Santa Clara University

Internet cafes: connectivity for the masses?

Roberto Verzola

         As a minimum, access to the Internet typically requires a computer with the right software, a modem, a telephone line, and a subscription to an Internet service provider (ISP). In the Philippines, the computer and modem would cost some P25,000 (US$500); phone and ISP subscription combined would require around P1,000 (US$20) or more per month. This is definitely beyond the reach of most poor families, though perhaps within reach of the middle class, if they are willing to drop other daily expenses. At these costs, the Internet would definitely remain an enclave of the rich.

         To make the Internet more accessible to the ordinary citizen, the idea of telecenters, more popularly known as Internet cafes (though in my experience very few of them serve coffee), was born. The Internet cafe would take care of the hardware and connectivity requirements and a user needed only to pay a per-minute charge for access to the Internet. Typically, in the Philippines, this would range from P20 to P60 (US$0.40 to $1.20) per hour, with a minimum of P15 ($0.30) for a half-hour session. Although still expensive for the typical poor who might be earning less than P100 to around P500 each day ($2-5/day), Internet cafes made the Internet somewhat more accessible to the middle class and some of the poor who might need it badly for a specific purpose.

         The idea was to bring the cost of access still further through competition among telecenters, until the Internet became truly accessible to the masses.

I wanted to check this idea out.

         I was not a typical poor. For eight years, from 1992 to 2000, I had operated a small Internet service myself through a three-person outfit called Email Center, which offered e-mail access to the Internet mostly NGOs, non-profit foundations, cause- and issue-oriented groups, churches and other civil society groups and activists. I knew very well the advantages not only of my own Internet subscription accessed from the home but of a 24-hour connection to the Internet where one did not have to worry about per-minute charges.

From a 24-hour connection, to access via I-cafes

         In 2000, I closed down Email Center. Instead of getting a personal subscription with an ISP, I decided to do most of my Internet access via Internet cafes, and to try the approach that was supposed to bring the Internet to the masses. I opened an electronic mailbox (free) with a popular provided called Yahoo, surveyed my neighborhood for Internet cafes (there was only one when I started, there are around eight now), and announced to my friends and colleagues my new Internet address. On the average, I accessed my mailbox two to four times a week.

         The first thing I noticed was that most of the so-called Internet cafes in the neighborhood were mainly game centers, where a majority of the computers were not Internet-connected but rather dedicated to running games. I found out later, as I checked out other Internet cafes whenever I travelled around the country, that this was true, with only a few exceptions, for most other Internet cafes I visited. In many cafes, the computers were often segregated; one side (or one room, in the larger cafes) dedicated to computers running games and another side (or room, usually the smaller one) for Internet-connected computers.

         I would estimate that on any one day, 1/2 to 2/3 of the computers in use would actually be devoted to games (very violent and gory ones at that). The remaining active ones would be split roughly evenly between online chat, word processing/printing, and browsing/email, with somewhat more engaged in chatting.

I-cafes: centers of youth addiction

         In fact, I soon realized that Internet cafes were not simply game centers. They were becoming centers of addiction among the youth, including elementary school pupils. I even started recognizing regulars in the cafe I frequented. They were youths of elementary or high school age but I'd see them at various times of the day, including schools hours as well as late evenings, even near midnight at times.

         They were mostly boys. In fact, I could not remember seeing a girl at all in that typical game player position which was then becoming such a familiar sight to me: hunched in front of the machine, staring glassy eyed at the screen, with most movement concentrated on the wrist, in irregular but frantic twitching of the fingers against the mouse or keyboard. The gamers were in a fantasy world of their own, engaged in gory shoot-outs and sword fights with imaginary enemies or with other game players, and totally oblivious of the din and activity around them. In many centers, the rooms were filled with tobacco smoke.

         I particularly remember two tragic victims of this new form of addiction because I knew them personally.

         One was a first year high school student. Once introduced to the vice, he became a regular in the cafe I often used. Whenever I saw him, he was engaged in a game or watching others play. He would sometimes acknowledge my greetings with a slight nod, without taking his eyes off the screen. After nearly a year, he dropped out from the scene and I didn't see him again. I learned later that he had become so good at the game that the cafe operators gave him a lot of free time to keep him playing and attract other players to their cafe. By this time, he had stopped attending classes and become a full-time addict. Eventually, however, his parents found out.

         Another victim was an elementary school pupil, living with relatives who sent him to school. He probably learned the game when some richer friends taught him or treated him to a free game a few times. Hooked, he started spending his food allowance to support his addiction. The money was not enough, so he started missing classes, to use his transportation allowance too. Still, it was not enough, so he began stealing money at home. But the small amounts did not satiate his addiction. He was by then getting reminders and warnings from his concerned and suspicious housemates. One day, he took two thousand pesos ($40) from an unattended bag. Eventually, he was found out and was sent back to his family in the province.

Tricks of seduction

         Internet cafes use various means to draw in gamers. Some offer lower rates during periods when their machines are underutilized, usually during office (and school) hours or after midnight. Others offer bonus hours, like a quarter of an hour for every hour paid, consumable only after accumulating a full hour. To young people supporting their vice with a limited allowance, every peso matters and so they take advantage of every offer.

         As they acquire skills not only in playing games but in operating computers, they also try to make themselves useful to the cafe operators, in exchange for more free time. As ace gamers, they attract players in search of competition. As computer operators, they take a big load off the work of the paid technicians. I have seen youngsters of high school age working full-time as assistants to cafe technicians and clerks. Cheap, high-tech child-labor: part-time work in exchange for free computer time. Some of them work past midnight, working for their fix.

         What kind of games do they play? Most games are shoot-em-ups: one walks through a maze and blasts every creature that crosses one's path; or one commands an army and deploys it to annihilate an opposing army. Many scenes are quity bloody, gory even: cut limbs, chopped off heads, and mangled bodies. To the young, however, play is reality and reality play. Mature minds may be able to distinguish which is which, but young minds often can't.

         Right under our very noses, Internet cafes are seducing youths to a new form of addiction, one which may not destroy their bodies as drugs do, but which is certainly twisting their minds.

         Unfortunately, students today are virtually forced by their teachers to use computers and the Internet. In many schools, essays and term papers are not accepted anymore unless they are printed out. Forget about handwritten or even typewritten submissions. Library sources are not enough. One must include source URLs. So, those neither a computer, telephone, nor an Internet subscription at home have to go to Internet cafes.

         There, they meet the high-tech addicts, and are tempted into addiction themselves.

         Sadly, all this is happening while parents and teachers blissfully think they are securing the children's future through exposure to computers and the Internet.

What about my own usage? Were the I-cafes useful to me?

         I indulged in no chats and played no games. I mostly did my email and some occasional browsing. Two or three times, I printed out something.

         But it was not the same.

Emailing in I-cafes

         Emailing via Internet cafes tend to be quite expensive and inconvenient, because one is doing most things online, while the clock is ticking and every minute has to be paid for.

         Downloading messages is slow, because the connection is not only between the console and the local ISP, but between the console and the Yahoo server somewhere in the U.S. Reading the messages is even slower. Writing replies takes even more time, if one has to compose carefully the contents of an outgoing message. My friends and colleagues must have noticed a drop in the quality -- and quantity -- of my correspondence in 2001; throughout that year (as well as the last two months of 2000 and the first three of 2002), I relied mainly on Internet cafes for my email access. My messages were brief, hurried, and poorly composed.

         For truly important messages, I would save them to a diskette which I would take home for further reading, a luxury that would not be available to the poor. And I would compose a reply on my home computer, save it to a diskette, and then upload the outgoing message on my next visit to the cafe. On some occasions, I forgot to bring the diskette with me, or the diskette itself became unreadable, resulting in delayed or lost messages, either incoming or outgoing.

Browsing with notebooks and diskettes

         I had to keep a notebook of keywords and sites I wanted to search on the Web, because I often could not recall all that I wanted to look for when I was already seated in front of the console. Sometimes, I forgot to jot things down on my notebook, or I forgot to bring the notebook itself, and so would miss some of the things I wanted. Then, I had to save the search results to a diskette again, so I can study them more carefully when I came home. Sometimes, the diskette was damaged along the way, or my disk drive was not quite aligned the same way as the cafe's drive, and I lost my work.

         Three or four times that year, when I needed to really do a lot of emailing and browsing, I cheated. I biked to a friendly office (the women's NGO ISIS International) that had a 24-hour connection which I could freely use, and had my Internet fix from there.

         There is no comparison between access via a dedicated line and access through I-cafes.

         I have experienced the whole range of connectivity from a dedicated line to I-cafes. And it is clear that a hierarchy of inequality, not so different from wealth inequalities elsewhere, also exists in the digital world.

The social divide in a digital world

         At the bottom of the hierarchy are the I-cafe users. They are the least privileged, extremely time-conscious due to high costs and unable to use the Internet to its fullest because of the constraints. They are on the periphery, just barely on the Internet.

         To get to the next rung, one must cross a huge gap, one that beyond the reach of most poor: acquire a computer, modem, and a telephone line, and get a subscription to a local ISP, paying either regular monthly charges or through pre-paid cards. This buys one the benefit of offline reading and writing of messages, and therefore a huge leap in one's quality of correspondence. Browsing remains an expensive option, and one does it only when the data is badly needed. Like the middle class who would take a taxi only when one is terribly late for a very important appointment or in a medical emergency.

         A rung higher would be users who set up their own Web sites on a local ISP or on servers like Geocities, maintained through their local ISP connection.

         The privileged stratum are those users with access to a dedicated connection, who don't have to worry about per-minute costs. With their marginal cost of communication and access approaching zero, they are the most competitive stratum in the digital world.

         But this stratum has a hierarchy of its own:

         At the bottom of the hierarchy are those who are paying for "unlimited access", available in the Philippines for around P1,500 ($30) per month, but must still dial their local ISP for a connection.

         Next are those whose cable TV provider also offer an Internet connection, at a fixed monthly cost of around P2,500 ($50). As soon as these cable Internet users turn their computer on, they are connected, usually at speeds that exceed the 56 kilobits/second that is the maximum, though rarely attained, over phone connections.

         Then there are the dedicated connections, usually for servers that have their own Internet Protocol (IP) address, at a monthly cost of around P8,000 ($160). With a server with its own IP address, then one is truly on the Internet, theoretically on equal footing with every other server on the Internet.

A familiar world of hierarchy

         But even Internet servers have their own hierarchy, which is not only based on the speed of connection to the net, but also on the underlying topology of network connections. Today, and presumably for a long, long time to come, the U.S. lies at the center of these connections, followed by Europe. They are thus at the highest level of the Internet hierarchy. U.S. and European ISPs dictate their prices and conditions to ISPs of other countries who want to connect to them. In fact, Philippine ISPs that connect to the U.S. or Europe often have to shoulder the full cost of the connection, even if that connection is mutually beneficial to both sides.

         Those who want cross the so-called digital divide will be asked to spend much of their hard-earned money only to find greater chasms confronting them. While they may marvel upon entry into this privileged world, they will find that they are the least competitive, due to their higher marginal costs, among the privileged.

         The poor may indeed cross the digital divide through Internet cafes. But they will be confronted with other divides that charge higher and higher fees to be crossed. Along the way, they will find themselves in a familiar world of hierarchy, escapism and addiction which keeps them at the bottom of the heap.