Opportunities
“People don’t die of hunger in our cities. They die from lack of opportunities…” — Rodrigo Baggio (page 113).
I just read the chapter Digital Opportunities in John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan’s book “The Power of Unreasonable People” (2008).
This chapter highlights the importance of new technologies for people world wide, whether rich or poor. The implication of this is that the new technologies are changing our world, our perceptions and our priorities. According to this book, more than 80% of people in the world have never heard a dial tone, let alone surfed the web. It seems pretty clear from this that there is a new form of class divide developing – the information haves and have-nots. I think this is almost just as serious as the divide that is growing between the monetary haves and have-nots. Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan compared the exclusion of the worlds poor from the intformation revolution to their exclusion from basic human rights (such as shelter, water, and food).
However, for me the most interesting part of this chapter is the discussion about the (current) problems and faults in the idea of international collaboration. For example, Rodrigo Baggio’s idea of a bulletin board on the Internet so that rich and poor children could join in debates and exchange ideas. It failed completely because the poor children never participated in the discussions – they had no access. I feel the same thing is happening world over. The supposed technological collaboration is only happening between people from the same “world”. This has limited the potential, extensive advantages of the Internet as a tool for exchanging ideas. This situation highlights the importance of not only providing the opportunity but also the education, so that the poor (so that everyone) can have the ability and the desire to participate in local, national and global discussions.
It is this problem that makes the “One laptop per child” idea so brilliant (See my page on Technology, Education & Change). Making the hardware so cheap will allow a much much wider demographic the ability to access the Internet, this wonderful educational tool, and inevitably to contribute.
