March 10, 2006
COMS 326 - Access and Digital Divide
A powerpoint on access and digital divide issues....
Posted by shade at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)
November 07, 2005
Canada Online - report by Canadian Internet Project
The Canadian Internet Project released Canada Online, results of the 2004 survey on Canadian usage of the internet.
"...a representational survey of Canadians that provides data and analysis for ongoing research in the area of internet use and non-use patterns. The study explores the behaviour and attitudes of both users and non-users and the economic, cultural, and social implications of the internet in Canada, in comparative perspective. CIP is also a partner of The World Internet Project (WIP); an international research consortium which exchanges and compares data obtained in response to a subset of 30 questions posed in more than sixteen countries worldwide. The initial Canadian study coordinated by CIP in 2004 constitutes a benchmark survey, from which it is anticipated that a panel will be formed for longitudinal study every second year."
--except from CultureScope
Posted by shade at 05:38 PM | Comments (0)
September 18, 2005
Krim- New Lines of Communication
By Jonathan Krim
Source: Washington Post
As crews rush to restore basic telephone and Internet services to areas ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, some executives, academics and analysts are urging a more ambitious approach: Make New Orleans and the surrounding areas super-connected communities, with advanced services that surpass what is available anywhere in the country, if not the world.
With many poles and wires reduced to sticks and spaghetti, cell towers down, miles of streets still flooded, and parts of the region uninhabitable for the near future, these experts see the perfect opportunity to deploy new systems that otherwise might be too expensive or disruptive to build.
The result, they say, could be a bonanza of higher technology at lower prices for businesses and consumers, more robust emergency-responder systems and an ability to provide high-speed Internet access to poorer segments of the population often left off of the information highway.
Posted by shade at 02:04 PM | Comments (0)
Zillah Eisenstein - Katrina and the Gendering of Race and Class
Katrina and her Gendering of Class and Race
September 12, 2005
By Zillah Eisenstein
Professor and Writer
Ithaca New York
It is almost too difficult to write these thoughts at this moment without a kind of distance on the incredible sadness and destruction…and without more information. Yet…
Hurricanes are now named for men and women in the superficial attempt at gender neutrality-as though this actually could make a difference in men and women's lives in terms of equal treatment. This alteration in nomenclature conceals the real inequities in women's lives. This was truer than ever when Katrina hit with all "her" powerful, destructive, unpredictable, foreboding force. "She" devastated hundreds of thousands of people's lives and there was/is no mention of the particular and disproportionate numbers of women who bore/bare the brunt of "her" fury. This fury hit blacks and poor people hard but it hit black poor women even harder. If usual numbers hold true here, poor black women make up the greatest numbers of people living below sea level without cars.
In the aftermath everyone mentions how the awful reality of racism and class has reared its ugly head, but there is no mention of gender. Why do we name race and class and not also gender as an unfair structure of power when women of color are the poorest of the poor in this country, and in Louisiana and Mississippi. Our T.V. screens were/are filled with the faces of black women, but they are/were described simply by their race and class. The victims were too readily called refugees and I assume the fact that most of the world's refugees are women and children played a part-as much as race and class-in this 'othered' choice of terms.
Posted by shade at 02:03 PM | Comments (0)
April 01, 2005
Electronic Marginality, Or, Alternative Cyberfutures in the Third World, Ravi Sundaram
Je me suis demandée dans quelle catégorie préexistante faire entrer cet article...Ravi Sundaram est un des fondateur de Sarai(www.sarai.net), un centre de recherche situé à Delhi, aux affinités postmodernes, qui travaille sur le phénomène urbain, la modernité,les nouveaux médias, les environnements technologiques... Ces gens là sont fermement opposé aux aspirations developpementalistes...So, not IT4D.
Quand à la notion de Fracture numérique...il me semble que cette approche leur semblerai à la fois trop intrumentale et binaire (le numérique diviserai le monde en deux?)... Je pense que cet article contribue a questionner ces deux notions (IT4D and Digital Divide) en démontrant que les marges évoluent sur des voies (en partie) autres, voire alternatives.(?)
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http://www.cfront.org/cf00book/en/ravi-india-en.html
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Thinking about virtual space in the Third World is almost a lonely exercise. At the same time that the local elite in a country like India dreams of riding the new wave of post-territoriality and simultaneous time on the backs of Microsoft, the fact remains that this is a society with one of the lowest saturation rates of telephones in the world. As for critical movements in electronic culture, remember that India has no tradition of cyberpunk nor any indigenous science fiction. Most cultural communities until recently have been ambivalent about technology. Historically, representations of science and technology have been state-sponsored, social-realist and monumentalist. All this raises a significant dilemma: alternative voices in India can only feel a sense of existential solidarity with cyber-debates in the West. For the genealogical reference points simply do not exist in India, much less much of the Third world.
In fact one almost feels a sense of bemusement towards the somewhat sweeping pronouncements in futurology emanating out of the French intellectual circuit, notably Baudrillard and Virilio. While Baudrillard’s positions are consistent, Virilio’s gloomy prognosis of the future net-worlds, ruled by the “industrialisation of real time,” make little sense here in the periphery of global capitalism as a singular category of analysis.
Despite all this, there is no doubt that the time of cyber-transition has arrived in India – the rhetoric of connectivity is in full swing both within the trans-national elite, state-managers and a bewildered generation of social movement activists. This essay seeks to stake out a voice for theorising the new electronic space in India by looking at the discursive patterns of cyberculture in the country. These patterns operate within a constellation of re-configured nationalist pan-optics, elite time-travel to the sacred geographies of the “West,” the decline of the Village imaginary and the rise of the Techno-city (Bangalore, Noida-Delhi) and new patterns of violence and terror in the old City. Cyberculture also operates within a changing grammar of techno-social power: elite/new class core enclaves which are predicated on a new post-nationalist optics are juxtaposed with large techno-cultural peripheries.
What concerns me in this essay is the changing topography of urban life. This new urban space which is distinct from Western modernist and post-modernist experiences of the city, which seeks to ‘house’ the new electronic culture. In much of the Indian public discourse on electronic networks and cyberspace this very significant transition is often missed.
Various forms of electronic networks exist in India today. They include the state-connected networks (VSNL, NICNET, ERNET), private providers (AXCESS, DART, SPRINT, etc) and the hundreds of non-legal bulletin boards which offer inexpensive network culture to many citizens. The public discourse on the ‘network’, ‘cyberspace’ and the Internet is intense, so much so that ‘cyberspace’ remained the top foreign story in the newspapers. In his recent visit to India, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates was accorded the kind of welcome few heads of states receive, and India is being spoken of as the software ‘giant’ of the future. Behind all this rhetoric, long-term transitions are missed. Our hypothesis is that the new network culture is actually part of a deep transition to an urban and proto-globalised culture in India within which any study be based. Before we go on to map out the possibilities of dissent within electronic space in India it is imperative that a brief history of this transition to the ‘city’ be given.
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The Absent City: Post-Colonial India 1947-1980
The centrality of the city in the narrative of Western modernity contrasts with the situation in post-colonial India. To be sure, in the pre-colonial period, Islamicate [1] political life accorded a certain importance to the city, notably the Imperial capital. This can be contrasted with the complete turn-around in the post-independence period. It will be no exaggeration to say that the City was marginal to the self-imagination of Indian nationalism.
In the Indian case, citizenship was secured through different forms of territorial identification: the self-governing village community (Gandhi) or the abstract, levelling national imaginary which reproduced itself through developmentalism (Nehru). While European social theory accepted the city as an important site for citizenship (in that it dissolved ancient regime distinctions), in India universalism was secured less by the city, but through developmentalism and constitutionalist discourses. The city also seemed marginal to Indian political and social thought – indeed to this day urban theory is one of South Asia’s great failings.
To be sure, urban space had remained prominent in the colonial imaginary – witness the grand constructions centred around Lutyen’s Delhi and the re-invention of Moghul urban spectacle through the Imperial Durbars. Nevertheless post-colonial political narratives privileged the village/Nation as sites of social discourse. In the Gandhian discourse, the village was seen as occupying a kind of sacred geography where intrusions of industrial western and urban modernity could be contested through self-governing communities based on indigenous technologies. In the immediate post-colonial period however, the Gandhian vision was overwhelmed by Nehruvian developmentalism which combined the imaginary of the dam/steel mill with populist references to the village as the site of the “Nation”. In other words despite its fundamental distinction from Gandhi’s agrarian utopia, Nehruvianism never departed from rhetorically asserting the importance of the village in building the imaginary national community.
Ashis Nandy has argued convincingly for the decline of the Village from the public imagination in India in the 1990’s. One can perhaps attribute this to a number of factors: the decline of old-style nationalist narratives, the imperative of globalisation which privileged a new urban space, and the secular retreat of upper-castes from the rural areas with the concomitant rise of lower caste movements for political power.
In the post-independence period, a city like Delhi had for the elites a certain untheorised security – part legacy of colonialism and part upper-caste hegemony over politics. While cities like Bombay, and previously Calcutta, came closest to resemble the urban experience in the Western sense, much of this began to change by the 1990’s.
The New Constellation and Electronic Networks
The accelerated pace of globalisation has led to a new focus on urban space, with cities acting as conduits of labour/cultural commodities vis-a-vis the West. Saskia Sassen [2] has spoken of a new geography of centralisation and marginality in the new “global cities”. The modes of electronic centrality links the financial centres of New York, London, Frankfurt, Tokyo with new centres like Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Bombay. This new regime of centralisation operates within an increasingly changed dynamic with local/national regimes. On the other hand the geography of marginality is also reproduced on a world-scale through migration of labour to low-wage areas of both Western and Third World cities.
In the Indian case however, the new focus on the city remains embedded in a distinct, historically specific constellation that may well add new dimensions to the debates in the West. In the first place, the unity/fragmentation dialectic, so central to Western thinking on cities, seems inadequate in capturing the evolving urban landscape. The experiences in India, with an explosive criss-crossing of religious-secular geographies, new urban landscapes based on inversions of received notions of public-private, speak to a host of theoretical issues that need to addressed.
In India, the rewriting of urban space appears as a series of disjunctures, which seem to reproduce specific practices of differentiation and conflict within cities. These include: the re-writing of the “national” to include the diaspora; the development of new enclaves of software/electronic production autonomous from the old city but connected to trans-national space.
Within cities themselves there have emerged a series of new overlapping discourses: the emphasis on the city as an abstract guarantor of consumption and desire, the idea of urban speed and temporal acceleration, the rise of right-wing Hindu nationalist movements which are securely embedded in the new urban commercial/consumption cultures. The new urban consumption cultures include a rapidly growing popular component centred around the large film industry, and a new subaltern techno-culture focused on musical audio cassettes. The resurgent lower-caste movements have sought to engage with the new discourses on the city, often aggressively supporting consumption regimes. The argument here is that the old hostility to consumption and an emphasis on frugality was derivative of an upper-caste politics.
Thus we see a number of initiatives that have radically changed the old marginality of cities: the decline of the village in the self-imagination of nationalism; the differentiation of cities with electronic enclaves linked to transnational space, new patterns of conflict embedded in practices of inequality, consumption and desire. These patterns of conflict do not follow traditional paths – given the limited resources of urban theory in South Asia (in contrast to the very rich work on rural and subaltern protest), very little work has been done on this new phenomena.
Nationalist Visions (1956-1980)
The peculiarity and abstract character of nationalist science stands out today. This was predicated on “development” – that is the possibility of ‘catching up’ with the West within the framework of a peripheral capitalist economy. Given the impossibility of this task and its eventual failure, we are left with the cultural legacy of the project and its impact on sources of dissent.
Nationalist science policy was state-centred and typically monumentalist – a feature Nehruvianism borrowed from the Soviet plan and the TVA [3] in the US. The early science/development monuments were the steel mill and the dam – huge, ugly monuments based on violence and displacement of millions (Walter Benjamin’s remark that there is no document of civilisation that is not also a document of barbarism [4] holds particularly true here). Not surprisingly, this project inspired very little cultural celebration (except a few Hindi films and thousands of reels of boring state news-reels). The Soviet industrialisation drives may have inspired Mayakovsky, but the Indian scientific monuments moved very few cultural producers.
The effect was the opposite. The vast majority of dissenters, aghast by the violence of the technological monuments, moved in the opposite direction – towards an engagement with Gandhian critiques of modernity and modern industrialism. Most social movements were joined by cultural dissenters who were hostile to technological monumentalism and nationalist technoculture.
This is a crucial distinction from the West. In the advanced capitalist world there almost is a “givenness” to the history of technology, rationalisation and creative dissent. In India, and I suspect in many parts of the Third world such a situation does not exist. Net-critique has to struggle against a whole tradition of dissent and radicalism that has, in the past, remained hostile to techno-culture.
Anyway, the first electronic networks, state sponsored, appeared in the 1980’s. This was again in the form of a panoptic grid, with the focus of vision right at the centre – the nationalist state. The idea was to connect each district centre of the country to the national centre to encourage accurate information for “development”. But this was at the time of a declining nationalist project, the pan-optics of the old, based on a now-defunct monumentalism soon gave way to the current multiple scenarios.
The transition from the old developmentalist science to the new urban techno-culture is significant. The old developmental model was partly based on an abstract Village imaginary that it cannibalised from the legacy of the anti-colonialism. The new techno-culture speaks to an urban imaginary, but in a fragmentary sense. This does not therefore fit in with the traditional history of the Western city of modernity with the compulsory reference points: Baudelaire, Simmel and Benjamin for modernism, Debord [5] and Baudrillard [6] for the new city-scape. In the new Indian cityscape there is a bit of everything and much, much more.
The tiny forms of digital accumulation (Deleuze’s “Societies of Control” [7]) co-exist with disciplinary societies (Foucault), as also violent forms of primary accumulation (Marx) and pockets of industrialised real-time (Virilio). Violent abstractions based on single-concepts: discipline, control, evil, speed make little sense.
The real dilemma for net-critique in India is this: on the one hand there is the historical tradition of dissent in the country that has remained hostile to techno-culture; on the other hand many of the critical Western debates make little sense here. What is the way out? It seems to me that net-critique has to engage with “actually existing techno-culture” in the country, and speak to the spaces that exist apart from the elite domains of multinational capital housed in the suburbs of techno-cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad and Madras. These domains include the hundreds of BBS [8] all over the country, the new network space of social movements and a fledgling electronic art movement.
But this is not all. There is no simple discrete net space in South Asia. Electronic geographies include the vast field of experimentation in popular cinema and music. In fact, some of the best fields of electronic engagement have been popular music composers and those that generate the older forms of mechanical reproduction – radio, inexpensive cassettes. The fact is that electronic space in India will never reach the vast spatial grid as in the West – unlike the cinema and radio, it is premised on speed of capital and print-literacy, both in relatively short supply in the periphery. To be sure, this may well change in the future, but for the moment what makes electronic space interesting in the periphery is the explosive mix of cultural transitions that it speaks to: village to city, monument to techno-culture.
But what of the critical dialogue with the West? Any trans-national solidarity has to move beyond simple-minded liberal acknowledgement of “limited access” in the Third World. The problem with this framework is that it leaves untouched the very limited framework of the Western debate itself. A genuine dialogue needs a reflexive transition in the terms of electronic debates in the West, which do not offer any theoretical place for the experiences in the periphery. Given the acceleration of the multinational-sponsored discourse here in the periphery, such a dialogue between dissenting voices is both urgent and necessary.
Notes
[1] Islamicate, as opposed to the more restrictive notion of Islam, is a term introduced by American historian Marshall Hodgson to include the multicultural breadth of thinking and societies in the regions under Islamic influence, especially in South-East Asia – eds.
[2] For an overview of Saskia Sassen’s theses, see
[3] TVA: Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the main New Deal projects of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
[4] Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History
[5] Many of Guy Debord’s texts are available online at
[6] A number of texts by Jean Baudrillard are available online at
[7] Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, in: _OCTOBER_ 59, Winter 1992, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 3-7
[8] BBS: Bulletin Board System; computer system accessible by modem, on which you can read messages by others and download programs, and leave messages and upload programs for others to download; BBS systems have almost disappeared since the rise of the Web, but can be considered its precursor – eds.
Tazi statiq na bylgarski / This text in Bulgarian
Back to Contents in English
Posted by icianita at 08:53 AM | Comments (0)
March 16, 2005
Response to Economist article from NGO groups
Greetings of solidarity to all
(apologies if you receive this more than once)
I am posting below the text to be sent as a Letter to the Editor of the
Economist in response to the recent article in question, which has
generated lots of discussion on many lists.
It was jointly developed and signed by a group of NGOs active in the WSIS
processes, including the one to which our organization belongs (APC).
These are:
Association for Progressive Communications, Johannnesburg
Digital Divide Data, San Francisco
IT4Change, Bangalore
Bread For All, Lausanne
NEXUS Research, Dublin
(The actual letter was sent with footnotes and references included.)
Another letter is being drafted to respond to references in the article to
the Digital Solidarity Fund.
Thanks and regards
Al Alegre
Foundation for Media Alternatives
Philippines
To the Editor, Economist
In response to: The Real Digital Divide. March 10th 2005
"The Real Digital Divide" correctly asserts that this divide is merely a
symptom of deeper, more important divides. However, the article has 2
serious flaws.
Firstly, it falls into the 'generalisation' trap. It assumes that
solutions that worked well in one context will necessarily work well
everywhere.
Mobile phones are NOT always the cheapest or best way to provide
telephony, especially to poor and rural populations. Newer and cheaper
technologies such as WiFi, WiMax, CorDECT and VOIP (voice over internet
protocol) could prove far more cost effective, and they have the added
advantage of providing data services such as internet. Furthermore,
sparsely populated rural regions are proving less attractive to mobile
providers, and the growth rate in network coverage (as distinct from
subscribers) is slowing down, long before it reaches many of the poorest
people.
Secondly, why does the author conclude from the undisputed value of mobile
telephony that other new technologies are superfluous in addressing
development challenges?
People living in the developed world's lives have been transformed by the
power of the internet in multiple dimensions: work, social connectivity,
banking, entertainment, political debate. They live in a context of
increasing access and efficiency. Why deny these benefits to developing
countries and the poor? Avoiding the infrastructure and capacity
development challenges of introducing these technologies to developing
countries is NOT an effective response to growing inequities.
Digital inclusion is not simply about access to computers or the internet,
it is about not being left behind when such far-reaching institutional
changes are revolutionizing every aspect of social and economic life.
Regarding regulatory approaches, it is now widely acknowledged, including
by the World Bank that the market alone is not sufficient, especially in
remote and rural areas and poorer populations. There is a major role for
investment and regulation in the public interest, in an environment that
is increasingly horizontally segmented between local access networks,
backbone providers, and service providers.
The need for universal service access funds is widely accepted. But
current thinking is now considering ways of providing wholesale bandwidth,
where a single provider, publicly-owned or in consortium, sells backbone
bandwidth cheaply and transparently to all. At local level,
community-owned networks already exist from Poland to Argentina -
following the lead of the USA where over 500 local rural telephony
cooperatives have flourished for decades and now provide broadband. The
point here is not to say that competition does not play a key role.
Rather, it is essential to pursue continuous and ongoing regulatory
innovation, and to remain open to all suitable solutions.
Exclusive solutions, be they technical or regulatory, are simply too
restrictive for the diversity of needs and environments.
(SGD.)
Association for Progressive Communications, Johannnesburg
Digital Divide Data, San Francisco
IT4Change, India
Bread For All, Lausanne
NEXUS Research, Dublin
Posted by shade at 06:06 PM | Comments (0)
The Economist - The Real Digital Divide?
The real digital divide
Mar 10th 2005
From The Economist print edition
Encouraging the spread of mobile phones is the most sensible and effective response to the digital divide.
IT WAS an idea born in those far-off days of the internet bubble: the worry that as people in the rich world embraced new computing and communications technologies, people in the poor world would be left stranded on the wrong side of a “digital divide”. Five years after the technology bubble burst, many ideas from the time—that “eyeballs” matter more than profits or that internet traffic was doubling every 100 days—have been sensibly shelved. But the idea of the digital divide persists. On March 14th, after years of debate, the United Nations will launch a “Digital Solidarity Fund” to finance projects 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”. Yet the debate over the digital divide is founded on a myth—that plugging poor countries into the internet will help them to become rich rapidly.
The lure of magic
This is highly unlikely, because the digital divide is not a problem in itself, but a symptom of deeper, more important divides: of income, development and literacy. Fewer people in poor countries than in rich ones own computers and have access to the internet simply because they are too poor, are illiterate, or have other more pressing concerns, such as food, health care and security. So even if it were possible to wave a magic wand and cause a computer to appear in every household on earth, it would not achieve very much: a computer is not useful if you have no food or electricity and cannot read.
Yet such wand-waving—through the construction of specific local infrastructure projects such as rural telecentres—is just the sort of thing for which the UN's new fund is intended. How the fund will be financed and managed will be discussed at a meeting in September. One popular proposal is that technology firms operating in poor countries be encouraged to donate 1% of their profits to the fund, in return for which they will be able to display a “Digital Solidarity” logo. (Anyone worried about corrupt officials creaming off money will be heartened to hear that a system of inspections has been proposed.)
This sort of thing is the wrong way to go about addressing the inequality in access to digital technologies: it is treating the symptoms, rather than the underlying causes. The benefits of building rural computing centres, for example, are unclear (see the article in our Technology Quarterly in this issue). Rather than trying to close the divide for the sake of it, the more sensible goal is to determine how best to use technology to promote bottom-up development. And the answer to that question turns out to be remarkably clear: by promoting the spread not of PCs and the internet, but of mobile phones.
Plenty of evidence suggests that the mobile phone is the technology with the greatest impact on development. A new paper finds that mobile phones raise long-term growth rates, that their impact is twice as big in developing nations as in developed ones, and that an extra ten phones per 100 people in a typical developing country increases GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points (see article).
And when it comes to mobile phones, there is no need for intervention or funding from the UN: even the world's poorest people are already rushing to embrace mobile phones, because their economic benefits are so apparent. Mobile phones do not rely on a permanent electricity supply and can be used by people who cannot read or write.
Phones are widely shared and rented out by the call, for example by the “telephone ladies” found in Bangladeshi villages. Farmers and fishermen use mobile phones to call several markets and work out where they can get the best price for their produce. Small businesses use them to shop around for supplies. Mobile phones are used to make cashless payments in Zambia and several other African countries. Even though the number of phones per 100 people in poor countries is much lower than in the developed world, they can have a dramatic impact: reducing transaction costs, broadening trade networks and reducing the need to travel, which is of particular value for people looking for work. Little wonder that people in poor countries spend a larger proportion of their income on telecommunications than those in rich ones.
The digital divide that really matters, then, is between those with access to a mobile network and those without. The good news is that the gap is closing fast. The UN has set a goal of 50% access by 2015, but a new report from the World Bank notes that 77% of the world's population already lives within range of a mobile network.
And yet more can be done to promote the diffusion of mobile phones. Instead of messing around with telecentres and infrastructure projects of dubious merit, the best thing governments in the developing world can do is to liberalise their telecoms markets, doing away with lumbering state monopolies and encouraging competition. History shows that the earlier competition is introduced, the faster mobile phones start to spread. Consider the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia, for example. Both have average annual incomes of a mere $100 per person, but the number of phones per 100 people is two in the former (where there are six mobile networks), and 0.13 in the latter (where there is only one).
Let a thousand networks bloom
According to the World Bank, the private sector invested $230 billion in telecommunications infrastructure in the developing world between 1993 and 2003—and countries with well-regulated competitive markets have seen the greatest investment. Several firms, such as Orascom Telecom (see article) and Vodacom, specialise in providing mobile access in developing countries. Handset-makers, meanwhile, are racing to develop cheap handsets for new markets in the developing world. Rather than trying to close the digital divide through top-down IT infrastructure projects, governments in the developing world should open their telecoms markets. Then firms and customers, on their own and even in the poorest countries, will close the divide themselves.
Posted by shade at 06:03 PM | Comments (1)
February 26, 2005
Interesting book on Digital Divide by Pippa Norris
Pippa Norris is the McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. His book on "Digital Divide - Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide" covers topics from Social Inequalities to Virtual Parties and Digital Engagement. It is available online in PDF.
Posted by renato at 08:17 AM | Comments (0)
February 07, 2005
A Laptop in Every Child's Lap
The mission continues...
Digital guru floats sub-$100 PC
Posted by momin.mirza at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)
February 02, 2005
Digital Divide Shortchanged During Powell's Term
Outgoing U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell's leadership of the FCC leaves questions about how much the nation's "digital divide" has widened or narrowed during his tenure. Social-justice advocates contend that the commission's regulatory decisions have limited affordable Internet access for communities, particularly for low-income families, while free-market advocates say that market competition will eventually drive prices down and that a range of government strategies are addressing the universal access issue effectively. "They seem to not care about (it) anymore," says Robert Fairlie, associate professor and director of the masters program in Applied Economics and Finance at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "It's almost become a dead issue."
Posted by shade at 08:47 PM | Comments (0)
January 30, 2005
Is this what I want for domestic access ...???
The new LG Internet Refrigerator "presents a refined kitchen with a 15.1-inch TFT-LCD TV that, with LG's own digital technology, provides much clearer and brighter pictures than conventional TVs."
Is this the wife I've been looking for?????
"Equipped with a digital camera that you can use to take and store pictures....
Cooking information come with pictures to help you give your family healthy and delicious meals...
Now enjoy an elegant and leisurely lifestyle... You can cook while listening to joyful music...
With an electronic pen, you can leave video, voice, picture or text messages...Digital technology brings your family much closer together.
The Internet, a sea of information - With our virtual keyboard, you can enjoy Internet services such as e-mail, search, shopping.
Diary ... You can mark special days such as birthdays, anniversaries and important appointments using an icon and these reminders will be displayed on the LCD monitor.
Refrigerator checks for equipment errors real-time and informs users about any problems via e-mail...."
OK, is this a gendered technology or what??? See GenderScripts and The Short Life and Death of Audrey™ in the gendertech blog....
Posted by shade at 02:46 PM | Comments (2)
January 28, 2005
Canadian Perspectives on Access & Digital Divide
In the mid 1990s I was involved in The Universal Access Project at the University of Toronto's Information Policy Research Program. The principal focus of the project was the convening of three Universal Access workshops at the University of Toronto. The invited particpants in these workshops came from the federal government departments, private sector firms, and public interest groups from across the country that had been most actively involved with networking applications and policy making around what we then called the 'Information Highway'.
There are some interesting policy submissions from the workshops , and some backgrounder papers...
Posted by shade at 05:57 PM | Comments (0)