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SPEAKING
FREELY
Perfect knowledge, imperfect
communication
By Kavita Philip
and Usha Zacharias
Speaking Freely
is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest
writers to have their say. Please click here
if you are interested in
contributing.
Twenty-first-century
science is pretty impressive. The Honolulu-based
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) can pick up an earthquake or tsunami half a
world away. The Vienna-based Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty Organization's network of seismic and
hydroacoustic monitoring stations can pick up a
rumble or tremor deep underground, even while its
human managers are eating Christmas pudding.
Yes, modern science can know things with
remarkable accuracy from amazing range: "They
could tell exactly where it [the earthquake]
occurred instantly, and they probably knew right
away there was a big tsunami generated by this, an
hour or two before these waves hit Sri Lanka,"
reflected scientist John Clague. It's just bad
luck that all those people died; I guess
21st-century communications aren't as impressive
as our science.
Oh wait, we just had a
communications revolution: information can travel
faster and to more remote places in the world than
ever before, and we can have instantaneous visual
and audio contact with almost any place on Earth,
from our homes, cars, and offices. You can buy a
plane ticket online while listening to the latest
download on your iPod as you get cell phone
customer service from an office 10 time zones
away. Well, maybe it's the tragedy of the Third
World, then - they don't have advanced
technological systems because they can't afford to
pay for them.
Oh, but hang on again -
South and Southeast Asia have such sophisticated
technological capabilities that the default image
of a Silicon Valley software engineer is a South
Asian face, and the instantaneous, day-and-night,
weekday-and-holiday communications of these
regions undergirds their legendary success at
using global communications technology ingeniously
and efficiently. What's odd about the picture that
emerged from US tsunami news in the first weeks of
2005?
Here is the standard narrative:
Nature strikes without warning, randomly, and for
no reason. States and individuals are powerless in
front of the awesome forces of nature - indeed, it
is these prodigious shows of force through which
nature reminds us of our helplessness, and of the
primitive roots of our nature-worship. So Larry
King invites theologians and monks to help us find
out whether God was in the tsunami; hard-working
families squeeze contributions from their strained
holiday budgets; the Indian deputy prime minister
donates a month's salary toward relief efforts;
news anchors express heartfelt hope that the gales
of ethnic hatred in Indonesia and Sri Lanka will
be washed clean by the waves; US Marines work hard
at raising their reputation for kindness and
generosity; and Internet petitions circulate for
Third World states to yield to humanitarian
interventions. Well-meaning commentators wring
their hands in genuine sympathy, but the default
assumption is that when nature strikes, the
calculus of death is random; the devastation
cutting across caste and class boundaries. All we
can do in this narrative is pick up the pieces and
respond with individual acts of generosity.
Media coverage of the tsunami in the US
was constant and comprehensive in the first weeks
of the new year. If there were gaps in their
explanations, many put it down to the partial
knowledge the Western public had of the developing
world. We pause here to ponder these gaps: what
produces them, how do they fit together, and how
do they forestall more comprehensive and radical
thinking about science and natural disasters?
Before we talk about the logic of the
silences in this picture, let us acknowledge that,
indeed, we have points of sympathy with the
standard narrative. There was genuine empathy
around the world. Almost as if relieved to prove
the Western world had more to offer the developing
world than shock and awe, mainstream and
progressive alike stretched out their hands and
shared what they could in gestures that make us
remember what a caring world might look like.
Most Americans had voted in November 2004
for President George W Bush, ostensibly
legitimating the devastation of Afghanistan, the
violence of Abu Ghraib, and the bombing of Iraq -
how unthinkably cynical and heartless must they
be, many of us had wondered around the world. But
now, it appeared, red and blue states were united
in their desire to reach out to the victims of a
natural disaster. Mother Nature was right on cue:
awesome and terrifying in her rage, mirroring the
rage and anger that simmered around the world, but
igniting global care and all-encompassing love in
her wake - balm for a painfully traumatized world.
As Anderson Cooper (conspicuously more
well-groomed in the midst of calamity than his
British Broadcasting Corporation counterparts)
traveled through South Asia or Mike Chinoy
reported from Thailand, American viewers become
acquainted with poor coastal dwellers on the other
side of the world, and bonds of kinship grow
between the some of the most privileged and some
of the most marginalized people in the world.
Yet this unprecedented global meltdown of
cultural boundaries is only part of the story. The
tsunami disaster reveals the structural unevenness
in technological access and international
communication in the age of neo-liberal economic
planning and development. It was neither random
coincidence nor simple conspiracy that, in an age
of staggeringly accurate science and instantaneous
communication, information available to Pacific
data stations failed to reach the victims of the
tsunami. It was not simply well-intentioned
ignorance about the developing world that shaped
US news reports. And it was not simply Third World
inefficiency that shaped the failure to
communicate information from capital to coast on
December 26, 2004.
There are some insights
available through an analysis of the politics of
aid, by observing the geopolitical jockeying that
occurred in the wake of the tsunami. We must
recognize, for instance, the significance of
India's refusal of international military
assistance; the relationship of separatist
movements to their states and the relations of the
latter to the US military; the presence of US
battleships in Southeast Asia; and the regional
competition among emerging powers to control the
security of the Indian Ocean.
But in
addition, there is a question we rarely ask,
because we are accustomed to looking at the social
context of geopolitics but unaccustomed to asking
about the social construction of science and
nature. Are natural disasters truly random in
their creation, unpredictable in their progress,
and socially neutral in their effects? Is science
simply sophisticated in its theorizations, but
inherently inaccurate in its application? Why do
we turn our eyes heavenward when trying to come to
terms with natural disaster, rather than turning
our eyes to the material conditions that shape
nature's disastrous effects on humans?
Perfect knowledge, imperfect
communication
We are accustomed to
analyzing economics not only for the mathematical
elegance of its theories but also for its efficacy
in addressing poverty and inequality. We are adept
at holding politicians, artists and teachers
accountable to their constituencies. But somehow,
when we speak of science, we experience awe at its
abstract elegance and technological accuracy, and
put down its failings to "human error". What is it
about science that encourages us to define its
errors as only "human", suggesting that its
successes transcend the frailties of humanity? Why
is it that we can distinguish between bourgeois
economics and radical political economy, between
conservative and progressive art, but not between
different political modes of scientific
theorization and practice? Science as a mode of
knowledge is like any other intellectual or
cultural practice: when defined by the parameters
of a neo-liberal world, what takes shape is a
bourgeois militarized discipline, not a universal
one.
By allowing this form of science to
be named transcendent and universal, we are ceding
the space of science to a militarized neo-liberal
establishment. The unevenness in access to
scientific knowledge is not an aberration in the
structure of universal knowledge, but an embedded,
natural component of bourgeois science. If we
structure scientific practice according to
militarized neo-liberal standards, we cannot be
surprised that access and benefits will accrue
only to a transnational elite, and not, even in
life-threatening emergencies avertable by simple
communicative strategies, to those who have
already been defined as marginal to the global
economy.
Let us revisit a set of seemingly
disparate, yet interlinked information bits: take
the fact that the Washington Post reported that
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization,
whose global ear is tuned in to nuclear explosions
anywhere and has instruments in the Indian Ocean,
had no chance to alert governments because its
offices were closed for the holidays. Add to this
the words of Charles McCreery, director of the
NOAA's center in Honolulu, who said that a
15-minute walk inland was all that was needed to
get away from a tsunami. Note that the NOAA, which
had recorded the undersea quake in Sumatra as soon
as it happened at 2:59pm Hawaii time, sent out
tsunami warnings to member nations 15 minutes
later, at 3:14pm - via e-mail (not by contacting
emergency operations staff with access to the
coasts, nor by contacting international press with
access to broadcast networks).
"We tried
to do what we could," McCreery said. "We don't
have contacts in our address book for anybody in
that part of the world." If all these pieces of
information seem to make sense, now take into
account that a British newspaper, The Independent,
reported that Diego Garcia, the British-owned
island in the Indian Ocean and home of a US base
for B2 bombers, had been forewarned by the Pacific
tsunami-warning system. It adds up: military
warning systems have a priority over communication
systems that can save lives; information protocols
are so strict that, even in the case of
emergencies that threaten thousands of lives,
information cannot breach security walls, even if
it's just to tell people to take a 15-minute walk.
A review of international communication
processes will not address the structural
unevenness in scientific knowledge, unless it
understands the ways in which knowledge always
appears in forms already shaped by the politics
and culture around it. The Pacific Ocean
seismologists are not individually to blame, any
more than the under-funded Indian geophyscial
systems are, for the tragic loss of life - we are
all to blame, if we allow a universalized science
and technology to be defined by the default
cultural politics of the neo-liberal economy.
Information economy, uninformed
politics
In 1980, the world's decolonized
nations got the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization to endorse a
critique of the global information economy, which
became known as the New World Information and
Communication Order (NWICO). The NWICO critiqued
the one-way information flow from West to East
that enabled capitalist bloc propaganda during the
Cold War. It also critiqued the dominant images of
the decolonized world that seemed to define it in
the First World: helpless poverty, political
unrest and natural disaster, all appearing, in
these narratives, to occur spontaneously, or as
being inherent to Southern nations' character.
Images of the 2004 tsunami, appearing along with
news of Iraqi resistance and US missions of
"freedom and democracy", remap Asia onto a visual
regime that reappears, not as farce, but as
tragedy. A new Asia that affirms every old
stereotype of the First World emerges in the US
media, complete with inept governments, docile
suffering populations, political insurgencies, and
catastrophic natural disaster. When assisted by a
benevolent West, poverty-stricken natives are able
to tap into their inherently ennobling innocence,
resilience and flexibility, but only when washed
clean of their inherent tribal animosities with a
dose of Christianity.
As we critique the
naturalization of a helpless Asia in global media
images, we must enlarge our critique to include
not merely the colonial legacy of
"underdevelopment", but also the present
unevenness of the neo-liberal economic and
political world order. The images of the refugee
camps in Chennai that now find their way into
prime-time US television must not eclipse the fact
that India actively plunged into the
"informatization route" to development beginning
with Rajiv Gandhi and Sam Pitroda. Investing
heavily in communication technology from the late
1980s, India signed on global information
technology agreements that clearly benefited only
its upper classes. The information crisis that
created India's unpreparedness for the tsunami was
neither natural nor inevitable. As an Indian
Express story revealed, the Indian Meteorological
Department (IMD) in Port Blair, Andamans, had only
an old analog system rather than a digital one; it
printed out a blank piece of paper because the
scale of the earthquake and its aftershocks
exceeded the range of its calibration. Why had a
nation which takes pride in its cyber czars and
cyber "coolies" not updated the Andamans
geophysical equipment?
Even more ironic,
the first IMD communique went to the residence of
former science and technology minister Murli
Manohar Joshi, rather than his successor, Kapil
Sibal. No coastal warning was issued. The Indian
state and information technology multinationals
make their choices, shaped by national priorities,
about which fields of technology they should
invest in. This may change now that
tsunami-warning systems are a budget priority, but
there were numerous opportunities to make this
allocation earlier, when free-market development
priorities demanded that money go to the cyber
medicos in Bangalore who read X-rays of American
patients from Boston, Massachusetts, in minutes
and the call centers that ensure 24-hour
productivity for the West.
The information
fiasco in the hour that preceded the waves that
hit the Tamil Nadu coast was a classic case of the
gaps - structural, not accidental - produced by
neo-liberal underdevelopment. The heavy
infrastructure investments to facilitate
multinational information-technology (IT)
investment, the reduction of tariffs that made
India's white collar labor pool attractive for IT
outsourcing, the Rupert Murdoch-style media
globalization that created huge markets for
corporate lifestyle brand products: these and
other Indian economic trends point to the new
world order's valuation of information systems as
commodities rather than as potentially
transformative social practices. Sadly, the
disaster of the world information economy that the
decolonizing world sought to prevent 30 years ago
has now become the nightmare in which we live. As
the sea waters clear, one wonders to whom the
windfalls of the disaster will accrue: the Indian
government has now asked Microsoft to digitize its
collection of satellite images, remote sensing
data, and information about the country's terrain.
A socially neutral tragedy?
The
devastation caused by the tsunami was by no means
uniform across caste and class. Watching victims'
grief on American television screens, Western
viewers were given no way to understand the
distribution of tragedy - it seems like cruel fate
that those who've lost entire families are the
poor. Little wonder that even the well-intentioned
turn to mystified religious explanations or
assumptions of the inherent abjectness of the
Third World.
Coastal demographics in South
Asia invert the Western neighborhood model. While
the super rich enjoy ocean views on California and
Cape Cod coasts, it is the poorest and the most
marginalized South Asians who populate the beaches
of the sub-continent. Fish workers have long been
ostracized both because of their low position in
the caste hierarchy and because of their economic
marginality. Despite having some of the richest
ocean resources in the world, fish workers have
suffered the effects of neo-liberalization more
cruelly than most, while middle men and fishery
multinationals have monopolized value-additive
processes and profits from the fishing industry.
Despite the fact that fish workers live by a
complex science, and continue to call for access
to more environmental data, the assumption is that
low-caste poor sectors have little to do with
science and technology. Social policy
organizations "deal with" the fish workers' unrest
when it explodes onto the streets, but funding is
reserved for those middle-class scientific and
environmental priorities: high tech, high finance
and the saving of large endangered species capable
of building tourist revenue.
Particularly
disturbing in the aftermath of aid flows is the
way in which the disaster is being deployed to
cast the coastal communities into long-term debt
traps. The Kerala government has struck a deal
with insurance companies to provide loans to
coastal residents: Rs5,000 (US$114) as a loan to
each tsunami-affected family at 7% interest – all
at a time when international aid is flowing in as
interest-free capital to those who can control
these transnational flows. The money will
indirectly flow back to the those who have it,
because another Rs6,500 will be given for
purchasing consumer durables at 4% interest.
Again, each affected person will also be eligible
for a loan of Rs75,000 for purchasing boats and
fishing gear. These loans will carry an interest
of 7%. In short, most of the "free" money that's
coming in the form of aid appears poised to bypass
most coastal dwellers' real needs. In Kovalam,
Tamil Nadu, 470 families were offered about 0.6
acres of land near a canal that overflows into
salt pans every year. In contrast, the state
government is "on a war footing" in the task of
restoring seaside cottages at its "enchanting
Tamil Nadu" tourist destination of Mamallapuram
(all stories from The Hindu, January 12).
The distribution of scientific and
economic resources creates the material conditions
for progress and for devastation. The
internationalization of technology functions for
the entrepreneur but not for the fish worker, who
has equal, or more, need of it. Our notions of
science and nature remain idealist: we assume that
scientific and natural laws function independent
of the social conditions of their existence. But
for high-tech satellites and low-tech tsunamis
alike, science and technology cannot be analyzed,
understood, appropriated or planned independent of
their realms of effect and practice.
Dr Usha Zacharias, assistant
professor, Department of Communication, Westfield
State College, Westfield, Massachusetts.
Dr Kavita Philip, associate
professor, Women's Studies Program, University of
California Irvine.
Speaking
Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows
guest writers to have their say. Please click here
if you are interested in
contributing.
(Copyright 2005 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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