Alan Levy is somewhat vitriolic in his condemnation of yet another
talking shop. Like him I lurk in some of the Digital Divide listservs.
But, unlike him, I don't know or pretend to understand the detailed
politics of the actors involved in digital divide dealings. Unlike him I
don't contribute so much to the discussions afforded by my relatively
privileged status in the world - I have access to an online computer
whenever I want it. However, I am still frustrated by the prevalence of
the technologically determined thinking that assumes that there are
soft- and hard- ware solutions to development problems and which doesn't
address the question So what!. Anuradha Vittachi, one of the founders
of OneWorld provides just such an answer in her essay as part of the
Digital Opportunities site. I quote a part of it here without her
permission but in the spirit of the interconnectedness of networks I
understand her essay alludes to.
Pakkialouchme is a 24-year-old Dalit woman in India, not the sort of
person one immediately thinks of as being online. Being a woman and
being a Dalit woman should be enough to exclude you from such elite male
pursuits! But each morning she goes online at a public telecentre in
South India to collect data from a US Navy space satellite that measures
wave heights, which predict storms at sea. Then she voices the gist of
this data, in Tamil, onto the Internet -- and every afternoon, at the
time the fishermen sit on the beach to check and mend their nets, her
storm warnings pour out through a series of loudspeakers planted along
the shore.
I asked someone at the telecentre whether Pakkialouchme's efforts had
made any measurable difference to the fisher families. Well, he said,
mildly, there used to be five to 10 deaths each year from drowning. But
in the two years she has been doing this work, there have been no more
deaths.
Many of us would be glad to be able to say we had made that much
difference in our whole lives.
How many times have I heard Northern experts championing one technology
or another as the politically correct technology for poor Southerners?
It has to be low-orbiting satellites, or radio, or mobile telephony.
Imagine if the fishermen had been stuck with one of these bores!
Luckily for the fishermen, everything from loudspeakers to space
satellites had been incorporated into Pakkialouchme's technical network.
She would probably have added a Brillo pad, or a hearing aid, if they
had helped.
And as a result of this promiscuous ingenuity, she had enabled a group
of fishermen who were neither rich nor literate to get the information
that was up-to-date, highly relevant to their lives, in the language
they spoke, at a time and place that was convenient to them, at no cost
-- and which came from the fanciest state-of-the-art satellite
technology in existence.
But of course Pakkialouchme hadn't saved the fishermen's lives alone:
she too was part of a network. There was the NGO that had set up the
telecentre -- the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation. There were the
people who managed the US Navy Web site. There were the people who
managed the space satellite. And one of the most intriguing aspects of
the people linked in this global network was that most of them on it
didn't know that they were part of this network. Did the people managing
the satellite know they were playing on Pakkialouchme's team? Probably
not. Did it matter? Not a scrap.
When you throw a pebble into a pond, you don't know where the ripples
will spread or with what other ripples they will intersect. All you do
is throw your pebble, and it generates all kinds of unintended
consequences. We can't predict them: all we can do is celebrate them.
Alec Leggat
Project Development
Panos London
9 White Lion Street
London
N1 9PD
tel +44 (0) 20 7239 7608
fax +44 (0) 20 7278 0345
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.panos.org.uk
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