Small is Beautiful

Abstract

This paper reviews the arguments of the Utopians and the dystopians on the current communication revolution, and makes the case that countries have no alternative but to join that revolution to compete in the world material economy. It uses a revised version of Kuo’s (1993, 1994) model to document and analyze the three main dimensions of informatization–people, infrastructure and economy–as they pertain to three relatively small Indian Ocean Rim countries–Malaysia, Mauritius and Sri Lanka. Using the backdrop of the countries constituting the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, it argues that smaller countries, as well as ‘fertile spots’ in larger countries, with high achievements on the people dimension can leapfrog into ‘cyberspatial heights’ in the global information society. Malaysia is in the process of setting up its Multimedia Super Corridor determined to implement its Vision 2020. Mauritius, with its Informatics Park set up in 1994, has the potential of beating Malaysia in mainline telephone density at the turn of the century. Sri Lanka, though well situated on the people’s dimension, lags behind because of its stop-and-go economic policies and other reasons. Although, under current projections, Sri Lanka is likely to be telecommunications poor even at the turn of the century, it may yet achieve its goal of becoming the ‘telecommunications gateway to South Asia’ if it adopts better policies to attract capital and develop high-performance computing capability.