Not Silly Kid Stuff

Other media are easier for leaders to control. Saddam Hussein, like many dictators, tried for years to isolate his subjects from the Internet and satellite television. No one was allowed Internet access in any form until the very late 1990s, and satellite dishes were banned until, oh, about April 9, 2003. Then, when the statue of Saddam was toppled (live, on satellite), dishes suddenly started sprouting like aluminum mushrooms all over Baghdad's rooftops--and banners advertising Internet cafes dangle from storefronts all over the city.

Such information avalanches touch everyone. Adults in traditional societies often try to resist IT, but kids quickly accept the rush of technology. In the Cairo slum of Mansheyet Naser recently, elementary-school children and teenagers were crowded into a sweltering basement room that billed itself as the Phantom Video Games Club. All it had to offer was a battered Sony PlayStation, but the kids swarmed around it. "The minute I sit down I forget even my mother's name," says 17-year-old Mahmoud. "It's like taking a drug that kills your worries and gives you the power to do things you can't do in real life, like flying, hitting, killing whom you hate."

Immersion in violent, graphic fantasies worries some who are fighting to span the technology gap between developing societies and the West. "Games that are designed to capture the imagination of children in the United States aren't necessarily welcome in other parts of the world," says Peters, of the World Economic Forum. Yet in places like Morro do Timbau, a hillside favela in one of Rio's most notorious cocaine corridors, even the bloodiest animation looks benign next to reality. "These kids are much more likely to grow up with a gun than a mouse in their hand," says Wladimir Aguiar, a communications engineer who set up an arcade in the slum last May. The favorite game among the kids there is a homegrown product: terrorists and cops battle each other in an uncanny digital reproduction of the favelas themselves. "Thirty kids playing computer games is 30 fewer kids in the hands of drug traffickers," argues Aguiar. "Some kids came here barely knowing how to read. In no time they know how to use the mouse and even read some rudimentary English." As they battle through the digital maze, there's no telling where the information revolution will take them next.

WITH MAC MARGOLIS IN RIO DE JANEIRO, GAMEELA ISMAIL IN CAIRO, SUDIP MAZUMDAR IN NEW DELHI AND REEM HADDAD IN BEIRUT

© 2003