Digital Categorization of Tech Users in Pakistan

We live in a country with innumerable classes of sustenance. Here awareness has different meanings and the term enlightenment is beyond grasp, but let’s not touch this sensitive area, instead let’s focus on types of tech classes we have got in our country.

I would count them as:

• The Tech Class
• The non-tech class,
• The obscured class
• And then the deprived class

The Tech Class:

The tech class is everywhere on the virtual canvas. They tweet with iPhones, blackberries, roam around on almost every social networking websites, post, read and comment on blogs and spend around 10-14 hours at-least on their GPRS enabled phones, tablets or laptops.

They are closely connected to each other, which makes their voice even louder (when its required). This tech class is said to be the symbol of this country.

This is the elite class of the internet, they are heard, followed and respected by the netzians of the country.

The Non-Tech Class:

The non-tech class forms the majority of the population on internet but they don’t know what to do with it. They crowd Facebook with all the useless stuff and consider Twitter to be a useless ‘commodity’.

The Obscured Class:

The obscured class has its hands on all the gadgets (almost) but is OK with only making calls and receiving and sending of emails.

The Deprived Class:

The deprived class is about which you hear daily. They are killed in bomb blasts, they’re accused of doing what they never did, they suffer form inflation, they sigh on seeing four-wheelers…they from the majority of this country’s citizenry.

If I merely term the above text in two words, it will be: Digital Divide!

In simpler words, digital divide points to the gap between people who have access to the virtual world and those who don’t (as given by Dr. Bharat Mehra, who is an Associate Professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxvillea)

The Dilemma:

The gap between the classes we have mentioned above is increasing, with each passing day for reasons known to everyone. The tragedy of digital divide is that it is driven from basic civic factors (such as education and finances).

The United Nations has come forward to do necessary measures besides private or government funded organizations which are striving to create a ray of light amid grey clouds. UN, in this regard, formed ICT Task Force in 2001. It spreads the call for celebrating World Information Society Day on May 17 every year.

In the end, in our country neither education nor anything related to it has quite well penetrated through the clusters of deadliness to those who know not the term education.

We, who have somehow completed the so-called education and are now lost in oblivion and are driven by animal instincts – eating, sleeping, reproducing and dying, have to set out parameters for our contribution to the society. Else, as I fear, our condition might end up evolving a term called ‘The Fourth World’.

Some Solutions:

• Weekly sessions in universities, colleges, even coaching centers on how to use internet.
• Instead of running crazy ad campaigns, we better run 2mins lectures on educating common users about internet and mobile technology.
• Anyone of us- truly anyone of us – who has spent barely half a year on Facebook or Youtube or any social medium for that matter, can upload a five minute video on their experience of the web, share tips & tricks and so on.
• A blogger can come up with any sort of matter that he/she can display at forums, other blogs for others to learn.
• In the last, we can have sponsored electronic message boards hanging in public places running news, messages, quotations, traffic updates, etc.

These are not the castles in air, but real time deployable and executable ideas for the lands like ours and other developing nations around the world…