Internet as freedom – does the internet enhance the freedoms people enjoy?

Abstract

This study evaluates the capacity of the Internet to enhance development in emerging regions through Sen's freedom perspective. The paper begins with a qualitative evaluation of the Internet's potential as a freedom enhancer through examples and literature study. It then presents a quantitative evaluation based on web access logs obtained from the AirJaldi network in rural India. We categorize the data based on Sen's freedoms to contribute an information and communication technology-freedom taxonomy and note the challenges in doing so. The usage logs indicate that indeed users may have experienced enhancement in all of Sen's freedom categories; yet our qualitative evaluation suggests there is much unexploited potential. We conclude that it is important to look at the Internet-based Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD) projects through Sen's freedom lens and call for such projects to be evaluated based on these broad freedom goals rather than on focused development goals.

Keywords:

• ICTD impact evaluation
• adoption and diffusion of IT and rate of uptake
• Internet
• social choice theory
• Sen

Notes

Annika Andersson is the accepting Guest Editor for this article.

Our work is primarily based on Sen's Development as freedom. Therefore, when we relate to Sen's view, we consistently refer to this reference.

Ullrich gives the example of the car that requires physical infrastructure from roads to ambulance service and even lawyers, as well as the psychosocial infrastructure which requires from people to confront all the installations, facilities, and institutions from driving lessons, training children to cross the street till an expert and diligent industrial worker who also need more schooling and disciplining … (Sachs, 1992, p. 285).

AirJaldi will be discussed in Section 3.1. For details about the technology, see Ben-David, Vallentin, Fowler & Brewer, 2010.

Source: The OpenNet Initiative; A collaborative partnership with the University of Toronto, Harvard Law School, the Cambridge Security Program, and the Oxford Internet Institute (OpenNet Initiative, 2012).

Tibetan Government in Exile's official website: http://www.tibet.net/ – though without a root domain like .tb. In the recent opening of the new root domain .asia, AirJaldi was the first to register Tibet.asia; yet after a short legal challenge, it was awarded to Beijing.

A Multi-user virtual world: http://www.secondlife.com/ (Linden Research, Inc., 2012).

BusinessWeek cover article “Virtual World, Real Money” published on 26 November 2006 and Hof's (2006) article in that issue, as well as Roger Parloff's (2005) article in Fortune Magazine: “From Megs to Riches”.

A search on http://www.vworker.com on 10 January 2011: Search Coders – Result (Exhedra Solutions, Inc., 2012).

An example from the USA: http://www.maplight.org/ illuminating the connection between political campaign donations and legislative votes in the US Congress (MapLight, 2012).

An example from India: the eChoupals give farmers economic transparency by better access to market prices (Kumar, 2004).

We note that the much smaller data set given by Du et al. could get skewed easily – for example, by setting the home page of the browser to a search engine, especially, in a highly multi-user environment where the browser gets re-launched often.

ibibo.com's mission is to “To empower Indians to create, share and discover people and information”, ibibo.

Objectives Miss Tibet. http://www.misstibet.com/aboutus/. (Miss Tibet, 2012).

We speculate that this website may be set as the home page for some of the foreign-exchange offices around Dharamsala – somewhat explaining the high hit rate.

This site has advertisements that are linked from the popular indianrail.gov.in; therefore, the number of hits should be similar (or a bit less assuming interrupted page loads).