Page 91 - Education in a Digital World

78 National Policymaking

(Iain Duncan Smith, cited in Manifesto for a Networked Britain 2010, p.62). These
issues have also featured in the Chilean government’s emphasis on extending
the Enlaces initiative to the rural regions inhabited by the country’s ‘first people’
populations. Similar sentiments could also be said to be reflected in the Singaporean
concern with “offer[ing] a digital future for everyone” (Singapore Ministry of
Education 2006).
Indeed, as Qi (2005, p.36) observes, in many East-Asian countries

the innovation of the internet and on-line distance learning carry a special
responsibility to bridge the existing gaps and discrepancies between lower-income
and rich households, rural and urban areas, elder and younger generations,
females and males, low and high educational levels.

One pertinent example of this was the Japanese emphasis during the 1990s on
the ameliorative effects of new technology on individual citizens – not least in terms
of righting existing ‘wrongs’ associated with previous stages of technological and
industrial development. For example, Japanese government interest in creating an
‘intellectually creative society’ during the 1990s made much of developing a com-
prehensive information and communications infrastructure in order to reform the
socio-economic system and ‘improve people’s lives’. The individual and social
implications of the Japanese Information Infrastructure programme were therefore
promoted in a diversity of social contexts, such as dealing with an ageing population
(both in terms of health support and encouraging increased participation in society),
rectifying over-concentration in urban areas, addressing the environmental concerns
from an industrial structure based on the massive consumption of resources, and,
perhaps most ambitiously, creating a ‘comfortable lifestyle’ for the country’s citizens
(Telecommunications Council 1994).
Following on from these points, the explicit goal of nation building has also been
evident at different times throughout these policy agendas, albeit in ways that differ
noticeably from country to country. One such notion is the recurring use of educa-
tional technology to support a sense of globalist nation building. As the Japanese
government reasoned, “Japan’s objectives are … to achieve the free circulation of
information at home and abroad in order to strongly promote the transparency
of Japanese society and to build a Japan that is open to the world” (Telecommunications
Council 1994, p.1). In some cases, therefore, educational technology has been
linked to the promotion of values that reflect an idealised sense of national cultural
diversity and cosmopolitanism – as with the case of the Chilean government’s
deliberate emphasis on extending the Enlaces initiative from the country’s urban
centres to the rural regions inhabited by the indigenous Mapuche people. Wider
reconciliatory concerns were also evident during the 2000s in the US alignment of
educational technology with the development of global citizenship and geopolitical
stability in the wake of the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’. As the US government
reasoned: