Re: [Air-l] air-l Digest, Vol 23, Issue 6: OLPC discussion
This has been an incredibly frustrating conversation. conversations about inequality and stratification do little to address the fact that there are millions of Africans who already use ICTs and would welcome the chance to have their own laptop for themselves or for their children. don't assume that because its Africa that the need or capacity to use ICTs is somehow diminished because their utilities lack the stability and reliability of Western networks. After all, the United States has some of the most reliable ICT infrastructure in the world and still has higher rates of illiteracy and ICT-non participation than many smaller, poorer countries. ICT adoption, in a world increasingly inundated with the awareness of information as a tool, rests not simply upon the possession of the material artifact but much more so on the possibility of using information to improve one's life chances. The comment about using a laptop as a shovel? completely out of line and insulting. Would you have made that comment about rural Chinese or Appalachian hill people? Andre -- Andre Brock PhD Candidate - Library and Information Studies Project Athena Fellow POSSE Mentor - UIUC Posse 2 (217.333.4693) University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Look, i've used pots and pans for shovels before to dig my way out of snow drifts before i could afford a shovel. I've also used my old computer as a stepping stool. if there is a practical use for something that goes above and beyond its immediate projected usefulness, you can believe that people will be smart enough to use it that way. It is pragmatics and common sense. If the use value of an object is higher in another mode of use for whatever reason in a particular situation, then it will likely be used that way. if the use value of information technology is less than that of using it for a another need, people will tend to use it for the other need. it is not 'racist' to admit that. I've lived in rural areas in the u.s. and urban areas and let me tell you, people do not always use things in ways that I would use them and I don't expect that of anyone else. Do you? The laptop... has built into it a certain ideology and set of western norms. There is a huge mental and knowledge infrastructure that goes into giving laptops the 'aura' that they have in our everyday lives. there is a ton of evidence that has shown that just giving countries computing infrastructure is not enough to transform them into learning or knowledge societies, there has to be an education program to parallel that infrastructure and then there has to be a plan for sustainability of the infrastructure also. In short, we have to export the ideology, norms, and knowledges to make things work the way we think they should work. However, it should be granted that not everyone thinks that we should pursue the normalization in parallel to the distribution of technology... However, then why are we designing the infrastructure according to our norms. my point is that this program has no educational or sustainability program iin place and thus what will happen to it? what would you do with the computer when the computer no longer works? or you can't figure out how to work it for some reason. as far as i can tell this whole $100 laptop program is predicated on the idea that technology can solve problems. Technology is just a tool, humans solve problems. If you don't give the humans the knowledge they need to build and sustain their own technological infrastructure, then in my opinion, you are just creating a larger digital divide, you have created a divide based on dependency. That will tend to develop into class divides much as happened in colonialism, is this project different than a digital colonization? I'm not sure. The project that I really liked in this field was the simputer, it had a plan for education and sustainability, but costs got out of hand, much like the costs of the $100 laptop have. On Jun 7, 2006, at 4:11 PM, Andre Brock wrote:
This has been an incredibly frustrating conversation. conversations about inequality and stratification do little to address the fact that there are millions of Africans who already use ICTs and would welcome the chance to have their own laptop for themselves or for their children.
don't assume that because its Africa that the need or capacity to use ICTs is somehow diminished because their utilities lack the stability and reliability of Western networks. After all, the United States has some of the most reliable ICT infrastructure in the world and still has higher rates of illiteracy and ICT-non participation than many smaller, poorer countries. ICT adoption, in a world increasingly inundated with the awareness of information as a tool, rests not simply upon the possession of the material artifact but much more so on the possibility of using information to improve one's life chances.
The comment about using a laptop as a shovel? completely out of line and insulting. Would you have made that comment about rural Chinese or Appalachian hill people?
Andre
-- Andre Brock PhD Candidate - Library and Information Studies Project Athena Fellow POSSE Mentor - UIUC Posse 2 (217.333.4693) University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Jeremy Hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.aoir.org The Association of Internet Researchers http://www.stswiki.org/ stswiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ LI-the journal http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series
pragmatics and common sense are not applicable outside of your own frame of reference. My family always references the difference between 'street knowledge' and 'book knowledge' - lack of one will get you killed, lack of the latter will get you fired. the assumption that Africans will use a laptop for a shovel is not like you using a dutch oven to move snow. i wasn't picking on you; it's just that your comment was the most blatant of a number of comments that on the surface address the 'practicalities' of bringing techonlogy to Africa but underneath are filled with assumptions about the capacities of Africans who are not users of IT in the ways that the Western world respects. your comments about exporting ideology and knowledge sound more like an assumption that Africans don't already have the knowledge or networks necessary to 'properly' employ these laptops. why is that? Despite the PR pictures i've seen (as you may have) of malnourished Africans crowded around a laptop like Negroponte's OLPC, there are more than a few places in Africa with thriving ISPs, corporate offices on the Internet, and cybercafes. i'm painfully aware, as a digital divide researcher and a minority, of the deficit assumptions that power DD discourse. there are literally millions of africans (and african americans, for that matter) who can and would use these laptops not only for their intended purposes, but probably hack them for purposes of their own. The point where i do agree with you (strangely enough) is about knowledge. but that knowledge should be user created content about the world that they live in, not random abstract knowledge about things in the Western world that don't matter a damn to someone in Burkina Faso. will their usage live up to our expectations? probably not. but the best resources about ICT usage indicate that the best way to learn about computers is to to let people play with them without fear of reprisal (have you read Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age? that's a good illustration of what i'm talking about). let's put them out there and see what happens. andre On 6/7/06, Jeremy Hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:
Look, i've used pots and pans for shovels before to dig my way out of snow drifts before i could afford a shovel. I've also used my old computer as a stepping stool. if there is a practical use for something that goes above and beyond its immediate projected usefulness, you can believe that people will be smart enough to use it that way. It is pragmatics and common sense. If the use value of an object is higher in another mode of use for whatever reason in a particular situation, then it will likely be used that way. if the use value of information technology is less than that of using it for a another need, people will tend to use it for the other need. it is not 'racist' to admit that. I've lived in rural areas in the u.s. and urban areas and let me tell you, people do not always use things in ways that I would use them and I don't expect that of anyone else. Do you?
The laptop... has built into it a certain ideology and set of western norms. There is a huge mental and knowledge infrastructure that goes into giving laptops the 'aura' that they have in our everyday lives. there is a ton of evidence that has shown that just giving countries computing infrastructure is not enough to transform them into learning or knowledge societies, there has to be an education program to parallel that infrastructure and then there has to be a plan for sustainability of the infrastructure also. In short, we have to export the ideology, norms, and knowledges to make things work the way we think they should work. However, it should be granted that not everyone thinks that we should pursue the normalization in parallel to the distribution of technology... However, then why are we designing the infrastructure according to our norms.
my point is that this program has no educational or sustainability program iin place and thus what will happen to it? what would you do with the computer when the computer no longer works? or you can't figure out how to work it for some reason.
as far as i can tell this whole $100 laptop program is predicated on the idea that technology can solve problems. Technology is just a tool, humans solve problems. If you don't give the humans the knowledge they need to build and sustain their own technological infrastructure, then in my opinion, you are just creating a larger digital divide, you have created a divide based on dependency. That will tend to develop into class divides much as happened in colonialism, is this project different than a digital colonization? I'm not sure.
The project that I really liked in this field was the simputer, it had a plan for education and sustainability, but costs got out of hand, much like the costs of the $100 laptop have.
-- Andre Brock PhD Candidate - Library and Information Studies Project Athena Fellow POSSE Mentor - UIUC Posse 2 (217.333.4693) University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
On Jun 7, 2006, at 5:15 PM, Andre Brock wrote:
pragmatics and common sense are not applicable outside of your own frame of reference. My family always references the difference between 'street knowledge' and 'book knowledge' - lack of one will get you killed, lack of the latter will get you fired.
human capacity and creativity of use, ie pragmatics is generalizable in many ways. my transposition of technical capacity amongst objects is not different in this case.
the assumption that Africans will use a laptop for a shovel is not like you using a dutch oven to move snow. i wasn't picking on you; it's just that your comment was the most blatant of a number of comments that on the surface address the 'practicalities' of bringing techonlogy to Africa but underneath are filled with assumptions about the capacities of Africans who are not users of IT in the ways that the Western world respects.
Kindly note, that i never raised the question of race or nationality in any of my posts. In fact, i don't actually differentiate the categories of race and nationality in my work (Personally, i think those categories perpetuate racism and nationalism and I prefer to promote a practice of equality and cosmopolitan identity). So when you say x is racist, my response is 'i was not talking about race', you should know i wasn't talking about Africa either, i think that you'll find that neither is the MIT project. The first project that MIT did that launched this was in Vietnam and Cambodia, where they took in IBM thinkpads and the project failed for a variety of reasons due to the problems that I've been talking about, education and sustainability.
your comments about exporting ideology and knowledge sound more like an assumption that Africans don't already have the knowledge or networks necessary to 'properly' employ these laptops. why is that?
In my mind, looking at this particular laptop design and knowing how hard it is to teach someone the ins and outs of using a linux system, i don't think that you could put this laptop very many places in the world and have the understandings or infrastructure necessary to have a successful user base. the fundamental assumption is not about Africans or anyone else, it is about this laptop and its design being flawed and premised on the assumption, in my opinion, that technology will solve the problems, or that technology will bring about a change. I think it is predicated on a form of technological determinism in other words, and I don't think that development works like that.
Despite the PR pictures i've seen (as you may have) of malnourished Africans crowded around a laptop like Negroponte's OLPC, there are more than a few places in Africa with thriving ISPs, corporate offices on the Internet, and cybercafes.
Actually I've never seen those pictures. The pictures and objects that I've seen were at WSIS and the recent picture of the bunny ear'd cute, twistable, multiple moving parts laptop that they just released.
i'm painfully aware, as a digital divide researcher and a minority, of the deficit assumptions that power DD discourse. there are literally millions of africans (and african americans, for that matter) who can and would use these laptops not only for their intended purposes, but probably hack them for purposes of their own. I don't doubt that there are millions of people in the world that will find these to be highly valued commodities. That also brings up the question... will it be better to sell your free laptop or keep it? How are they going to enforce that? if at all.
The point where i do agree with you (strangely enough) is about knowledge. but that knowledge should be user created content about the world that they live in, not random abstract knowledge about things in the Western world that don't matter a damn to someone in Burkina Faso.
will their usage live up to our expectations? probably not. but the best resources about ICT usage indicate that the best way to learn about computers is to to let people play with them without fear of reprisal (have you read Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age? that's a good illustration of what i'm talking about). let's put them out there and see what happens.
or, perhaps, we could take the 500 million that might be spent on this project worldwide and build information kiosks as Sara's posts suggests are effective.... or perhaps, we should build commercial infrastructure with that 500million.... as i said in my blog, i could see taking the Fablab http://cba.mit.edu/projects/fablab/ model and doing that and letting people develop their own novel technics based on an open infrastructure, perhaps they'd build a laptop, but i can't see the predetermined laptop model being highly successful. Perhaps I will be proven wrong.
andre
On 6/7/06, Jeremy Hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:
Look, i've used pots and pans for shovels before to dig my way out of snow drifts before i could afford a shovel. I've also used my old computer as a stepping stool. if there is a practical use for something that goes above and beyond its immediate projected usefulness, you can believe that people will be smart enough to use it that way. It is pragmatics and common sense. If the use value of an object is higher in another mode of use for whatever reason in a particular situation, then it will likely be used that way. if the use value of information technology is less than that of using it for a another need, people will tend to use it for the other need. it is not 'racist' to admit that. I've lived in rural areas in the u.s. and urban areas and let me tell you, people do not always use things in ways that I would use them and I don't expect that of anyone else. Do you?
The laptop... has built into it a certain ideology and set of western norms. There is a huge mental and knowledge infrastructure that goes into giving laptops the 'aura' that they have in our everyday lives. there is a ton of evidence that has shown that just giving countries computing infrastructure is not enough to transform them into learning or knowledge societies, there has to be an education program to parallel that infrastructure and then there has to be a plan for sustainability of the infrastructure also. In short, we have to export the ideology, norms, and knowledges to make things work the way we think they should work. However, it should be granted that not everyone thinks that we should pursue the normalization in parallel to the distribution of technology... However, then why are we designing the infrastructure according to our norms.
my point is that this program has no educational or sustainability program iin place and thus what will happen to it? what would you do with the computer when the computer no longer works? or you can't figure out how to work it for some reason.
as far as i can tell this whole $100 laptop program is predicated on the idea that technology can solve problems. Technology is just a tool, humans solve problems. If you don't give the humans the knowledge they need to build and sustain their own technological infrastructure, then in my opinion, you are just creating a larger digital divide, you have created a divide based on dependency. That will tend to develop into class divides much as happened in colonialism, is this project different than a digital colonization? I'm not sure.
The project that I really liked in this field was the simputer, it had a plan for education and sustainability, but costs got out of hand, much like the costs of the $100 laptop have.
-- Andre Brock PhD Candidate - Library and Information Studies Project Athena Fellow POSSE Mentor - UIUC Posse 2 (217.333.4693) University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
jeremy hunsinger jhuns@vt.edu www.cddc.vt.edu wiki.tmttlt.com www.tmttlt.com () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ Learning Inquiry-the journal http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series
I am certain that many would have made that comment about Appalachians. Which brings about another topic: how about closing the digital divide in the United States too, in both the urban and rural areas? Laura Andre Brock wrote:
This has been an incredibly frustrating conversation. conversations about inequality and stratification do little to address the fact that there are millions of Africans who already use ICTs and would welcome the chance to have their own laptop for themselves or for their children.
don't assume that because its Africa that the need or capacity to use ICTs is somehow diminished because their utilities lack the stability and reliability of Western networks. After all, the United States has some of the most reliable ICT infrastructure in the world and still has higher rates of illiteracy and ICT-non participation than many smaller, poorer countries. ICT adoption, in a world increasingly inundated with the awareness of information as a tool, rests not simply upon the possession of the material artifact but much more so on the possibility of using information to improve one's life chances.
The comment about using a laptop as a shovel? completely out of line and insulting. Would you have made that comment about rural Chinese or Appalachian hill people?
Andre
-- Laura J. Little, Ed.D. Instructional Technologist/Director, Title III Grant Marietta College Marietta, OH littlea@marietta.edu (740)376-4815 http://www.marietta.edu/~littlea/ "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Alan Kay
participants (4)
-
Andre Brock -
Andre Brock -
Dr. Laura Little -
Jeremy Hunsinger