Changes in the ways knowledge is created and used — and how this is enabled by new information technologies — are driving economic and social development worldwide. Discussions of the “knowledge economy” see knowledge both as an economic output in itself, and as an input that strengthens economic processes; with developing countries tending to be described as planning or embarking on a journey of transformation into knowledge economies to bring about economic gain. Indeed, increasing connectivity has sparked many hopes for the democratization of knowledge production in sub-Saharan Africa.

Despite the centrality of digital connectivity to the knowledge economy, there are few studies of the geographies of digital knowledge and information. In their article “Engagement in the Knowledge Economy: Regional Patterns of Content Creation with a Focus on Sub-Saharan Africa”, published in Information Technologies & International Development, Sanna Ojanperä, Mark Graham, Ralph K. Straumann, Stefano De Sabbata, and Matthew Zook investigate the patterns of knowledge creation in the region. They examine three key metrics: spatial distributions of academic articles (i.e. traditional knowledge production), collaborative software development, and Internet domain registrations (i.e. digitally mediated knowledge production).

Contrary to expectations, they find distribution patterns of digital content (measured by collaborative coding and domain registrations) to be more geographically uneven than those of academic articles: despite the hopes for the democratizing power of the information revolution. This suggests that the factors often framed as catalysts for a knowledge economy do not relate to these three metrics uniformly.

Connectivity is an important enabler of digital content creation, but it seems to be only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition; wealth, innovation capacity, and public spending on education are also important factors. While the growth in telecommunications might be reducing the continent’s reliance on extractive industries and agriculture, transformation into a knowledge economy will require far more concentrated effort than simply increasing Internet connectivity.

We caught up with Sanna to discuss the article’s findings:

Ed.: You chose three indices (articles, domain registration, collaborative coding) to explore the question of Africa’s “readiness” to join the knowledge economy. Are these standard measures for the (digital) knowledge economy?

Sanna: Academic articles is a measure often used to estimate knowledge-rich activity, so you could consider it a traditional variable in this area. Other previous work measuring the geographies of codified knowledge have focused on particular aspects or segments of it, such as patents, citations, and innovation systems.

What we found to be an interesting gap in the estimation of knowledge economies is that even if digital connectivity is central to the knowledge economy discourse, studies of the current geographies of digital knowledge and information on online platforms are rare. We argue that digitally mediated participation in information- and knowledge-intensive activities offers a metric that closely measures human capacity and skills. An analysis of digitally mediated traces of skills and information might thus complement the knowledge economy discussion and offer a way to better detect the boundaries of contemporary knowledge economies. To address the gap of research on digital content, we examine the geography of activities in collaborative software development (using the GitHub platform), and the registration of top-level domains. While there are other indicators that we could have included in the analysis, we selected these two, as they have a global reach and because they measure two distinct, but important segments of knowledge economy.

Ed.: To what extent do the drivers commonly associated with knowledge economies (e.g., GDP, broadband Internet, education, innovation) explain the patterns you found? And what were these patterns?

Sanna: While connectivity plays a role in all three categories, it seems to have a strong effect only on digital content creation. Conversely, the production of academic articles is more strongly related to GDP than to connectivity. Innovation capacity appears to have a positive relationship to all three content types. Education as a topically narrower variable appears, perhaps unexpectedly, to be related only to variance in academic articles.

In terms of the patterns of these variables, we find that the geographies of collaborative coding and domain registrations are more uneven than the spatial distribution of academic authoring. Sub-Saharan Africa contributes the smallest share of content to all three categories, providing only 1.1% of academic articles. With 0.5% of collaborative coding and 0.7% of domain registrations, SSA produces an even smaller share of digital content.

While comparison across absolute numbers informs us of the total volume of content creation, it is useful to pair that with a standardized measure that informs us of the propensity of content creation across the populations. Considering the most productive countries in terms of their per capita content creation suggests geographies even more clustered in Europe than looking at total numbers. In SSA, the level of individual countries’ content production falls within the two lowest quintiles more often in the case of collaborative coding and domain registrations than with academic articles. This runs contrary to the expectation of contemporary digitally mediated content being more evenly geographically distributed than traditional content.

Ed.: You measured “articles” by looking at author affiliations. Could you just as well have used “universities” as the measure? Or is there an assumption that connectivity will somehow encourage international co-authorship (does it?) — or that maybe “articles” is a better measure of knowledge quality than presence of universities per se?

Sanna: We chose this indicator, because we consider scientific output in the form of academic articles to represent the progress of science. Publication of academic articles and the permanent scientific record they form are central for the codification of knowledge and are a key enabler of knowledge-intensive processes. Beyond being an indicator often included in the knowledge economy indices, we believe that academic articles offer a relatively uniform measure of knowledge-intensive output, as the process of peer-reviewed publishing and the way in which it constructs a permanent scientific record are rather similar around the world. In contrast, other systems for knowledge-intensive outputs such as registering patents and innovation systems are known to be vary greatly between countries and regions (Griliches, 1990).

We didn’t use the number of universities as an indicator of the knowledge economy, because we wanted to look at measures of knowledge-intensive content-creation. While universities educate individuals and increase the nation’s human capital, this ‘output’ is very diverse and looks very different between universities. Further, we wanted to assess whether education in fact drives the development of knowledge economy, and used a measure of enrollment rates in secondary and tertiary education as an explanatory variable in our analysis.

Ed.: There’s a lot of talk of Africa entering the “global” marketplace: but how global is the knowledge economy — particularly given differences in language and culture? I imagine most cultural and knowledge production remains pretty local?

Sanna: The knowledge economy could be seen as a new dynamic stage in the global economic restructuring, where economic processes and practices that place greater emphasis of intellectual abilities take place in the context of an increasingly interconnected world. To the extent that African information- and knowledge-intensive goods and services compete in these global markets, one could consider the region entering the global knowledge economy. While the markets for knowledge-based goods and services may be smaller in various African countries, many produce regionally or nationally and locally targeted knowledge-rich products. However, this understanding of the concept of knowledge economy tends to focus on commercial activities and scientific and technical knowledge and neglect indigenous, local or cultural knowledge. These types of knowledge have a higher tendency of being tacit rather than codifiable in nature. Unlike codified knowledge, which can be recorded and transmitted through symbols or become materialized in concrete form such as tools or machinery, tacit knowledge takes time to obtain and is not as easily diffused. While these tacit types of knowledge are prevalent and carry significant value for their users and producers, they are less easily converted to commercial value. This makes their measurement more challenging and as a result the discourse of knowledge economies tends to focus less on these types of knowledge production.

Ed.: Is the knowledge economy always going to be a “good” thing, or could it lead to (more) economic exploitation of the region — for example if it got trapped into supplying a market for low-quality work? (I guess the digital equivalent of extractive, rather than productive industries .. call centres, gig-work etc.)

Sanna: As is the case with any type of economic activity, the distributional effects of knowledge economies are affected by a myriad of factors. On one hand, many of the knowledge- and information-rich economic activities require human capital and technological resources, and tend to yield goods and services with higher value added. The investment in and the greater presence of these resources may help nations and individuals to access more opportunities to increase their welfare. However, countries don’t access the global information- and knowledge-based markets as equal players and the benefits from knowledge economies are not distributed equally. It is possible that exploitative practices exist in particular where institutions and regulatory practices are not sufficiently powerful to ensure adequate working conditions. In a previous study on the Sub-Saharan African gig economy and digital labour – both areas that could be considered to form part of the knowledge economy – some of the authors found that while a range of workers in these domains enjoy important and tangible benefits, they also face risks and costs such as low bargaining power, limited economic inclusion, intermediated value chains leading to exploitation of less experienced workers, and restrictions in upgrading skills in order to move upwards in professional roles.

Ed.: I guess it’s difficult to unpack any causation in terms of Internet connectivity, economic development, and knowledge economies — despite hopes of the Internet “transforming” Sub-Saharan African economies. Is there anything in your study (or others) to hint at an answer to the question of causality?

Sanna: In order to discuss causality, we would need to study the effects of a given intervention or treatment, as measured in an ideal randomized controlled experiment. As we’re not investigating the effect of a particular intervention, but studying descriptive trends in the three dependent variables using the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) method of estimation in multiple linear regression framework, we cannot make strong claims about causality. However, we find that both the descriptive study of RQ1 as well as the regression modeling and residual mapping for RQ2 offer statistically significant results, which lend themselves for interpretations with relevance to our RQs and that have important implications, which we discuss in the concluding section of the article.

Read the full article: Ojanperä, S., Graham, M., Straumann, R.K., De Sabbata, S., & Zook, M. (2017). Engagement in the knowledge economy: Regional patterns of content creation with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Information Technologies & International Development 13: 33–51.

Sanna Ojanperä was talking to blog editor David Sutcliffe.

Information is the raw material for much of the work that goes on in the contemporary global economy, and visibility and voice in this information ecosystem is a prerequisite for influence and control. As Hand and Sandywell (2002: 199) have argued, “digitalised knowledge and its electronic media are indeed synonymous with power.” As such, it is important to understand who produces and reproduces information, who has access to it, and who and where are represented by it.

Traditionally, information and knowledge about the world have been geographically constrained. The transmission of information required either the movement of people or the availability of some other medium of communication. However, up until the late 20th century, almost all mediums of information – books, newspapers, academic journals, patents and the like – were characterised by huge geographic inequalities. The global north produced, consumed and controlled much of the world’s codified knowledge, while the global south was largely left out.

Today, the movement of information is, in theory, rarely constrained by distance. Very few parts of the world remain disconnected from the grid, and over 2 billion people are now online (most of them in the Global South). Unsurprisingly, many believe we now have the potential to access what Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales refers to as “the sum of all human knowledge”. Theoretically, parts of the world that have been left out of flows and representations of knowledge can be quite literally put back on the map.

However, “potential” has too often been confused with actual practice, and stark digital divisions of labour are still evident in all open platforms that rely on user-generated content. Google Map’s databases contain more indexed user-generated content about the Tokyo metropolitan region than the entire continent of Africa. On Wikipedia, there is more written about Germany than about South America and Africa combined. In other words, there are massive inequalities that cannot simply be explained by uneven Internet penetration. A range of other physical, social, political and economic barriers are reinforcing this digital divide, amplifying the informational power of the already powerful and visible.

That’s not to say that the Internet doesn’t have important implications for the developing world. People use it not just to connect with friends and family, but to learn, share information, trade, and represent their communities. However, it’s important to be aware of the Internet’s highly uneven geographies of information. These inequalities matter to the south, because connectivity – despite being a clear prerequisite for access to most 21st-century platforms of knowledge sharing – by no means guarantees knowledge production and digital participation.

How do we move towards encouraging participation from (and about) parts of the world that are currently left out of virtual representations? The first step is to allow people to see what is, and isn’t, represented; something we are planning with this project. After that, there’s also a clear need for plans like Kenya’s strategy to boost local digital content, or Wikimedia’s Arabic Catalyst project, which aims to encourage the creation of content in Arabic and provide information about the Middle East.

It remains to be seen how effective such strategies will be in changing the highly uneven digital division of labour. As we rely increasingly on user-generated platforms, there is a real possibility that we will see the widening of divides between “digital cores” and “peripheries”. It’s therefore crucial to keep asking where visibility, voice and power reside in our increasingly networked world.

References

Graham, M. and M. Zook. 2013. Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies: Exploring the Geo-linguistic Contours of the Web. Environment and Planning A 45(1) 77-99.

Graham, M. 2013. The Virtual Dimension. In Global City Challenges: debating a concept, improving the practice. eds. M. Acuto and W. Steele. London: Palgrave.

Graham, M., M. Zook., and A. Boulton. 2012. Augmented Reality in the Urban Environment: contested content and the duplicity of code. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00539.x

Graham, M. 2013. The Knowledge Based Economy and Digital Divisions of Labour. In Companion to Development Studies, 3rd edition, eds V. Desai, and R. Potter. Hodder.

Hand, M. and B. Sandywell. 2002. E-topia as Cosmopolis or Citadel On the Democratizing and De-democratizing Logics of the Internet, or, Toward a Critique of the New Technological Fetishism. Theory, Culture & Society

Mark Graham‘s research focuses on Internet and information geographies, and the overlaps between ICTs and economic development. His work on the geographies of the Internet examines how people and places are ever more defined by, and made visible through, not only their traditional physical locations and properties, but also their virtual attributes and digital shadows.

Read Mark’s blog.