Yolanda's "worst case scenario" - and its hilarious description - is
the necessary complement to those (my / "our" ?) high-flying ideas.
(BTW I'm sometimes astonished to what degree of dereliction keybords
and similar things can degenerate - and sure I'm sexist: boys *are*
worse than girls - ... though the kids being *still* able to make those
machines work.)
The Cybercafe/sub-ISP models discussed may quite well have the
genetic traits of hippiesque house communities (a propos, does anyone
know a source/URL for the original series of "Fat Freddie's Cat" ?);
but as with that other basic communication gadget, the telephone
(line) itself, there *is* some least care the moment it is perceived of,
and known as, "essential".[*]
So the social, self-organising side of it is perhaps as important as
the technical. And this may be precisely the "motivating" aspect.
However, as what are computers and the Net perceived of now:
-- gadgets of the better-off;
-- nasty machines used by police and assurance companies to find and
harass people;
-- business machines (nothing for someone out of any business);
-- game toys, i.e. nothing serious;
-- boring work utilites useful for only those who have work;
-- setups working with all sorts of secret tricks to enslave the world,
the worker, and the universe;
-- ...(fill in)
The GRQ factor (and those "enormous success" stories of the Wall Street
type variant of get-rich-quick) does only compound the perception that
all that pertains to the other/"upper" side of the social divide.
The only immediate - and short-term - rewarding use is games; but look
at kids: when the game is over (or kaputt) there's another/different
toy. Not a solid base to maintain a (IT) system
So the real motivating thing would be the "power = knowledge" verse.
(And at least "we" know, or at least we believe, that the Net is a
"powerful" knowledge source.)
But rewards do not come quick this way, rather they follow - with some
delay - a learning curve; which latter in itself is not very sexy.
And here I would even go a bit further than Eko who said for instance:
> the internet is still viewed as an exclusive stuff, partly because most
> ISPs (even free/low-cost ISPs) tends to advertise their services as only
> useable with up-to-date computers, which these people simply can't afford.
Namely, in suspecting that the usefulness of that knowledge is put in
question as long it is seen as - and to some degree *is* - something
worth only for those on the other/"upper" side of the social divide; or
only if you want to jump side (e.g., GRQ).
Knowledge or more flatly, "information" is not (perceived of as)
"neutral", and does not "work" in a neutral way in real-life social
environment.[**]
I think this is even one of the dillemas of "development policy" when
it comes to "technology transfer", especially with "IT".
Though there *are* success stories. An exemplary one was when the
Australian Maritime (and Dockworkers) Union a good year ago crushed the
strategy to "de-unionise" the Australian ports, even to deploy
mercenaries for that purpose; the union's defense depended on highly
decentralised actions and responses (by a not at all to a high degree
organised port and seafarers' population around the world) and with
simple eMail as the main communications instrument (the world press and
media were conspicuously absent in the whole affair). And you wouldn't
find many Pentiums in those local TU locals.
// Heimo Claasen // <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> // Brussels 1999-09-14
HomePage of ReRead - and much to read ==> http://www.inti.be/hammer
[*] One heavy damper to my idealism got was when I first saw the general
attitude of the "Kinois" (people in Kinshasa) towards the holy
telephone: usually, the receiver was put down on the table, or just
dangled on its wire. "It doesn't work", was the usual answer. And
sure it couldn't this way either.
[**] In the ex-GDR (of East Germany), the central economic planners in
the sixties had tried to mobilise the "knowledge on the shop floor" for
the good of all. The yearly "plan discussion" was to harvest
innovations and improvements to increase production or administraive
efficiency. No way, the scheme failed miserably. And, by the way, so
did and do fail most similar capitalist attempts to appropriate
real-life knowledge of the lower echelons by the hierarchy of larger
organisations; though everybody knows that without some "informal"
knowledge - and sometimes ingenious technical tricks on the work floor -
the whole formal organisation or production scheme would break down.
For sure the other way round is even more critical.
This is not a problem of mere "acessibility" of salient information -
the moment some "other side" knows about it changes the very value of
knowledge, in the worst case it wouldn't be worth much any more.
-hc
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