At 10:27 +0000 on 11/12/2003, Peter Burgess wrote: > Whatever happened to the idea of pen and paper, and typewriter > (manual)?
Sometimes one gets that aha! experience, given an unexpected piece of information, or a new look at something that was there all along. At the AMARC conference in Kathmandu earlier this year, the delegate from Papua New Guinea mentioned how one of the biggest problems in his region is the unavailability of affordable dry cells (forget rechargeables!). This limits the usefulness of the radio experience for listeners, and also for program producers, who need to be extremely careful in field recording projects. This was a concept quite alien to me, from India, where I have a choice of at least four if not five brands of cells, in different parts of the country. Aha! On communication, it is seductive to think of simple communications as writing with pen and paper, but in many rural areas of developing countries, even *paper* is a problem, never mind *literacy*, a *unified language* base and the commerce in consumables such as pencils and ink. This is the major reason to favour voice communications - at least the speaker and listener are very often interested in using the same language, which may or may not even support or be associated with a written script. Telecommunications very quickly morphed into voice from script (Morse and other codes based), in the initial life cycle, and voice grew much faster than script. This happened in areas of countries that today would be considered developing or even severely underdeveloped. Fortunately, from the technology point of view, voice is now a subset of the data telecommunications experience, thus enabling both interpersonal communication and e-commerce, e-governance and e-societal development, using the same investments in technology and its deployment. But voice must and probably shall rule supreme from the point of view of user experience, and it makes a lot of sense to give it its due prominence, while prioritising. -- Vickram ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For the GKD database, with past messages: http://www.GKDknowledge.org
