Al-Ahram Weekly | Books Supplement (July 2002) | New challenges of the IT age

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New challenges of the IT age
Misr wa 'Asr Al-Ma'loumat (Egypt and the IT Age), Abdel-Khaleq Farouk, Cairo: Maktabat Al-Kalima, 2002. pp260

Egypt and the IT Age is not to be confused with the author's first study under the same title, published in 1991. Critics' reception of that work was relatively lukewarm, generally for reasons pertaining to the quality of the publication rather than to its substance. Not so this new publication, which represents the product of more than ten years of research and is a valuable contribution to the literature in Arabic on the relationship between national security and the IT revolution.
Perhaps the most novel feature of Abdel-Khaleq Farouk's latest work is his comparative study of the impact of the processes of economic deregulation and decentralisation on the performance of the research-and-development establishments in countries such as Russia, China and Egypt. From this analysis, Farouk develops a proposal for a scientific and technological development programme for Egypt, and it is towards this thesis that the book's 12 chapters, divided into three parts, are structured.
"Cautions against Containing the Egyptian Intellect", as Part One is titled, treats the intellectual freedom that is a precondition for successful research and development. The author focuses here on certain developments in Egyptian political and cultural life that ensued from the Open Door policy introduced in the 1970s towards the West and the US in particular. Specifically, he highlights the infiltration of Egyptian academia by Western research institutions under the rubric of joint research, a phenomenon that generated heated controversy in Egyptian political, intellectual and security circles in the early 1980s.
This infiltration gave rise to two kinds of discussion, the first on potential channels for information leaks and necessary guarantees for security of information and the second on the dangers of this infiltration for national security in the field of scientific research. In the latter regard, Farouk cautions against the chauvinistic appeals that spread at that time -- and that are still voiced by some researchers, for example those linked to the security apparatus -- that national security be tightened up, specifically by increasing surveillance of academic and scientific research.
Farouk's following chapter, "The Impact of the IT Revolution on the Concept of National Security", represents, as the title implies, an attempt to address the increasingly nebulous boundaries of what constitutes national security. Following an analysis of the impact of the IT Revolution on the national security of other countries, the author presents an in- depth survey of the activities of foreign research agencies, mostly American, between 1974 and 1987 at a single Egyptian university, the University of Alexandria. At this university during this period, some LE30 million was allocated to fund 186 studies in different areas of specialisation, many in the field of experimental health, but others of a political or sociological nature. Supervising the management of this activity was an Alexandria University professor who organised the provision of more than 950 assistant researchers to assist in the completion of the studies.
Considering that similar activities take place at other Egyptian universities on, perhaps, a similar scale, a large social and institutional base has developed with a vested interest in the perpetuation of such activities, which are largely directed by foreign funding agencies. According to Farouk, more than 5,000 professors and research assistants from Egypt's major universities have been involved in studies financed from abroad.
While the reader will draw the obvious conclusions from this phenomenon, Farouk, in the third chapter of his book entitled "Information and Democracy", looks at it somewhat differently. In what is clearly an appeal for freedom of access to information, the author opens this chapter with a discussion of governmental and non-governmental channels for the circulation of information, focusing in particular on the influence of red tape and Egyptian bureaucratic mentality on democratic access to information. His argument is forcefully driven home through an enlightening study of the bureaucratic problems and rivalries that beset a recent government venture into modern IT systems -- the labour and wage database project designed and supervised by the Ministerial Council's Centre for Information.
Having posed a number of fundamental issues -- an unrestricted research climate versus the encroachment of foreign research funding agencies, the regulatory role of security agencies in the context of the changing concept of national security, bureaucracy versus the freedom of access to information -- the author steps back in Part Two of his book to paint in the broader background. In his chapter entitled "The Historical Development of the IT Revolution", Farouk surveys the socio-intellectual roots of this revolution in the context of developing socio-political structures in Europe and the parallel development of the forces of production, which have caused radical changes in the technologies used in every field. These processes have been accompanied by powerful developments in the methods of disseminating culture, and Farouk here describes four major waves of major technological breakthrough.
The first of these waves, from 1776-1840, brought James Watt's invention of the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution in production methods. The second, from 1840 to 1890, saw astounding advances in transport and communications with the invention of the automobile, railroad and telephone and wireless communications. The following wave, from 1890 to 1940, was marked by the enhancement and massive spread of the transport and communication breakthroughs of the previous wave, as well as by a qualitative leap in communications and media through successive innovations that made possible mass access to the cinema, radio and television.
In the fourth wave, lasting from 1940 to the present, scientific advances made rapid inroads into three fields of research and development: atomic fission, computers and, through the conquest of space, satellite technology. The latter wave, Farouk adds, derived its primary impetus from the marriage between government and science contracted in World War II and strengthened through the arms race and Cold War between the world's two superpowers.
Against this background, Egypt and the IT Age explores "the conceptual framework for communications and information systems", in which Farouk identifies terms of reference -- defining information, for example, as "any fact that adds to human theoretical or practical expertise in all fields of life, knowledge and know how" -- and delineates the modes and levels of communication, from direct contact to the mass media.
From here, the author proceeds to a discussion of "information and communications systems under global polarisation", a discussion that he deftly takes beyond the dynamics of superpower rivalries in science and technology and in propaganda and information dissemination, in order to depict the characteristics of the communications and information systems developed in the capitalist and formerly socialist worlds and the role of their respective research-and- development sectors. Although the Cold War has ended, and along with it the bipolar world order, this portion of Farouk's study remains valuable not only as an historical investigation into a fundamental dynamic of the IT revolution, but also in light of its continued consequences for the 21st Century.
No less valuable is the book's subsequent chapter on "IT Economics under Globalisation". Here it appears that the same factors that govern the global economy in general -- breathtaking advances in IT technology, the rapid and colossal movements of capital and the merging and conglomeration of transnationals in all fields -- also make it extremely difficult to pin down figures for the volume of IT economic activity.
According to one source, for example, the global electronics industry was worth $827 billion in 1995, whereas another places it at $1,427 billion in 1992, and yet a third source predicts that it will reach approximately $3.5 trillion in 2002. The reason for the enormous discrepancies between these estimates, Farouk holds, is due to differences in the definition of what constitutes the electronics industry in terms of manufactures and services. But the figures, of course, are staggering regardless of how they were arrived at. More significant for Egypt is that the country enjoys no more than a very modest share in this activity in comparison with some of its neighbours, and this presents a danger to its scientific and technological development, and hence to Egyptian national security.
In view of all this, Part Three of the book, "Towards a Programme for Scientific and Technological Development", is all the more compelling. The first chapter of this part opens with a sobering account of the deterioration and chaos that beset the R&D establishment in Russia and the former Soviet republics as a result of the sudden shift to decentralisation and economic deregulation and the restructuring of what remained of State R&D agencies to accommodate what Western funding institutions termed "the reprioritisation of the Russian scientific research agenda towards peace".
Understandably, both Russia and the former Soviet republics suffered a massive brain drain, owing to the sharp decline in standards of living in these countries and to the erosion of research funds at their scientific and research centres. The beneficiaries of this brain drain were first Israel, followed by the US and Western Europe.
There are many lessons to be drawn from the post-Soviet experience, especially when this is contrasted with China's ability to contend with the pressures of globalisation and rapid domestic economic and social change within the framework of the "socialist economic market", as Chinese strategists have termed it. With such lessons in mind, Farouk turns to the situation in Egypt. Here, he observes, the R&D establishment is muddled and fragmented, largely due to the absence of a "national strategy" or a "national project" for scientific and technological development.
This state of affairs is all the more dismal in view of the unprecedented scientific and technological challenges posed by Israel, which, in two decades, has succeeded in putting into orbit three Israeli satellites launched by Israeli rockets. This, combined with Israel's nuclear arsenal and high-technology delivery and guidance systems, puts the country into a position to blackmail every Arab capital, posing a threat that Arab governments have been unable to challenge even at the level of research and development. Given its developing electronics and computer- programming industries, Israel is also poised to become a major league player in this vital economic domain in the post-Cold War era.
Egypt, by contrast, in spite of its human resources and numerous academic and research institutions, has yet to devise a research-and-development programme linked to national strategic aims. Nevertheless, Farouk presents a detailed list of 86 institutions that could serve as Egypt's "scientific first line of strategic defence", and a second list of 110 colleges (of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, engineering, agriculture, etc.) that could serve as the "second strategic scientific defence line".
Were these institutions to be properly equipped and adapted to a national research programme they would become a powerful force for scientific and technological development within the space of a few years. Towards this end, Farouk also suggests restructuring such centres within the context of an autonomous National Council for Science and Technology, which would be chaired by the president of the republic. This bold and lucidly-argued vision is the culmination of a book that will serve as a useful reference work, put together by an original and stimulating writer.
Reviewed by Nasser Zaki