>Nicholas Negroponte (MIT Media Lab spin doctor) was at the DAVOS World
>Economic Forum promoting the idea of the cheap PC for development.
This, as most other ideas of a "cheaper PC", seems to prop up yet another
gadget for profit... Who said people really want a PC (or a miserable,
unfeatured cheap gadget instead) in each home? Lower-income villages and
communities want (and need) access to ICTs, but the idea of reproducing the
pattern of the rich to gain this access is another matter.
Behind nearly all ideas of a "cheap PC" is the consumerist, very USA, view
that any individual should have the same "propertied" access profile (a
computer which I can call "my own computer" at home connected to the
Internet), so let us downgrade the standard PC for use by those poor people
so they can call it "mine" too, and so on.
Why not think in terms of networking using community spaces -- the "cheap
PCs" for this (or for the "individual solution") are already
available off the shelf and are *real* PCs. Obtaining the hardware for this
is not the major problem (curiously, VIA is one of the major
manufacturers of standard parts for cheaper machines) -- the problems are
the running costs, how to maintain, how to guarantee reasonable
connectivity, how to extract the best from these installations to the
benefit of all, all to manage the tools locally by the community and for
itself.
Digital inclusion strategies which start with "solving the hardware
problem" (the "consumer product problem") instead just treating it as part
of the broader (and far more serious) issues facing lower-income
communities may be either naive or have a for profit motive behind them.
The VIA chief executive officer and his flock are very happy to have the
Negropontes to their side...
IMHO
--c.a.
Este archivo fue generado por hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Jul 1 11:02:37 2005 AST