Ask what the Internet can do for Kazakhstan
Irene has an interesting post up at Neweurasia on the number of bloggers in Kazakhstan: 3450 blogs registered in Kazakhstan. Compared to China, which has 19.87 million blogs(!), the number is very low, especially when you look at it per capita. 1 in 65 Chinese has a blog, but only about 1 in 4347 Kazakhstani is a registered blogger. The post then asks why Kazakhstan is so slow. It led me to thinking about the Internet and Kazakhstan. There is an assumption generally that new technology is good and that people will naturally incline towards use of new things, if any technical barriers are sufficiently reduced. So in the interests of making Kazakhstani computer-literate and Internet-savvy in general, the government is working on a program to provide cheap, high-speed Internet cafes throughout the country, as well as trainings. The theory is that Kazakhstan doesn’t use the Internet because it is expensive, not widely available, and because they don’t know how. Reduce those barriers and everyone will be jumping on a computer to use Wikipedia and start a blog! In turn this will help convert Kazakhstan to a knowledge-based economy and the money will start pouring in!
This begs the question of whether the Internet has anything to offer Kazakhstani. We assume that technology is good and everybody needs it. However there are features of Kazakhstan culture and social life that make me wonder if Internet usage will ever reach the levels of the US, for example. Keep in mind that my evidence is all anecdotal and I am always hesitant to generalize so broadly about an entire country. That being said, one of the great benefits of the Internet is that it contains tons and tons of public information–and this information is relatively anonymous. You go to Wikipedia and you have no idea who wrote what. You go to the website of a company and you know the information there was put up by someone in the company, but who? Kazakhstani tend to get their information from friends, relations, and acquaintances. If someone gets sick, the first thing many people do is consult their friends who had similar sicknesses, not a doctor. If you want to navigate the bureaucracy, you shouldn’t go to the main office. You should call a connection in the higher management. So when I registered as a resident of Kazakhstan, I went to the city department of interior affairs, but a co-worker offered to call someone at the Ministry to get the real information. When people call our offices, they always ask my name to know who told them what. So I wonder if Kazakhstani would trust some information up on some website somewhere. How do they know that information is right, if it doesn’t come from a known and trusted source?
I remember being asked once to help another department fill out a list of universities in the US. They asked me to write down which city and state the schools were located in. I knew some of them, like Brown or Harvard or Boston University. Others, I had no idea. I told them they could look it up on the Internet. They looked confused and asked if I was sure I didn’t know which town Oklahoma State University was in. Please, can’t you help us? I said, I can find out. I’ll look it up on the Internet. “OK, never mind,” they said. And I heard them go into the next office to ask people if they knew where the schools were. The Internet, I can only assume, was not to be trusted.
Another big issue is from the provider side. Marketing skills are still very low in much of the nation and the idea that information should be made both available publicly and edited in such a way as to make sense to people is still emerging. If you go to the website of any given ministry in Kazakhstan, you will find whole laws copied and pasted from the law books up on websites. As if your average Internet user is a lawyer who can read and understand this stuff. We might also note that the laws are usually without subsequent amendments, so the information may also be out of date. To make the Internet an effective tool, information needs to be presented in a way that is accessible and useful for people. When I go to the Ministry of Interior Affairs’ website to find out how to register, I don’t need the entire law on classes of residents of Kazakhstan. I need a bullet-point list of the documents to submit, where to submit them, and how long it will take. I also need that information to be up-to-date. As long as providers are unable or unwilling to consider their audience, the Internet in Kazakhstan will not be a desirable product.
As one extreme example of the fact that people just don’t get the Internet yet, at the government-owned company where I worked, they asked me to write a short article for the website. I wrote it up and they asked me to sign it. I asked why and they told me that anything on the website needs to be signed by the Director of the company. Which, as those of you familiar with Kazakhstan bureaucracy will know, means that it needs to be signed by everyone between the writer and the Director. I asked jokingly how the President had signed the logo and the menu bars and icons and so on. They said, ‘We printed the website out so he could sign it.’ ‘The homepage?’ ‘No, every page’ !!! A website is yet another document that should be signed and stamped and approved, and the smallest changes still have to go through the whole process of approval, which can take weeks in a big enough company.
On the other side, there are many Internet savvy people in Kazakhstan. I see the Internet widely used to download MP3s and movies. Joke pages are very popular, as are news website comment boards. Photo sharing and other social networking sites are extremely popular, especially among Kazakh students studying abroad (just like American students). Skype and IM and other chat programs are also well-known. And perhaps, blogs are not for Kazakhstan just as information websites still have a long way to go. I’m not sure it’s right to count that as a bad thing. I am sure Kazakhstan will develop its own uses for the Internet or other technologies, as the people see fit.
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It is precisely to break these outdates patterns of thinking that they need to introduce the Internet and make it as widely accesible as possible. I’m not even sure I get the thrust of your argument. “It’s not perfect so let’s not use it”? But how does it get perfect if not through use? What about learning by doing? Throw the people in and let them sink or swim; it’s the best way to make sure things will get MOVING for a change. Otherwise, as with everything in our benighted part of the world, we’ll just sit around and sigh about all these new and wonderful things that we hear about but that are out of our reach — because we’re too cautions to use them. To hell with caution! We have too much of it already!
Comment by A Concerned Kazakh — 4 February 2007 @ 9:17 am
The thrust of my argument is that maybe people don’t want the Internet or they want different things from the Internet than Americans or Germans or Chinese want and maybe we should pay attention to that.
I see your point and I don’t want to say that Kazakhs don’t don’t deserve the Internet or can’t learn the Internet. Not at all. But I also don’t think one should force things on people just because it’s the new cool thing or all the western countries are doing it.
I still hold that if the Internet is to catch on in Kazakhstan it will take more than just handing it to people, it will also changing people’s views and socialization.
Thanks for the comment, I hope we get some more on this!
Comment by KZBlog — 4 February 2007 @ 3:34 pm
maybe people don’t want the Internet or they want different things from the Internet than Americans or Germans or Chinese want and maybe we should pay attention to that
There are too many maybes in this sentence. One can second-guess the usefulness of something to no end. It’s a bit like arguing which hydrant to pump water from while the house burns down. (Maybe that’s overly dramatic, but the principle is correct.) If the people don’t want the Internet, they won’t use it. If they want it for something other than Americans-Germans-what-have-you, they’ll use it for those other purposes. The beneficial effects a wired environment has on business productivity, political openness, and cultural development are enormous (see Hal Varian’s work on some of the economic aspects, for example). To me, the cost-benefit analysis is simple: will the drive to expand Internet use harm Kazakhstanis? I fail to see how. Will it help? Most likely. It’s easy to see which way the scale is tipping here.
Comment by A Concerned Kazakh — 5 February 2007 @ 10:23 pm
Okay, I have re-read your response to my first comment and I can see that I may have come on too strong here.
Let’s clarify things a little. I agree absolutely that people’s attitudes in KZ will need to change before the Internet is of any use to them. I think where we diverge is in thinking about how this change will (ought to) come about. You seem to argue that the Kazakhstanis should be left alone and allowed to grow organically into the state of mind where they’re Internet-ready. It’s a hands-off approach to the local culture and as such is very Western and PC. I understand it but do not sympathize with it. My goal is to have my country develop as quickly as possible and for that a certain amount of shock therapy, for want of a better word, it warranted. So foisting the Internet on people will likely hasten the formation of attitudes that we both agree they right now lack. To me it’s a good thing, to be aided as much as possible.
All right, that’s my two cents.
Comment by A Concerned Kazakh — 5 February 2007 @ 10:35 pm
KZ, I think the government has the right idea in striving to provide cheaper internet. You argue that people tend to only trust information from friends and families, those in the know. But the internet and blogging do a pretty good job of conforming to any model, but make the model more efficient. I.e., Kazakhs can read blogs written by people they trust. This is already happening at a very rapid rate.
Concerned Kazakh, I really think that internet use and blogging is going to expand in Kazakhstan really rapidly, especially if the government helps out a bit with the cost and infrastructure.
Comment by James — 5 February 2007 @ 11:45 pm
After a recent scandal over executive salaries in the national telecom operator, a low-cost DSL program, 128Kbps for 7Gb of traffic for about $40, was rolled out. Getting in the program is tough, and users will get told “no” several times before they get it, but it is possible.
However, the government likes bloggers about as much as it likes independent media. Which is to say, not very much.
As for government websites, the criticism that information is not clearly presented and easily accessed is on point. However, this is not a technological problem. The bureaucracy thrives on making sure that people are in as much doubt as possible over what the proper procedure is, so that any claims against them of being slow or inefficient can be deflected with accusations of failure to follow proper procedures. Until most procedures are simplified, the average Internet user will have to be a lawyer. In fact, the average Almaty blogger probably IS a lawyer; it’s the kind of office most likely to have high speed Internet readily available for research.
Comment by Narcogen — 6 February 2007 @ 10:59 am
WiMax looked a promising gateway for people with phone line problems, but here in SaryArka, at least, it will have to be forgotten - someone complained it was interfering with their own private system, so no one is allowed to sign up for it.
Combine that with our flat’s maintenance company not allowing a direct Kazakh Telecom phone line, and their seriously over-priced, under-specced ADSL packages (compared to a Kazakh Telecom package), and we’re still all stuck on dial up access around here.
To get back on topic, I think one of the major factors is age. In the same way that you can safely assume that the younger a person is, the more likely they’ll have a small smattering of English, I’ve found the older the person is, the less likely they are to consider the internet as an avenue worthy of investigation, when presented with a query/problem.
As the current batch of school & University graduates come into positions of power and/or influence, I think the internet will automatically play a larger role in the day to day business and social life here in RK.
Comment by ChrisM — 7 February 2007 @ 1:28 am