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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."
Maybe, but the village elder doesn't have any better access to the train schedule than the other villagers, or to information about which nearby market town is currently offering a higher price for millet. This service clearly outclasses him for questions of this type. If he is at all smart, he won't try to compete on this basis. He'll restrict himself to the topics on which he is better than google, say advice about how to approach your girlfriend's parents or what you should plant in which field.
Access to information is a valuable commodity in itself, one which existing structures often withhold from the poorest, who typically are farmers or labourers. Imagine being a subsistence farmer who relies on a small surplus from each harvest in order to be able to afford access to medicines or schooling for his children. Now imagine a cooperative or community of such people having access to accurate information about crop prices (this is probably the single most important financial value to farmers everywhere) and being able to negotiate with local middle men instead of being dictated to by them. There's nothing 'primitive' about this need, it's universal and it empowers communities and individuals. In fact it's essential to anythign which pretends to be a free market. Just because someone toils in the fields doesn't mean they are unintelligent or any less astute than someone who works in an office in a developed nation, and the benefit they can obtain from affordable access to information from disinterested parties is likely to be as great or greater and certainly more vital than the benefit obtained by those of us who already have easy access to information, medicines, education etc.