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Japan is now moving forward with an “e-Japan Strategy” that calls for building the world’s fastest Internet infrastructure and fostering a Japanese-style IT society within five years.
Of course, simply building a high-speed Internet network will not bring a sophisticated IT society into being. Several problems need to be solved before that can occur, for instance, something has to been done to ensure that all people have equal access to information resources.
To understand this, let’s look back in time by about ten years.
A decade ago, many observers noticed a certain sense of community among Internet users, even when they met one another face-to-face for the first time. Networks and platforms were still primitive, and the huge effort required just to access the Internet gave required birth to this sense of community among early users.
Compared to the situation back then, the barriers to Internet access have been lowered to a remarkable extent. Even people who have no specialized knowledge of computers or networks can easily get on the Internet and call up information from just about anywhere in the world. To put it another way, the IT developments of the past ten years have gone a long way to make the Internet “barrier-free”—i.e., accessible to everyone. From this angle, let’s look at some information and communication “barriers” that are being eliminated through the work of Japanese private-sector companies. |
