No Internet Please, We’re Sri Lankan!

NALAKA GUNAWARDENE on 08/29/2016

“You’re an Internet addict!”

That is what a retired professor of mass communications told me publicly at a university media conference four years ago. I was a bit taken aback as he had no clinical training to make such assertions.

The basis for his ‘diagnosis’ was simple and simplistic. I had just told my audience how I was spending increasing number of hours each day online engaged in various functions like searching, reading, blogging or tweeting. He felt that it was rather excessive (= wasted?), compared to his own total use of Internet which was limited to dealing with emails (on which he spent an average of half hour a day).

We agreed to disagree, and our audience was divided. I wish, though, the amiable don either updated his knowledge — or kept his mouth shut on matters he knew little about. (Internet addiction is not measured by the duration spent online.)

That little encounter highlighted a much larger problem: many opinion shapers and decision-makers in Lankan academia, public administration and education sector remain ill-informed and yet highly prejudiced about digital and web based technologies.

My on-going interactions with our university teachers of journalism or mass communication reveal how some of them love to bash the web and mobiles phones – even as they use these technologies themselves! 

There is no research or analysis behind such negativity – the worthies just know it’s bad for you and me!

Even worse, they sometimes cite their own dubious studies to justify this stand. One example is a ‘survey’ by a journalism professor at a leading University that suggests a link between rising divorce rates and growing popularity of Facebook in Sri Lanka! Some Sinhala language newspapers reported this ‘finding’ rather gleefully, probably because it fit their own moralistic worldview. Yet my repeated queries on that study’s sample size, methodology, assumptions and limitations went unanswered. That was two years ago.

With 30 per cent of our population now using the Internet, it is no longer a peripheral pursuit. Neither is it limited to cities or rich people.

So we urgently need more accurate insights into how society and economy are being transformed by these modern tools.

Disappointingly, many Lankan sociologists hesitate to study the socio-cultural impacts of new media – perhaps out of a (misplaced) fear of these issues being ‘too technical’? Meanwhile, IT engineers and other ‘techies’ involved in the digital infrastructure are not much concerned with societal issues arising from their work.

This disconnect has led to dangerous gaps in knowledge and policy formulation. Some are demanding ‘strict regulations’ without evidence. Public discussions about the web and digital media easily get polarized between those who uncritically embrace and others who habitually demonize anything modern or foreign.

I stand in the middle, and often get caught in their crossfire…

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