Internet in French Polynesia

Moorea, French Polynesia
Interview with Pascal at Arts Polynesians

Pascal is the fellow who runs the only wireless internet cafe on the island. The price is very competitive: $30 for two weeks of wireless service, as opposed to $10 an hour for regular internet use. Since it can take up to 20 minutes just to load a 2 minute video, Pascal's wireless service saved me a pile of money while we were on the island.

Pascal told me he used to do web sites when he lived in France. He declined, however, to go into any detail about what brought him to live on Moorea. When I asked, How did you come to live here? he answered, "By airplane." I laughed and said, "A very French answer," and he replied, "Well, I could have come by boat!" The French are very reticent to divulge personal information to relative strangers. Americans, on the other hand, can very easily go into the kind of detail about their private lives that would make their best friends blush.

I was amazed, in fact, when the woman in a couple we were visiting told me she and her husband were having problems, that he'd had an affair recently, and they had been talking about splitting up. Unheard-of personal information from a French woman. I have no idea what got into her, and I certainly didn't know what to say. If she'd been American, I'd probably have gone right into it with her, but I was so dumbfounded, I was speechless.

Pascal and I talked about the internet and its impact here in French Polynesia. He told me that there are just about 200,000 people who live here, spread out among all the islands. Half of them live between Tahiti and Moorea. The only internet, he told me, is on these two islands.

This isn't strictly true, however, since there was an internet connection at the post office on Rurutu where JF stayed for a week, but it was even more expensive than normal, $14 an hour. You had to buy a phone card to use it, and it used your money just getting -- very slowly -- online. With a phone card, you can never use your money wisely. Either you are down to three or four "units," and that's not enough to get online and DO anything, or it cuts off on you in the middle of something and you lose whatever you were doing.

Still, it was there, for the use of the wealthier inhabitants.

Of the 100,000 people on the two populated islands, Pascal told me, only about a third or so even have a computer, much less the internet. They just don't care. Frankly, he said, they don't give a damn. When they do get on the internet, what do they do? They go immediately to see pornography. Pascal quoted some wild figure that over half the people who get on the internet (this was supposed to be a worldwide fact, by the way) go first to the porn sites before they go anywhere else.

I started talking about the email computer that the folks at ___ in England are developing. No need for electricity...I pointed out to Pascal, who was about to object that half the islands don't have any. And as he was about to go into the lack of service providers, I said the devices would be connected to satellites. He protested that satellite charges are exhorbitant, more than $40 an hour. The company has negotiated a somewhat reasonable price for use of the satellite connection for their email machines, something like $.05 per email message. This is still FAR cheaper than regular mail, if you think about it, and also much faster. The advantages for village doctors, teachers, and administrators (not to speak of police...) are, I thought, obvious.

Pascal was still skeptical. Why would they bother? he wanted to know. You get them to send an email to someone and two or three days later, you ask if they've gotten a reply. Reply? No reply... Did they turn their machine on to see? No, they didn't realize they had to turn the machine on to find out of they've gotten an email reply.

Pascal's point, well taken, is that computer training has to start where folks are, and that may very well be far more elementary than we might think. It's true that computer programmers have trouble communicating with those of us who just USE their inventions (hence the uselessness of most computer user manuals), and the same difficulty to know how to communicate computer rock-bottom-basics holds true for us semi-literates.

The French and Americans we met on Moorea--not counting the Rotary Club, which was more mixed--have stayed there to make their lives because they are looking for a return to a simplicity, an easing of the bonds of "civilization," a kinder, gentler lifestyle more in tune with nature. They look to their Polynesian neighbors for these values, the choice not to participate in the commercialized, materialistic modern society, the choice to live without "conveniences" in order to have more time for family, fishing, swimming in the azure sea, and just sitting.

Pascal, at Arts Polynesians, echoed the views we heard again and again, that the Polynesians simply don't need our computers, our internet, our materialistic "stuff." I suspect the situation is more complex than Pascal painted it, but I would need more than a week's visit to the island to ascertain the truth. I suspect there's a romantization of the Polynesian life going on not unlike our own with the Native Americans, who might choose to be less "simple" and somewhat more "materialistic," if they had more educational and employment opportunity closer to home.

As it stands, the internet in Tahiti and Moorea is a toy for the foreigners, something tourists do, and are willing to pay good money for.

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[Kenneth Smith]

To find out more information on tahiti and moorea visit my blog at http://www.tamtrip.blogspot.com/