[EMAIL PROTECTED] said: > Giving laptops to all the children would impact the culture too much too > quickly.
I am not sure that I agree with this. We should help them use their computers wisely, and help them understand that it is a tool, not an end. In Western Samoa many years ago the government gave each village a TV and a Video Tape player. Then each week the government sent out two video tapes filled with educational information. You could bet that Wednesday and Thursday nights would see the people of the village sitting in their communal fala, notebooks on their knees, taking notes about what they thought was important to their lives. On Friday the tapes were mailed back, to be re-recorded. So "TV", the bane of western civilization to so many, was actually useful to them. And most people will differentiate the "documentary" from the "sitcom" in importance of teaching and information. Health information, environmental information, information on how to manage money or run a business. The delivery system is important, since it has to meet the needs of the people, but the tailored content is just as (or more) important. The content has to be tailored to them, and that is what the Internet can allow to happen. Printed paper fits a cost model that says it has to apply to a large (or relatively large) audience. Wikis can fit a cost model that says the information can be of use to a very small number of people, maybe even as small as one or two people separated by large distances. Techniques of digging a bore-hole in Africa might be very useful to someone living in another desert thousands of miles away. To your statement, I have seen a much different approach to using computers when they are omnipresent. They become more of a natural extension of what you need to do. Notetaking, information lookup....the quality of the experience is exponential when you don't have to wait, or you don't have to hurry because someone else is waiting. There is a group of people, collectively called the "cyborgs", who experiment with "ever-present" computing, trying to see the difference between "ever-present" and "intrusive" computing. Some of this work was done at MIT's Media Labs, but is now being done at other universities. > Who knows what the culture might lose before members even became > aware of the value of what would be lost?! I would hope that we would encourage people who have these computers to capture and preserve their cultures through the use of the computer and the Internet, to explain to them that their culture is important, and other people are interested in how they live, what they think, and how their culture acts. >From that viewpoint, it would be nice if the computer had a small video camera and microphone built in, or a small scanner, but these could be tools that would be shared among the users, to keep the costs down. Let them record the stories and songs of their cultures and spread them to the world. md -- Jon "maddog" Hall Executive Director Linux International(R) email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 80 Amherst St. Voice: +1.603.672.4557 Amherst, N.H. 03031-3032 U.S.A. WWW: http://www.li.org Board Member: Uniforum Association, USENIX Association (R)Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in several countries. (R)Linux International is a registered trademark in the USA used pursuant to a license from Linux Mark Institute, authorized licensor of Linus Torvalds, owner of the Linux trademark on a worldwide basis (R)UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the USA and other countries. _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org 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.
