French version 1. THE ROLE OF SOCIO-CULTURAL VALUES
Information technologies are both a by-product of the socio-cultural environment within which they evolve as well as a substantive and strategic sub-system of that environment.
The term "information technology" is used here in its broadest sense. It covers all the technologies which concern the collection, storing, processing, use, communication, transmission and updating of any form and type of information regardless of its technical support. It therefore includes all the technologies concerning documentation, data processing, information sciences, computer technology, robotics, artificial intelligence, communication, space technologies as well as all of the technologies related to graphic and audio-visual signs.
Human civilization is undergoing a major mutation from a society of production to a society of information and knowledge. Information underpins now every human activity and the information technologies have become highly sophisticated, greatly diversified and at the same time very inter-connected. They rely heavily on qualified human resources, innovation, Research and Development (R & D) and require economies of scale and large markets.
Before the end of the century the total knowledge of mankind is likely to double. The number of titles of scientific technical publications published per year has jumped, according to the OECD, from around 10.000 in 1900 to over 100.000 in 1990. There were around 300 data banks in the world in 1980, in 1990 their number exceeded 4000 (56% in the USA, 28% in the EEC countries, 12% in Japan, and around 1% in the third world (source : French Ministry of Research and Technology).
Information is now one of the major determinants of power relations as well as of economic and social development. It is also one the principal causes of the increasing gap between the North and the South. No strategy of development is any longer conceivable without a well thought-out long-term policy in this area.
The transformations which have led to such an evolution can not be understood without taking into account the socio-cultural environment which generated them. This process is not a uniform one and varies from society to society because as we shall see below, there are no such things as real "universal" values in the scientific or socio-cultural sense.
Information technologies are contributing to a greater awareness of the importance of participation as a source of empowerment and have thus become essential ingredients of political and social communication. And yet, one can not neglect the fact that as a source of political, economic, social and cultural power, information technologies tend to privilege (within and between nations) the value systems of those who hold such powers. Hence the question of the "democratization" of information technologies raises issues related to values and more particularly to the ethics of redistribution.
We are generating knowledge, at a rate unknown before in human civilization, and yet we have so far proven that we are incapable of mastering it so as to make it more socially relevant and accessible to a larger public - this is the "human gap" in our societies. Information technologies have yet to pay attention to social change and to scientific and technological illiteracy which limits their impact and pave the way for politico-technocratic domination. New learning systems are needed to develop the mental structures capable of assimilating the fundamental changes which information technology is bringing about.
The "Nation State" and many of the institutions which it has generated in the past to improve the quality of life are all slowly becoming obsolete because of the development of new communication channels and the growing importance of informal networks of human solidarity which transcend and by-pass the governmental and inter-governmental structures based on "sovereignty". The reverse of the medal of this process is that huge financial and economic interests behind the information technologies take advantage of an absence of systemic "regulatory" mechanisms in order to by-pass societal controls.
Pending major transformations and the construction of a new order of information and communication, information technology is and will remain a source of inequality, political domination, economic supremacy, military superiority and cultural hegemony notwithstanding the great scientific and socio-economic benefits it has unevenly brought about. This is not the fault of the information technologies but of the manner in which they are used and abused. It is again an issue of the socio-cultural environment within which they evolve and the value system which underpins it. 2. DEVELOPMENT MODELS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
The economic weight of the information technologies and their by-products is already quite impressive. The turnover of the information industry represented about $ 400 billion dollars in 1985; the following year it became the largest industry in the world; 4 years from now (according to the OECD) its turnover will reach $ 1000 billion dollars; and by the end of the century it will account for over 40% of the industrial production of the world. The economic dimension of information technology is essential to the understanding of their impact on consumption models and styles of life which in turn condition the evolution of value systems and vice-versa.
The share of the third world in this industrial production
represents less than 10 % and its investments in R&D in this
sector add up to less than 3 % of the world total R&D
expenditures related to information technology. Furthermore about
80% of these activities are concentated in 10 countries (China,
India, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia,
Brazil and Mexico). This lag - unlike those of the traditional
sectors - cannot be caught up with capital investments alone
because there are no short cuts to the development of information
technologies.
The real North-South gap in the field of information technologies, if measured per capita, attains a disproportion of the order of between 1 to 30 and 1 to 40; it could reach 1 to 50 by the end of the century if no major transformations take place at the level of the international system and of the development models in the South as well as in the North.
The political, economic and cultural dependence of the third world will remain on the increase until it realizes fully the implications of the information technologies for its development and shows the political will to translate this consciousness into operational policies taking into account:
- the need for a long-term vision;
- the revision of existing extraverted models of development;
- the fundamental role of human resources;
- the basic function of R & D;
- the myth of the "transfer of technology";
- the necessity of creating functional economic groupings;
- the vital dimension of socio-cultural values;
- the transformation of mental structures through education;
- the place of human person as a means and an end of
development; and
- the importance of self-reliance and the limits of
international cooperation in this area.
The success of such objectives is unthinkable without a clear assessment of the socio-cultural environment and without a dynamic approach to values bearing in mind that for change to be effective it must start from an endogenous environment and not count on blind and automatic transpositions of development models which are the product of value systems which have emerged in other non-imitable environments.
Development used to be economically defined in terms of the capacity of absorbing capital, today one may say that it can be measured in terms of the capacity of society to generate, process, stock, update, transmit and make a rational use of information. 3. THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURAL DIVERSITY
In 1985, as guest editor of "Development", a journal published in Rome by the Society for International Development (SID), I had the occasion to sum up the problematique of linkages between information and values in the following terms,
"The dilemma which the information revolution raises can be put as follows: on the hand, no development process of any kind can take place without a heavy reliance on information and communication technologies; on the other hand, these technologies and the information which they carry are highly value-loaded, they disrupt development patterns and seriously affect the socio-cultural environment of the industrialized as well as of the developing countries.
"The only valid question which remains is whether to opt for a passive attitude and accept the invasion of these technologies and their products or to opt for an active stand and for the elaboration of strategies and policies to ensure social relevance as well as cultural coherence. There is no reason to raise the flag of 'cultural identity" as a means of protection unless one wishes to reduce culture to folklore or to maintain reserves for future ethnologists to study cultures of the past."
Diversity is nonetheless a key to survival of all species and eco-systems. Diversity with respect to human beings is best reflected in the value systems which cultures have evolved. This diversity is not in contradiction with the idealized notion of "universality" as long as this concept is culturally relativitized. Even in the area of science and technology the concept of universality has its limits.
Rene Maheu, former Director general of UNESCO, used to say that "le developpement est la science devenue culture" (development is science as a culture). Prigogine, a Nobel Prize in physics, contests the "neutrality" and "universality" of science in his famous book "The New Alliance" in which he writes,
"It is for science to recognize itself as an integral part of the culture within which it develops... We are persuaded that science will open itself to the universal when it shall cease to deny and to consider itslef foreign to the preoccupations and interrogations of scoieties and when it will be able to dialogue with men and women all cultures, having thereby learned to respect their questions." (p. 23 and 28 of the French edition)
More recently, a French Professor of Medecine and author of "Biological Organization and the Theory of Information" (1972, a new edition is coming out in 1992), said in an interview, "Nobody can pretend to refer to values which have a universal objectivity." (Le Monde, 19 november 1991, p.2)
The diversity of values and the absence of absolute universalism not only help us to understand the process whereby science and technology develop but also explain to us why such technologies can not be automatically transfered. One can "buy" a technology, in which case he simply buys a product or a gadget which is not of great value unless it is in symbiosis with the system of values of the society in which it is to be used - it does not imply that he has to copy the value systems of other societies because this is even more impossible.
This is why the "transfer of technology" is a myth unless one is capable of unpackaging and repackaging (with an added endogenous value) a given technology. Access to any technology requires a minimal innovative input. Values come are the "enzymes" of innovation and development; they also give meaning and a sense of purpose to a technology because they are much more concerned with the "know why" and "know what for?" than with the "know how".
Not only the "transfer of technology" is a myth, it is also an "illusion" because the industrially advanced countries have no intention of making available the "high" technologies to the developing world. This is an official position of the EEC and of North America. Severe controls, which are becoming more and more strict, are there to prevent such transfers due to military considerations.
When one understands the growing inter-connectedness between the advanced technologies, on the one hand, and the difficulty, on the other hand, of distinguishing between civilian and military applications of information technologies such as those which serve for teledetection, weather monitoring, satellite communication, radar control ... not to speak of nuclear and biological technologies, then the illusion of any "transfer" becomes blinding.
This willl remain so as long as the North will continue to regard the South as a mere market for the dumping of its obsolete technologies. The South has no choice but to develop these technologies on its own through a greater reliance on South-South cooperation. The ironical aspect of it all is that information technology, like other high technologies, is a child of military research and could not survive without defense funds.
There are numerous indices that ideological, political and economic issues are less and less likely, in the future, to generate global conflicts; whereas lack of cultural communication and tolerance will endanger peace in the years to come. Cultural values have made their entry into the world of economics and political science and can no longer be neglected in strategic studies and peace research.
Peace and survival call for a solidarity in space : participation; and a solidarity in time : anticipation. The major obstacles to the satisfaction of these conditions are : (a) the great economic disparities to be found within and between countries and the ensuing social inequality; (b) the hegemony over the last three hundred years of the "Western" system of socio cultural values; and (c) maladapted learning systems, archaic mental structures and unbalanced communication channels.
The combined effect of these obstacles is the promotion of "reductionism" at a time when the challenges facing humanity are a growing "complexity", the need for greater "diversity", and the promotion of "pluralistic" institutions and "alternative" solutions. In international relations this reductionism is quite apparent when one sees how the concept of "universality" becomes, through ethnocentrism, limited if not equivalent to "Western" values. The Japanese model of development is beginning to throw some light on the errors of such reductions and over simplifications.
The introduction to a 1988 Report by the NIRA (Japanese
Institute for Research Advancement) entitled : "Research
Output - Agenda for Japan in the 1990's" emphasizes the
concept of the "Age of Diverse Civilizations",
"It has become necessary to look at the world system differently, to put aside a long sustained view of world order based on stratification under American rule. The new world order may be called the "Age of Diverse Civilizations", based on the emergence of an age with multiple co-existing civilizations. Although Westernization led to progress on a worldwide basis in terms of material civilization, Japan's modernization served as evidence that modernization is different from westernization.. In order to accurately ascertain the world system, therefore, it is now necessary to examine closely the inner structure of the multipola-rized world... The world is perhaps searching for the possibility of developing pluralistic civilizations in a multipolar world... to deal with its tasks Japan must expand both the time and space dimensions of the concept of self-interest or self-benefit."
Only two days ago, the economic and financial analyst of the French newspaper "Le Monde" wrote the following words,
"On n'insistera jamais assez sur la motivation profonde des Japonais. S'ils se sont lancés avec l'enthousiasme que l'on sait dans l'expansion economique, c'est pour se payer le luxe de rester japonais. Le contraire de l'américanisation announcée par les analystes superficiels."
Paul Fabra, "LE MONDE", 3 december 1991
For how many years has the West lived with the idea that Japan was simply a good copy-maker not being ready to accept that modern scientific and technological development could emerge from other value systems than its own ?
In conclusion, let me refer to the famous remark of Gregory BATESON about information in which he says that,
"it is the difference which makes the difference".
The greatest challenge facing the use which is made of information technologies is how to preserve diversity - a condition of survival in general and of information in particular. It is how to prevent these technologies from becoming a new weapon for a cultural hegemony which the vast majority of human societies have never accepted in the past and are even less likely to accept in the future. War and peace today are simply about the "difference that makes the difference".
© 
Genève 1996. Webeditor