| Chapter 1: | Introduction—Surveying the Cyberterrain of Developing Country Head of State Web Sites |
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This mélange of Web sites creates a dizzying array of official government information and statements, some from presidents, others by various offices under the presidency or within government. The number of Web sites is increasing, as is the number of Web sites in English spawned from developing countries. Despite the impressive growth of government Web sites, little research has been conducted to study them as texts, and even fewer studies have focused on developing country Web sites. The few studies that involve developing countries have used geographical boundaries to delineate their study samples. Examples of these studies are Fürsich and Robins’(2002) textual analysis of Sub-Saharan country government Web sites and Vorvoreanu’s (2003) quasi-rhetorical analysis of Central European Web sites. Other research in this strain has used corporate Web sites or usability studies to identify the components of an “effective” Web site.
While Western public relations literature might extol the Web for its relationship-building capabilities, case studies from around the globe demonstrate that many governments are using the Web to spur economic growth and facilitate faster communication to target audiences. In a 1998 case study, for instance, one researcher studied a conundrum facing the government of China: How to use the Web to contribute to economic prosperity without destabilizing the political and economic grip of the government (Goodman et al., 1998). Chinese government officials envisioned the Web as a tool to create a “knowledge based economy” to replace the industrial processes that have characterized that country’s economy. The government of India has similarly made a concerted effort to link its population by promoting the Web and the Internet (Agarwal, 1999).
For every India and China study, dozens of other studies have examined how countries use the Web for domestic purposes. Many of these studies concentrate on the infrastructure needed to diffuse the Web across vast expanses of land, cultural barriers, and even ambivalence and, perhaps most topically, the economic resources needed to connect a country to the World Wide Web. While these types of studies are plentiful, no studies to date have focused on how governments, more specifically presidents or leaders, of developing countries are using the World Wide Web to represent themselves, their policies, and their people on the Web to English-speaking audiences.