Taran and Ed,
My issue is not that the video is commerical or fanciful. Rather, in the context of the 'digital divide', my point is that videos like this represent an unrealistic vision of the value of ICT for social change. Visions are essential to the future and there is nothing inherently wrong with unrealistic visions, however, so many visions of ICT represent fanciful drawings of economic and social relations that the boundry between our ability to imagine what practical roles ICT can play in societal change and what are fanciful and unrealistic notions is unknown - where dream ends and ambition begins is collapsed and unknowable under a deluge of fancy. This is what is dangerous about videos like this and what makes practical and useful applications of ICT for change - whatever change - more difficult. That one video is fanciful is no great issue, but en masse only the fanciful is encouraged.
What telephone company would allow Ghandi, a critic of modernity and industrialism - Taran, I really don't know if he would keep a blog! - speak genuinly about global imbalances in perception of power and knowlege through practices of technological hegemony, as Ghandi 'speaks' about in this advertisment? But then the message of the iis not to question global imbalances, it is to encourage it, however you interpret it - as a commercial, as a vision of ICT, as a vision of the 'digital divide', as a vision for change, as a vision of the future.
This is similar in reason to why I made by other reply to Taran re: the wiki project. To be honest, I'm pretty much disinterested in the actualities of that work. Wiki's can be very useful workspaces just as much as they can be totally unsuitable for any particular job. I don't know anything about the particular project that was mentioned, so I'm really not in any position to comment on it. What I did commented on was Taran's responce to Alfred (my post is below):
> "the era preceding Wikis lacked said influence"
>
> ... all 2 million years of them, Taran? I'm picking on this point not just
> to be a smart arse but to highlight what I believe Alfref meant by, "Every
> new idea is seen by some as a solution."
Presenting every new thing as a sapling that only needs encouragement to blosom and sprout change for the better - as Taran did in his alegorical reply to my post on that matter - is to treat all things equally and thus anihilate the portential of everything. The way we imagine technology needs to be grounded in realistic, socially-grounded terms and we imagine realistic, socially-grounded needs, less as technological deficits on the part of those who are exploited and impoverished. Advertisments such as these do not help matters and they abound.
Oliver Moran Digital Media Centre Dublin Institute of Technology Ireland
Taran Rampersad wrote:
Oliver Moran wrote:
Oh, my goodness! If this is why anyone believes that Gandhi's struggle was met with resistance and brutality by colonialism, you're sadly missing the point of human politics and the nature of society, communication and history.
*confused look* - huh? Where did this come from?
Hats off the the guys at Telecom Italia for pulling our heart strings but while communication may be key to ending global inequity, communication requires that people listen, understand and are willing to accommodate, not that it occurs on one media or another. This is far more complex that any circumstance of technology. Why should crowds fill Red Square, Times Square, tune-in in Roman plazas, meeting rooms at Whitehall, villages in rural Asia and southern Africa just because of ICT? Did they not have newspapers, radio and newsreels at the time of Gandhi but was he still not considered a kin to a terrorist - no matter how much, in hindsight, that we would all plea that he was a man of non-violence? How many of you have visited the Al Jazeera website lately?
You know, I take issue with Gandhi ever being viewed as a terrorist. There was a man who strictly advocated non-violence, who never lifted his hand and helped define 20th century *peaceful* protest. To even consider that Gandhi was ever considered a terrorist is something that I would find insulting if I didn't decide to forego insult. He most definitely was considered a pain in the posterior to quite a few, including some of his own countrymen, but equating him to a *terrorist* is simply ridiculous.
As far as Al Jazeera and so on - I won't pretend to understand the varying levels of abstraction in the media where West meets Middle East. But I would most certainly love to read Gandhi's weblog, if he had one.
Imagining the 'digital' divide solely as a matter of access to technology is to poorly estimate the importance of socio-political and economic relations and to incredibly misrepresent the significance of ICT. Media verbiage of this kind are what mask real causes of societal inequity and stints discussion of how to use ICT meaningfully for social change.
*confused look* - huh? Where did this come from?
Honestly, I feel like I'm missing a really big part of the conversation here. Nobody here has said anything that you appear to be responding to; could you please clarify? What was this all in response to?
Oddly enough, Gandhi's speech was taken slightly out of context for the purpose of the advertisement. The original speech is here: http://www.gandhiserve.org/information/listen_to_gandhi/lec_2_iarc/lec_2_iarc.html
--
This message has been scanned for content and viruses by the DIT Information Services MailScanner Service, and is believed to be clean.
http://www.dit.ie
_______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
