Dear GKD Colleagues, This is an interesting posting, and worth unpicking. Sam Lanfranco has just posted a wonderfully incisive analysis of these 'offers'. Even the much vaunted Simputer becomes questionable under this analysis.
I want to take Sam's analysis a little further. (1) If these computers are so great, why aren't they being sold this side of the digital divide? Can't people in the North/West also benefit from these cheap computers? The answer is that it is not in the interests of the hardware and software suppliers to sell us these, when we have been so willingly (reluctantly?) buying much more expensive equipment, forced upon us in a cycle of planned obsolescence of incompatible bloat-ware releases. So what do they do to prevent it? They supply software that we would not find useful, reduced Windows systems, limited software that will not communicate across the divide. And meanwhile they attack the potential open-sources that do deliver useful software. I yearn for those days when office software was sufficient for my purpose and did not fail from over-weight functionality. (2) The objective of such enterprises is to give voice to the poor and the marginalised, in precisely the same way that literacy programmes can, and local community radio stations can. Sam points this out, but lets emphasise this, enabling access to ICTs is not so much to enable the South to access the 'truths' from the West, it is to enable 'truths' to flow the other way. And to do that means we must recognise linguistic diversity and support and respect that, so that the ICTs so cavalierly being offered do work in other languages and scripts, and that there are translation paths between languages, and there is support for those many who are not literate. This is a big enterprise, not a matter for $100 handouts from the West, but an enterprise for us all on both sides of the digital divide to combine our expertises and make it happen. Pat Hall, Global Initiative for Local Computing Limerick University Ireland and Open University UK ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** 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 Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
