Slashdot Mirror
Searching Google, Where Internet Access is Scarce
Internet searching means that finding information mundane, obscure, or fantastically useful is just a few keystrokes away — but not if you're without a connection to the Internet (or can't read), both the norm for many of the world's poor. itwbennett writes "Rose Shuman developed a contraption for this under-served population called Question Box that is essentially a one-step-removed Internet search: 'A villager presses a call button on a physical intercom device, located in their village, which connects them to a trained operator in a nearby town who's sitting in front of a computer attached to the Internet. A question is asked. While the questioner holds, the operator looks up the answer on the Internet and reads it back. All questions and answers are logged. For the villager there is no keyboard to deal with. No complex technology. No literacy issues.' This week, Jon Gosier, of Appfrica, launched a web site called World Wants to Know that displays the QuestionBox questions being asked in real time. As Jon put it, it's allowing 'searching where Google can't.' And providing remarkable insight into the real information needs of off-the-grid populations."
Not to put too fine a point on it,...
but why would anyone in the distant backward village want to go on the internet?
And a more important question.
Why do the technically advanced people in the overdeveloped parts of the world feel this overwhelming compulsion to force all this inappropriate and culturally disruptive technology onto the tribal people of the world?
Listen, we are not all the same. If someone is living in more or less the same way that their people have lived for the past two thousand years, then their way of life is sustainable and suitable for them.
So you (you being the technological elite, and that's you if you're a Slashdaughter) should just leave them the fuck alone.
You aren't helping them in any way. You aren't making their lives any better.
Yes, they're 'primitive'. Yes, they're technologically backward. Yes, they could probably live ten years longer if only had the advantage of the technology that you feel so compelled to bring to them.
But, so what!?! What's it to you? What difference does it make to you how they live?
You need to lose your missionary complex. This obsession of bringing technology to the distant regions of the earth regardless of any real need for it is only the latest manifestation of the same obsession that drove your great-grandparents to go to the distant corners of the earth in order to save the souls of the heathen.
This obsession is your real problem. Their lack of technology (or having an unsaved soul) is not a problem for them. Actually, YOU are a problem for them.
So do yourself a favor, and do them a favor,...Stay home. Leave people alone. Deal with your own mental diseases. Not everyone wants and needs your techno toys as much as you do.