Article: The Unwired Side of the Divide - Faye Ginsburg

The Unwired Side of the Divide - Faye Ginsburg, New York Univeristy
in Flow: A critical Forum on Television and Media culture.

This article provides some updates on the discussion about the digital divide between the North and South* countries.

Notably that the UN Digital Solidarity Fund has agreed to underwrite initiatives that address "the uneven distribution and use of new information and communication technologies" and "enable excluded people and countries to enter the new era of the information society". There is also a World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) to be held in November this year.

The article also raises some issues regarding the implications about the digital divide citing Bill Gates choice to fund direct aid instead of providing computers in 'third world' countries. Coming from a social perspective it questions the assumptions the West makes about the way that the digital age may impact on South Nations.

I think one of the interesting things touched on in this article is the idea that technology may not present itself in the form that we use it. I think when we think of the internet there's a vision of somebody sitting in front of a monitor with a keyboard and a big clunky box that contains most of the hardware. I know that this was mentioned in the first lecture, particularly in regards to mobile phones. This article also cites an example of a project in a village in Cambodia were an 'elementary' school has internet access through a wi-fi connection that is motorcycled through the village once a day (The Motoman Project). They can access the internet through delayed non-real time interactions - very different to my ADSL connection at home. This raises questions then about the level of tech required (would you need a high speed processor if you're only dealing with irregular spurts of information?).

It reminds me of this *really awful* film with Adam Garcia, Rosario Dawson and Jack Busey called 'The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest'. In this a bunch of geeks create a computer that accesses the internet for under $100. Of course their technobabble was just that: technobabble, but the form that the invention took was very different to our vision of a computer. It was a tube with a holographically projected screen that you could interact directly with (not completely impossible). The idea was that the processing and the software was all provided online and it touched on the ideas of non-propriety software.

The idea of cheap technology falls under the discussion about technological determinism - that somehow access to the tech will cure all ills and make the 'less developed' countries as rich as we are. There are so many assumptions wired into that idea: that the poor can be saved by having the same, or any, technology and that the poor want the same things as the rich. That last point is really important. We assume, in the West, that the rest of the world wants what we do and that we are the epitome of what it means to be civilised and human and there's a lot of discussion about this idea including all of the work done under the heading of post-colonialism. But we rarely ask people from other cultures how they want to live and if they really want the wealth we're trying to give them. And, of course, now that they've had hundreds of years of exploitation/indoctrination and colonialism, most of these cultures are so disenfranchised that the original culture has gone and the colonial states are dependent on the west. It's a very complex issue and it ties into the debate around the digital divide, both because of our idea that everyone needs the tech to make them good world citizens and that the tech has to take the form that we have it already made into.

The article ends with a comment I'd like to echo: "Rather than imagining that we know the answers, clearly, we need to keep listening the 88% of the earth's population that is on the unwired side of the so-called digital divide."

*The terms North and South are used as an acknowledgement that the terms first (North) and third (South) are western-centric and non-reflective/biased about the value and implications of the patterns of living in these countries.

** And as a quick aside the article itself is an interesting example of web writing in that it uses links quite effectively through the article.