KZBlog

Irene has an interesting post up at Neweurasia on the number of bloggers in Kazakhstan: 3450 blogs registered in Kazakhstan. Compared to China, which has 19.87 million blogs(!), the number is very low, especially when you look at it per capita. 1 in 65 Chinese has a blog, but only about 1 in 4347 Kazakhstani is a registered blogger. The post then asks why Kazakhstan is so slow. It led me to thinking about the Internet and Kazakhstan. There is an assumption generally that new technology is good and that people will naturally incline towards use of new things, if any technical barriers are sufficiently reduced. So in the interests of making Kazakhstani computer-literate and Internet-savvy in general, the government is working on a program to provide cheap, high-speed Internet cafes throughout the country, as well as trainings. The theory is that Kazakhstan doesn’t use the Internet because it is expensive, not widely available, and because they don’t know how. Reduce those barriers and everyone will be jumping on a computer to use Wikipedia and start a blog! In turn this will help convert Kazakhstan to a knowledge-based economy and the money will start pouring in!

This begs the question of whether the Internet has anything to offer Kazakhstani. We assume that technology is good and everybody needs it. However there are features of Kazakhstan culture and social life that make me wonder if Internet usage will ever reach the levels of the US, for example. Keep in mind that my evidence is all anecdotal and I am always hesitant to generalize so broadly about an entire country. That being said, one of the great benefits of the Internet is that it contains tons and tons of public information–and this information is relatively anonymous. You go to Wikipedia and you have no idea who wrote what. You go to the website of a company and you know the information there was put up by someone in the company, but who? Kazakhstani tend to get their information from friends, relations, and acquaintances. If someone gets sick, the first thing many people do is consult their friends who had similar sicknesses, not a doctor. If you want to navigate the bureaucracy, you shouldn’t go to the main office. You should call a connection in the higher management. So when I registered as a resident of Kazakhstan, I went to the city department of interior affairs, but a co-worker offered to call someone at the Ministry to get the real information. When people call our offices, they always ask my name to know who told them what. So I wonder if Kazakhstani would trust some information up on some website somewhere. How do they know that information is right, if it doesn’t come from a known and trusted source?

I remember being asked once to help another department fill out a list of universities in the US. They asked me to write down which city and state the schools were located in. I knew some of them, like Brown or Harvard or Boston University. Others, I had no idea. I told them they could look it up on the Internet. They looked confused and asked if I was sure I didn’t know which town Oklahoma State University was in. “Please, can’t you help us?” I said, “I can find out. I’ll look it up on the Internet. “OK, never mind,” they said. And I heard them go into the next office to ask people if they knew where the schools were. The Internet, I can only assume, was not to be trusted.

Another big issue is from the provider side. Marketing skills are still very low in much of the nation and the idea that information should be made both available publicly and edited in such a way as to make sense to people is still emerging. If you go to the website of any given ministry in Kazakhstan, you will find whole laws copied and pasted from the law books up on websites. As if your average Internet user is a lawyer who can read and understand this stuff. We might also note that the laws are usually without subsequent amendments, so the information may also be out of date. To make the Internet an effective tool, information needs to be presented in a way that is accessible and useful for people. When I go to the Ministry of Interior Affairs’ website to find out how to register, I don’t need the entire law on classes of residents of Kazakhstan. I need a bullet-point list of the documents to submit, where to submit them, and how long it will take. I also need that information to be up-to-date. As long as providers are unable or unwilling to consider their audience, the Internet in Kazakhstan will not be a desirable product.

As one extreme example of the fact that people just don’t get the Internet yet, at the government-owned company where I worked, they asked me to write a short article for the website. I wrote it up and they asked me to sign it. I asked why and they told me that anything on the website needs to be signed by the Director of the company. Which, as those of you familiar with Kazakhstan bureaucracy will know, means that it needs to be signed by everyone between the writer and the Director. I asked jokingly how the President had signed the logo and the menu bars and icons and so on. They said, “We printed the website out so he could sign it.” “The homepage?” “No, every page.” A website is yet another document that should be signed and stamped and approved, and the smallest changes still have to go through the whole process of approval, which can take weeks in a big enough company.

On the other side, there are many Internet savvy people in Kazakhstan. I see the Internet widely used to download MP3s and movies. Joke pages are very popular, as are news website comment boards. Photo sharing and other social networking sites are widely used, especially among Kazakh students studying abroad (just like American students). Skype and IM and other chat programs are also well-known. And perhaps, blogs are not for Kazakhstan just as information websites still have a long way to go. I’m not sure it’s right to count that as a bad thing. I am sure Kazakhstan will develop its own uses for the Internet or other technologies, as the people see fit.