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UN Secretary-General Asks for Help
knownsense writes "News.com.com is carrying a feature by Kofi Annan talking of the digital divide. He says, "But bridging the digital divide is not going to be easy. Too often, state monopolies charge exorbitant prices for the use of bandwidth." and of bringing WiFi to the developing world. This at a time when places like Panama ban cheaper means of communication and places like India instead of combating absolute illiteracy and hunger, run out to make PDAs. Is the digital divide a purely western concept?"
I'm not convinced this can be solved from outside or that all cultures want it solved. This kind of transformation needs to start from within. Indiais a great example of a country with excellent educational expertise and literacy, but they lack the educational infrastructure to deliver it to everyone. Compounding this their culture is not geared towards allowing all childern to spend their time learning. Many children in India and other cultures are breadwinners.
Bootstsapping industries in these countries also requires profound cultural change that is often rejected.
We hear of a "Digital Divide", but never a "Health Halving" or a "Food Fjord" or a "Freedom Fission". "Digital Divide" seems to be just a handy buzz term to throw around when you are a technologist and have no real ideas that address a country's true problems...
It is so difficult to form any type of organization aimed at bridging the digital divide. Here in the US the PowerUp program just died. If a program like that can't survive in one well-developed country, how can something similar take on the world's technology deficiencies?
From the article: "Though it failed to eliminate the divide, the program--established in 1999--did succeed in equipping nearly 1,000 high-tech computer labs in underserved areas across the country before pulling the plug."
I know this sounds as a troll and most people expect me to bash the Bush (actually if a small country was chosen by the UNO to monitor every Iraqi transaction, I then guess that some planned invasion would -all of a sudden- become less urgent) but I really think that to the point that you may downvote this electronical impulse of mine to oblivion, this won't change my advice.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Funding the "digital divide" is only a subsidy for major telecommunications companies to invade third-world countries and other places to set up their infrastructure for future profit.
Other infrastructure should be set up in poor countries first -- how about drinking water first? Most countries don't have it, and children around the world are drinking filthy water while the UN gives lip service to the "digital divide."
Even in America, the drug and crime problem should be rooted out in poor neighborhoods before we go and give away internet access to those who will never use it.
Think about it: intelligence and education (or a lack thereof) really is a source of problems for a lot of countries.
Digital Divide? No, Education Divide would be more like it.
Just my (un)educated opinion, of course.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
and places like India instead of combating absolute illiteracy and hunger, run out to make PDAs.
Well, the Simputer was in fact built to combat illiteracy! I saw a documentation about it on a German/Austrian/Swiss TV station "3sat" presenting the Simputer, and they basically showed programs to teach people all kinds of stuff. So, IMHO this is a good thing.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
And never give money for free if you want to help someone.
Cancelling a debt will hurt the recipient in the long run: He will get used to getting help for free and develop an addiction.
There are other ways to help: I believe that third world countries should be given lower interest loans, even zero-interest loans ; conditioned by their changing their economies and reducing corruption.
This IT help the UN aparently wants to give poor countries is a step in the right direction.
But relinquishing debt is stupid and eventually hurts the poor more than the rich.
Working for necessity's mother.
Anan says, "Public tele-centers have been established in places as diverse as Egypt, Kazakhstan and Peru," and that "bridging the digital divide is not going to be easy. Too often, state monopolies charge exorbitant prices for the use of bandwidth. Governments need to do much more to create effective institutions and supportive regulatory frameworks that will attract foreign investment; more generally, they must also review their policies and arrangements to make sure they are not denying their people the opportunities offered by the digital revolution."
I think this whole article misses the point. The problem in countries such as Egypt, Kazakhstan, Peru and other similar places is their lack of truely transparent constitutional democracy and a properly regulated free market, or anything even approaching it. Just look at our previous discussion on Panama. Anan is pushing for treating the symptoms without addressing the root problem.
If you want to solve the digital divide, stop supporting dictatorships and other corrupt third world governments. Of course, I can understand Anan not being able to address the real problem, being that said governments make up about 2/3rd's of the UN's member states.
Woopty Doo Basil, what does it all mean?!
The Web was developed during the early nineties, at the time we had 286 processors just going in to the 386 world. So all that's needed to surf the World Wide Web (as a knowledge base) is a 286 with a dial-up connection and a web browser.
The foundation of the Web hasn't changed. Neither has the user requirements. But website designers expect that visitors have the most recent version of Internet Explorer with cookies, javascript and Flash enabled.
So the barrier to entry on the World Wide Web has been increased by web designers. Recycled hardware is anathema to a web designer - even though this provides a better hardware platform than the top-range PC's at the start of the Web revolution.
This senseless raising of the bar has prevented a significant audience from using the Web to enrich their knowledge and better themselves.
Why has this barrier been continually heightened? The only discernible reason is that web designers believe their audience is stupid and lacks the attention span to read text, this leads to geegaw type sites with functionally useless animation effects and inaccessible content to cater for this attention deficit disorder that webdesigners proclaim their (largely US) audience suffers.
So by catering to the deficiencies of the US education system and its associated youth, this makes the barrier to using the web as a learning and education tool higher and higher with each passing year.
This dumbing down of the Internet content is what creates higher and higher barriers to entry, because more and more content is inaccessible to anything other than a modern browser running on modern hardware. And _there_ is your digital divide.
Everyone _can_ benefit from technology, but as long as webdesigners continue delivering websites that require the latest gadgets just to dumb down websites for deficient attentions, it futher reduces the international audience the website can cater for.
Accessibility is a cornerstone of reducing this ludicrous digital divide. But as long as webdesigners keep using the cartoon network as an example of how to create websites, they'll keep dumbing down their content, and keep making it more expensive for any new country to make use of the WWW.
"Knownsense" is buysy spouting nonsense. This stale old mantra of "don't do anything else, but work on illiteracy/poverty first" is getting pretty tiresome.
Indians know how to combat illiteracy. There are states in India (Kerala) where the literacy rate is 100% (or as close to that as you can get). In other words, the literacy rate of Kerala is higher than Kansas. Checkout this article to read more.
The problem here is that of suburban kids who have barely seen the world trying to "fix" it. Before you suggest any "fixes", spend a few years in a "poor" part of the world and see what the real issues are, and not what CNN/ABC/NBC/CBS tell you they are.
As far as the PDAs in India are concerned, don't you that the designers (i.e. Indians), who are much closer to the targetted consumers than you are, may (just may) have a better idea of the needs of the villagers over there?