Cyber intelligence

By Samir Sobhi

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A few decades ago, the only sources of information were the radio and the newspapers. We didn't have the Internet. We didn't have cable and satellite television. Even our cinema was in black and white. That was back in the 1950s, when the movie theatres used to run a newsreel before the main show. Now we have 24- hour television, in colour, flat screens, and digital. We have hundreds of channels featuring news and entertainment. We have millions of websites, a few hundreds of which are in Arabic. And we haven't had enough! Now we're trying to "close the digital gap". In other words, we're trying to catch up with the rest of the world in cyberspace.

How much of the new information, I wonder, is getting through to the poor? Not everyone in this country is computer literate. And obviously not everyone is literate. This means that the gap in digital knowledge is not going to disappear overnight. We're a poor country, and in the digital world we're more consumers than producers. According to 2004 statistics, about 13.6 million Egyptians have trouble affording basic food. How do we expect such people to bridge the digital gap? And how do we expect them to sift through the flood of information coming their way? Anyone listening to the news now has to develop a sense of what is propaganda and what is not. Right? This in itself is no easy task.

Information technology brings opportunity as well as perplexity. You don't have to be literate to use a mobile phone. But you need to be literate to process political information. So let's worry less about cyberspace and more about what's happening to the ordinary folks on the ground. All the technology in the world will not help them if they can neither use it nor understand the information coming through it.

This week's Soapbox speaker is deputy editor- in-chief of Al-Ahram .