panacea or a solution to our problems. It certainly isn’t. There’s got to be another kind of look at simple low-tech technologies, certainly for the next hundred - fifty or a hundred years. I suppose that’s why certain communities just will never keep pace, and they’re just never gonna get ahead, or because they’re measuring, the way in which we measure value, increasingly is done in such a manner that still renders certain members of our society, the vast majority…