Count your blessings

There is no doubt SA faces many problems in terms of ICT. We are suffering the effect of the strong arm of a telecommunications monopoly, which has kept connectivity costs relatively high. Let's not even mention the skills debacle. But we, as South Africans, need to take a step back and count our blessings.

Never was this clearer to me than at the Highway Africa conference that I attended last week. The event is a gathering of journalists from across Africa, aimed at discussing various issues surrounding our craft.

This year, the conference focused on the role of IT and telecoms in journalism, with a large spotlight on new media development in Africa.

Strikingly, South Africans headlined most of the IT discussions, with a clearly South African focus.

The tea breaks had many delegates saying they were certainly not represented in any of these discussions. And they were right.

Another discussion, on broadband infrastructure across Africa, made me realise that we in SA are a progressive First World country sitting at the bottom end of a Third World continent.

Candice Jones, portals deputy editor, ITWeb

I started to realise SA is streaks ahead of many other African countries while listening to a discussion between Sunday Times columnist Fred Khumalo and Mail & Guardian online strategist Vincent Maher on the newspaper column and the increasingly pervasive blog.

The debate highlighted the possible threat the blog may be to our craft. The conversation took a dramatic turn when a Zimbabwean journalist noted that, for most of the journalists working in the economically ravaged country, the blog was the only free platform left for them to express any truth to their readers.

This comment effectively put the rest of the conference into perspective for me: we were discussing South African issues, not African issues, which meant many of the delegates had no frame of reference from which to work.

The most well attended lecture at the conference dealt with how to use the Internet as a resource. The journalists listened attentively to how to use RSS in a Web browser and the basics of using an online translator to see how world counterparts were dealing with various topics. The speaker was bombarded after the lecture by requests for another demonstration.

I experienced this same lecture during my first year of varsity and was bored by it even then, because I knew how to do it.

And these basic concepts were not the only things many of the delegates were missing.

Another discussion, on broadband infrastructure across Africa, made me realise that we in SA are a progressive First World country sitting at the bottom end of a Third World continent.

One of the speakers, a researcher from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), spoke about the country's dire lack of consolidated infrastructure. He pointed out that more than 70% of the DRC's inhabitants don't have access to any form of connectivity.

One memorable quote sent me reeling: "We don't really know what the Internet is; most people use PCs for desktop applications."

All of this made me appreciate how much we have in SA. We have a working infrastructure, data prices are dropping and competition is slowly being introduced into the market. It made me feel like a fake Oliver Twist asking for more caviar.

It also made me feel that SA can no longer be dealt with in an African context.