A framework for building an information society for selected countries in the southern African development community

Text in EnglishIn line with the World Summit on the Information Society and with the expectation that this would enable them to advance their development and improve the lives of the population, almost all the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries had developed national information and communications technologies (ICT) policies. The purpose of this doctoral research was to investigate the theoretical underpinning(s) of the national ICT policies of the SADC countries in order to develop a theoretical framework for building an information society for development. The research employed a grounded theory design, utilising the NVivo11 software as a tool to support the analysis of the national ICT policies for the selected 12 of the 15 SADC countries, as well as the interviews of five knowledgeable informants. Content analysis and open-ended interviews were the research methods applied sequentially to develop the Capacitating Theory for Building the Information Society for Development (CaTBIS-4D) for SADC countries, which is the core of the theoretical framework that this thesis proposes. The research found that building an information society continues to remain relevant for SADC countries, and its achievement is dependent on capacitating human, infrastructure and financial factors. Significantly, the research concluded that the perceived failure of the information society project within the SADC countries is due to the arcaneness or obscurity of the recognition that development and the information society mutually reinforce upon each other such that the improvement of one contributes to the advancement in the other. Based on the research findings and conclusions, this research proposes a framework that contends that to build an information society for development, it is necessary/ crucial to capacitate the human, infrastructure and financial factors by focusing on identified economic sectors and social categories within an effective governing and implementation monitoring environment. The research recommends that as the national ICT policies within SADC countries are updated and implemented, the framework proposed in this research be utilised as a basis. Furthermore, the research recommends that the broadest range of local role-players should participate in the information society development project to ensure its endurance and relevance.Information ScienceD. Litt. et Phil. (Information Science

Quantifying Information Overload in Social Media and its Impact on Social Contagions

Information overload has become an ubiquitous problem in modern society. Social media users and microbloggers receive an endless flow of information, often at a rate far higher than their cognitive abilities to process the information. In this paper, we conduct a large scale quantitative study of information overload and evaluate its impact on information dissemination in the Twitter social media site. We model social media users as information processing systems that queue incoming information according to some policies, process information from the queue at some unknown rates and decide to forward some of the incoming information to other users. We show how timestamped data about tweets received and forwarded by users can be used to uncover key properties of their queueing policies and estimate their information processing rates and limits. Such an understanding of users' information processing behaviors allows us to infer whether and to what extent users suffer from information overload. Our analysis provides empirical evidence of information processing limits for social media users and the prevalence of information overloading. The most active and popular social media users are often the ones that are overloaded. Moreover, we find that the rate at which users receive information impacts their processing behavior, including how they prioritize information from different sources, how much information they process, and how quickly they process information. Finally, the susceptibility of a social media user to social contagions depends crucially on the rate at which she receives information. An exposure to a piece of information, be it an idea, a convention or a product, is much less effective for users that receive information at higher rates, meaning they need more exposures to adopt a particular contagion.Comment: To appear at ICSWM '1

IT Innovation within the Esprit and IST Programs. Some Evidence from the UK

The European Strategic Program for Research in Information Technologies (Esprit) was created back in 1983 as a defensive response to the US and Japanese lead in Information Technologies (IT). Esprit was driven by the belief that intra-EU collaboration is an effective means to enhance the competitiveness of the European IT industry. Esprit has undergone a number of changes to facilitate collaboration and innovation. Yet, only after eighteen years of Esprit did the European Commission appreciate the need to encourage worldwide co-operation within its Fifth Framework Information Society Technologies (IST) Program. In the emerging information society and economy it is conceded that new ideas are as likely to be found outside Europe as within. This paper aims to investigate the personal networks of UK main contractors in Esprit and IST programs with regard to national boundaries and external linkages. It argues that the world of IT innovation is borderless and that Commission policies to impose boundaries to collaboration are unlikely to contribute to successful innovation in the IT industry throughout Europe.Mapping IT innovation networks; EU R&D programs; ESPRIT; IST; UK

More Income Equality or Not? An Empirical Analysis of Individuals' Preferences for Redistribution

Do people prefer a society with an extensive social welfare system with high taxes, or low taxes but lax redistributive policies? Although economists have for a long time investigated the trade-off mechanism between equity and efficiency, surprisingly little information is available about citizens’ preferences over the distribution of income in a society. The aim of this paper is reduce this shortcoming, investigating in an empirical study working with World Values Survey, what shapes individuals' preferences for income equality in Spain. We present evidence that not only traditional economic variables are relevant to be considered, but also factors such as ideology, political interest, fairness perception about others or trust in institutions, are key determinants to understand preferences towards redistribution and equality. Furthermore, we also find that regional conditions affect the citizens’ preferences for income equality. Higher income inequality leads to stronger preferences for equality. On the other hand, there is the tendency that higher social expenditures reduce the preferences for income equality.redistribution, inequality, welfare state, social capital, regional conditions

The importance of national ICT visions for information society in South East Asia

This paper addresses the question &lsquo;How necessary is a national information and communications technology (ICT) strategy/vision for the development of an information society?&rsquo; For the purpose of this paper, &lsquo;information society&rsquo; is reduced to two key dimensions: penetration of ICT, and access to government information on-line. In considering the question, the paper calls on data contained in the International Telecommunication Union&rsquo;s (ITU) case studies of e-readiness in eight South East Asian (SEA) nations (Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam). The background to the paper includes an overview of the SEA nations in terms of demographics and a discussion of the dilemma of government involvement in developing an information society in the light of the &lsquo;small government mantra&rsquo; that has dominated in recent years. National ICT strategies visions of each nation are presented, followed by on overview of their information society policies and practices and their ICT penetration. The importance of the vision is then contrasted with other factors including level of development and national income. The conclusions draw attention to the importance of a vision irrespective of level of development and resource availability. In fact, for the least developed nations, poor infrastructure may be an opportunity to leap frog to the most advanced networks supporting an information society, if the vision is relevant, powerful and broadly held.<br /

The importance of truth and sousveillance after Snowden

This article aims to provide a novel conceptual understanding of the nature of the global mass surveillance policies and practices revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in collaboration with the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers. The critical analysis and conceptual reinterpretation of state and corporate surveillance and its impact on the political agency of civil society is multidisciplinary. An intersection of surveillance studies, political philosophy, and global politics/international relations provides an overview of the policies and practices that states and corporations develop and implement in relation to information and communications technologies (ICT). Clarifying how contemporary society is global and digital, it analyzes the way in which political economies inform contemporary policies and practices of surveillance. A critical analysis the relation of political economy to neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical technologies of power, and contemporary regimes of truth, leads to posit that global mass surveillance is a technology of power deployed by a contemporary biopolitics of information and communication. A conceptual reinterpretation of Foucault’s notion of parrhesia and Mann’s notion of sousveillance leads to posit that parrhesiastic sousveillance is a socio-political and technologically-enabled modality of resistance that can resemantize contemporary politics of truth and lead towards a newborn digital agency for global(ized) civil society