While we’re dispensing with borders (see previous post) – well that’s what the Web is all about, no? – Reporters Sans Frontieres have this article about how to blog anonymously if you’re a whistleblower in an oppressive regime, plus a whole online Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissidents! A great title. A great idea. Hope those Burmese bloggers have latched onto it.
I’m adding links to these two websites.
Digital Divide Network has way the most saves on del.icio.us, but is a bit of a minefield in terms of finding anything interesting, and it’s Western-dominated.
But there are things to be discovered. Intrigued by a link to Five weird ways to bridge the digital divide (too technical and again Western-centric for me) at Silicon.com, I discovered that Telecoms sans Frontieres (is there anything that comes with borders these days?) provide satellite broadband for disaster zones, including a three-minute phone call for affected families. Nice to know.
Digital Divide.org is more interesting, if only for the vague hint of fundamentalist religious sect about its approach. Read the Seven Fallacies about the Digital Divide. Then discover the Nine Truths about the Digital Divide. Nevertheless the arguments are thought-provoking. They don’t believe, for instance, that giving poor people laptops is necessarily good for them (see Fallacy Number One). They focus on Indonesia, what makes it so appealing, apparently, is that it is “a kind of digital virgin“. All this odd language is making me worried, but it’s an intriguing group to take a look at.
Last week saw a One Laptop Per Child conference where they revealed the ‘second generation will be a two-screen e-book’ (Guardian blog).
I’m still trying to get my head round the whole OLPC debate, but I know a former big cheese there has been blogging about his dissatisfaction with the current state of the project – Ivan Krstic calls it “this whole clusterf*** of conflicting agendas” in this post that is more of an essay. Hmmm, will have to try and examine more closely.
So it seems some people grasp the technology available to them and suffer the consequences. Would this man have survived had he not been blogging? I don’t know, but I don’t like the thought of a ‘technology martyrs’ category.
More maps – this time a site’s been set up to monitor the recent spate of xenophobic attacks in South Africa.
They’re distributing an SMS number to report incidents – you can also donate via this method. Neat.
Will it take off? So far there’s 21 reports, dating from 12 May. Will keep an eye.
So in my first post I’ve already got diverted onto funky new products – the portable light – that are ultimately outcomes of the current state of digital inequality, rather than discovering anything about access to and use of digital technology the world over.
Happily, I have discovered Gapminder, a fab mapping / graphmaking device using UN human development report stats.
I made this map, based on the percentage of internet users per country, for 2000. Use the slider to take it up to 2004, the latest year the stats are available on Gapminder. Go there and make your own maps and graphs.
In 2000, the Democratic Republic of Congo was on 0%, in 2002 it had leapt up to 0.1%. In 2004 it’s not even on the map – presumably no data was collected in the aftermath of the most deadly war since World War Two.
Sweden comes top by the way – 76% compared to the US’s 63%.
Posted in access to technology, digital divide
Tagged digital divide, digital equality, internet access, map
Fishing around for sites that might deal in digital equality I came across this pretty cool product from Pop!Tech: the amazing portable light – devised for use in poor, remote communites and trialled by some Mexican villagers. Powered up by the sun during the day, the light is very flexible (literally, it rolls up) and the women have even woven it into their bags.
There’s a nice video of a presentation on its development on the Pop!Tech site. Although as I watched the rich*, white audience applaud the rich, white speaker, I couldn’t help but feel a little uncomfortable that we were still watching admittedly altruistic rich, white people bestowing expensively developed technology (though cool and innovative) on poor, brown people.
This still has to be manufactured, paid for and shipped. It might be cheap and effective but where will it be manufactured? Who will get paid for making it? Where will the poor Mexican villagers buy more? Yep… I think it might be north of the Rio Grande.
As with computers, does the West donate technology and retain power? Or, once the technology is handed over, is it just a matter of time before the power balance shifts?
*Rich – for the purposes of this blog I’m assuming rich to mean the vast majority of people living in Europe or the USA.
