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Research Questions
This diagnosis raises several critical research questions which will guide the investigations of the Junior Research Group. A first set of questions seeks to find out where today’s so-called ‘digital divide’ comes from and – eventually – where it is going. As already established, a number of different indicators point at the continued existence of pronounced asymmetries in global connectivity among world regions.
- How do these asymmetries relate to the structural centre-periphery dichotomy that manifested itself in the global telegraph network of the nineteenth century?
- And how asymmetrical has the nineteenth-century web really been? Does the centre-periphery dichotomy really hold, if we apply a more refine network analysis approach?
- Are potential structural similarities mere coincidence or do they hint at an important influence of path-dependence in the evolution of the modern telecommunication network? What role do changes and ruptures play in this respect?
- And if path-dependence has really shaped modern global networks, in which spheres has it been present and how could it unfold its conserving potential despite the dynamizing and levelling tendencies of modern information technology?
- Figure 1: Global Telegraph Network and Communication Times 1900
Source: Roland Wenzlhuemer
Essentially, these questions seek to establish how modern informational asymmetries came into being in the first place and to what extent they build on earlier uneven global patterns of information flow. The second set of guiding questions tackles the concrete consequences of uneven informational development.
- Did and do informationally less developed regions automatically find themselves at the receiving end of transcultural flows? What exactly did it mean for a region to stand at the centre or at the fringes of global communication in the nineteenth century?
- How did differing information access shape the perceptions, horizons and opportunities of local populations?
- Can we find evidence for processes of political and maybe even cultural centralization? And if so, have there been counterstrategies in order to preserve the influence and leeway of agents in the periphery?
- In what ways have agents in non-information societies adopted and adapted European information technologies to their own ends?
The historical context, in which some of these questions will be asked, can serve as a laboratory in order to assess cultural, social and economic consequences of asymmetrical information flow.
Building on the implications of these questions, the Junior Research Group starts at the following initial hypotheses:
- Global telegraphic communication established a new pattern of information flows and, thereby, altered the structural conditions of transcultural interaction between South Asia and Europe.
- Structurally, the new network reflected an integration gap between the centre and the periphery and cemented an asymmetrical pattern of information flow.
- Path-dependence played a shaping role in the evolution of modern information asymmetries and helped to conserve earlier flow patterns.
- Path-dependence operates partially through technological continuity and partially through continuities in the global division of labour.
- The position of a certain place or node in a network impacts significantly on the horizons and opportunities of the people living in this particular place.
- People in less-centrally positioned places have developed strategies and functional equivalents to compensate this ‘informational’ disadvantage.
- European-developed information technology is used in essentially different ways and to different ends in non-information societies.
- Therefore, structural asymmetries do not necessarily translate themselves into asymmetries in processes of cultural transfers.
