Information and communications technology, commonly known as ICT, has the potential to bridge the gap between people who have knowledge and those who can make use of it, concluded participants in a roundtable discussion on the prospects of ICT in South Asia at the Lahore University of Management and Sciences (LUMS) on Wednesday.
Organised under the LUMS Research Initiative on Internet and Society, the discussion also included the research findings of LIRNEasia, an ICT policy and regulation think tank working in the Asia Pacific region.
LIRNEasia CEO Rohan Samarajiva said that their research showed that a large segment of businessmen and self-employed people used ICTs for livelihood-related purposes. He said those uses were few as compared to their larger usage, “but those instrumental few uses are of high value for those people”.
Samarajiva, who has served at key positions in the Ministry for Economic Reform, Science and Technology in Sri Lanka and the Ministry of Post and Telecom in Bangladesh, said that policymakers had not foreseen the manner in which technology was employed in current times.
He said that the use of communications technology was not limited to higher income groups. In Indonesia, he said, more than 60 per cent of all mobile phone users were smart phone users. “In this scenario it’s not hard to imagine that soon smart phones will also be used at the bottom of our social pyramid,” he said, but added that in the absence of relevant technologies, such as 3G, the possibilities were limited.
Sriganesh Lokanathan, senior research manager at LIRNEasia, said that there were not enough functional mobile phone applications. He said this was because of a gap between the developers of mobile apps and the fields in which they were used. He said that a more enabling environment could be created by tapping into the information concentrated within specific industries.
“There are a lot of myths around ICT regarding what it can and cannot do,” he said. “All I want to see is how we create that environment to make it more productive.”
“The Internet is now not on our desks but in our pockets,” said Lahore University of Management Sciences Vice Chancellor Dr Adil Najam. Soon people would be wearing it, he said, noting that Google was developing glasses and Apple developing wristwatches which could connect to the Internet.
He said that in future, mobile devices would be used in ways never thought of before, just as no one had foreseen the widespread use of mobile phones as cameras. He said that the productivity potential of mobile apps needed to be explored. “Mobile applications are often thought of as problem solvers,” he said, adding that this was often contrary to reality.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 5th, 2012.
COMMENTS (1)
Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive.
For more information, please see our Comments FAQ
This is what universities should really be doing. Not protests and bands, but thinking intellectually about where the world is heading and how we can benefit from it.
By the way isn't it "Lahore University of Management Sciences"? No 'and' in LUMS :-)