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Cultures UNPLUGGED: Charting the Divide

An Update by Rüdiger Wischenbart

Conventional wisdom has it that there is a widening gap not only between the rich and the poor on this planet, but also between the information rich and the information poor. Still, it is an over simplistic concept to oppose just two antagonistic groups, or to imagine the world devided by just one deep abyss between 'us' and 'them'.

As a matter of fact, the forces that currently integrate much of the world into one hugely complex and interdependent system – call these forces 'globalisation' and 'digitisation' -, are the very same forces that also generate new patterns of a scattered, fragmented global landscape with many conflicting and contradictory dynamics at work.

Imagine this to be a forceful and pragmatic process, and not some fancy theoretical model conceived by academic sociologists.

Sitting in his functional office spectacularly overlooking the roofs of Paris, Philippe Quéau, the Directior of the Information Society Division at the headquarters of Unesco, points at a true paradox that characterises all of his work.

'On the one hand', Philippe Quéau says, 'Unesco is busy to make the benefits of information technology such as cheap and easy access to the Internet available to some of the most disadvantaged populations and individuals in order to allow them to take an active role in a global exchange between cultures. But at the same time we know that these same information technologies very effectively threaten the cultural diversity of the planet.'

Roughly half of today’s 5.000 languages spoken around the world are at risk to become extinct within a generatito on or so. Only tiny fractions of the content currently available on the Internet are of any significance to most of those cultures in menace.

M. Quéau, who will attend this year’s Ars Electronica Symposium, adds: 'If one reduces the digital divide, this is for instance a strong agent working against the surviving oral traditions and cultures.'

So there is no easy way out of the dilemma of cultural diversity, but it may be a first important step to enhance our understanding of the conflicting forces and to base the assessment on facts, not on myths.

Examples Democratisation versus exclusivity of information

Estimates have it that today there exist some 250 Megabyte of information per capita, equivalent to some 250 books, subject of rapid growth. As of today, the better part of this information is created and stored digitally and tends to include ever more images, video and audio. As a result, more and more of this information is publicly available to an ever growing audience.

'Thus the trend towards democratization of data - especially in digital form - is likely to continue', concludes a study published by the University of Berkeley, California, under the title 'How much information?' (1)

A comparable, yet more modest pattern of continuous growth characterizes the more traditional sectors of published information such as the global book markets. Major retailers like the chain stores of Barnes & Noble in the USA or the online bookseller amazon.com list between three and four million titles in their catalogues. The number of new titles – with some 90.000 new publications displayed every year at the Frankfurt Book Fair alone - grows more rapidly than the markets, thereby creating a situation of stiff competition between publishers who, as a consequence, have to increase their profitability.

Yet, there is no such thing as a level playing field for publishing on a global scale. Some forty percent of all content published in books worldwide originates from the USA, both in titles and in value. NAFTA – with the USA, Canada and Mexico – makes up roughly for half of the world production in books.

The top three book markets of the world, the USA, Germany and Japan, represent 60 percent of the global book market; the top 10 countries stand for 88 percent of the value produced with books.

This top 10 list has countries so different in size as the People’s Republic of China with 1,1 billion inhabitants, and Italy with a population of only 57 million. Austria with 8 million holds the 18th largest book market on the planet.

Readers spend 116 US dollars for books per year and capita in Germany as compared to 4,6 dollars in Russia and 1,5 Dollars in China. There is an even more specific point to be taken on this last figure of individual’s spending on books. Of course, living standards and income levels varie widely between the chosen countries. At the same time, several of the main cost factors for books, particularly the respective price for paper, ink and printing technology, approaches the same global standards anywhere in the world. Therefore, the gap in market value for published content reflects a gap in the accessability of high quality copyrighted information.

The dominance of a few leading markets on a global scale is not only true for the publishing industry, but for the trade in cultural goods in general.

Between 1980 and 1998, the value of imports of cultural goods worldwide grew from 47,8 to 213,7 bn US dollars. But only a handful of countries can be seen as the main actors in this trade. Some 60 bn of imports where aimed at the USA alone. The top 13 importing countries were the recipients of some 80 percent of all global imports of cultural goods.

The ranking in detail reflects some interesting forces of change however, with France having been overtaken by Germany by 1990, and China rising to the top 5 importing nations recently, joining the USA of course, Japan, the United Kingdom and Germany at the top. (2)

Why are books of specific importance?

Can all that information that is packaged rather exclusively and expensively in books be democratized with the by far larger quantities of information publicly available on the Internet? Hardly so, at least for the moment and for some time to come as well.

Currently, all the information available between book covers by 1999 was the equivalent of 1 to 8 Terabytes, as compared to 20 times as much produced by companies and bureaucracies of all sorts. And as of today, much more is already stored digitally on hard drives, CD-ROMs and DVDs.

Still, in terms of knowledge value, the point even underlines the quality of the book as a container for particularly valuable information, as in general books are the result of a long chain of optimizing information turned into complex insight and knowledge by highly specialized contributors. Publishing is not just printing what someone has written down. But authors tend to reflect and condense what they have to say particularly well when it goes into a book, then their writing is usually edited and, in the case of science, peer reviewed to the effect that the resulting books are seen more as a reference than most administrative works.

Therefore it generally is assumed that, 'the written word is an extremely efficient way to convey information'(3), and it makes sense to analyze not only quantities and qualities, but also the pattern of flows of such written words of high quality.

The world according to the translators

In Germany, being the world champion in book translations, one out of eight titles published is translated from another language. But these translations, as a matter of fact, hardly mirror the diversity of the 5.000 languages spoken and written around the globe.

Roughly 75 percent of all these books are translated from English language originals, and another 10 percent from French. In reverse, only 5 percent of all translation rights sold by German publishers will go back to US readers. Germany’s European neighbors take 75 percent of the translations. (4)

On a global scale, flows of translations are even much more unevenly distributed. Altogether more then half of all books translated are from English language originals, with only a mere 6 percent that travel from all languages combined back onto English language book shelves.

Despite all the growth of global travel and global economic exchange, the total number of translations is in decline according to statistics provided by Unesco, counting 52.070 translated titles in 1980 and only 50.434 in 1994.

The portion of English is still expanding, and together with German as the number two and French as the number three original language for translations, these top 3 originating languages cover three out of every four translations worldwide. Or, to put it the other way round, all the other languages combined make up only 25 percent of the global flow of culture and ideas through translated books. (5)

Even more telling are certain regional aspects. For instance the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought about the virtual disappearance of Russian as lingua franca in the former Soviet sphere of influence. English has largely replaced Russian in less than a decade.

Or, to take an even more recent example of global significance: Information on the societies and cultures under Islam travels to the non-Arabic world almost exclusively via English intermediary translations, or is written, even by regional authors, directly in English for publication with a European or US publisher. There is hardly any direct flow of cultural information from Arab sources to other languages than English, some French and maybe some German publishing houses.

In the mid 1990ies, Unesco statistics account for a mere 200 translations of Arab language books – less than e.g. than from Polish or Hungarian original texts -, and the overall number declines.

Conclusions

The global flow of ideas follows a set of one-way roads. However, the dominating actors, particularly by the USA and Europe, are not alone to impose the various regulations and limitations. Insufficient copyright legislation and thus the considerable risk of piracy discourage the professional trade with copyrighted cultural goods considerably.

There exist, additionally, highly effective cultural barriers, hindering potentially receiving societies and communities to take in input from abroad.

When the prestigious Paris daily newspaper Le Monde recently started a new supplement with articles from the New York Times in the original English language version, the editors were obliged to their own surprise to defend the initiative against angry readers who complained about the 'sell out' of French cultural sovereignty.

Since former Yugoslavia broke apart, the resulting warring ethnic entities made sure that the formerly unified 'Serbo-Croatian' language was also broken apart into respective Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian languages. The cultural segregation was backed up by political and economic regulations that made sure for instance that, until very recently, books printed in Croatia were not available in Serbia, and vice versa. Encounters between cultural actors such as publishers or writers took place preferably in third places, in Budapest or in Frankfurt, but certainly not in Zagreb or Belgrade. (6)

Many a neighbor can communicate with peers only through a third party or language as an intermediary.

It would therefore be far too simplistic to analyze only the most visible gap of the global digital and cultural divide, namely the one defined by the US or English language hegemony.

The paradoxical result of globalization and the advent of a world wide web of information and integration is the emergence of a highly complex system of cascading sub-divides in terms of culture and information flows.

The more the small number of dominating and overriding information channels is integrated on a global scale, the more, on the bottom end of the new hierarchy of information and cultural exchanges, on a local and regional level, a forceful process of fragmentation takes place.

Notes

(1) How much information? Peter Lyman, Hal R. Varian et al. University of California at Berkeley 2000, Executive Summary, p. 4. www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info/. Regarding public accessability, the authors write: 'In the future we expect the distinction between 'individual' and 'public' to become increasingly blurred.' P. 7. back to top

(2) For all data on the global trade with cultural goods, see: International flows of selected cultural goods 1980 – 98. Ed. By Phillip Ramsdale. Unesco Institute for Statistics, 2000. back to top

(3) How much information?, p. 4.back to top

(4) Buch und Buchhandel in Zahlen. 2001. Hg. Vom Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels e.V. Frankfurt am Main 2001, p. 70. back to top

(5) World culture. World culture Report 2000, Unesco, p 374-5. back to top

(6) For a detailed study on former Yugoslavia, go to Nenad Popovic, Rüdiger Wischenbart: Re-inventing publishing in the war-torn Balkans. Logos, October 2000, and www.wischenbart.com back to top

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