Africa’s 900 million inhabitants ~14 percent of the world’s population—have access to less than 1/5 of 1% of the world’s connectivity.
Almost One Million Egyptians Have Broadband Internet Access MOHAMED MARWEN MEDDAH | APRIL 28, 2008 – 1:54 PM |
In a new survey of connectivity among Egyptian urban households, titled ‘Egypt Households Telecoms and Media Survey Report 2008‘, in which the Arab Advisors Group sampled 700 households in urban areas of the country, the results show almost a million Egyptian households have access to broadband connections.
Last year, the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based environmental research group, published a report with the International Finance Corporation entitled “The Next Four Billion,” an economic study that looked at, among other things, how poor people living in developing countries spent their money. One of the most remarkable findings was that even very poor families invested a significant amount of money in the I.C.T. category — information-communication technology, which, according to Al Hammond, the study’s principal author, can include money spent on computers or land-line phones, but in this segment of the population that’s almost never the case. What they’re buying, he says, are cellphones and airtime, usually in the form of prepaid cards. Even more telling is the finding that as a family’s income grows — from $1 per day to $4, for example — their spending on I.C.T. increases faster than spending in any other category, including health, education and housing. “It’s really quite striking,” Hammond says. “What people are voting for with their pocketbooks, as soon as they have more money and even before their basic needs are met, is telecommunications.
This is why a new breed of observers is now joining the ever-present futurists and gadget geeks in studying the consequences of this technology. Sociologists in particular are trying to figure out how mobile communications are changing interactions between people. Nomadism, most believe, tends to bring people who are already close, such as family members, even closer. But it may do so at the expense of their attentiveness towards strangers encountered physically (rather than virtually) in daily life. That has implications for society at large. Anthropologists and psychologists are investigating how mobile and virtual interaction spices up or challenges physical and offline chemistry, and whether it makes young people in particular more autonomous or more dependent. Architects, property developers and urban planners are changing their thinking about buildings and cities to accommodate the new habits of the nomads that dwell in them. Activists are trying to piggyback on the ubiquity of nomadic tools to improve the world, even as they worry about the same tools in the hands of the malicious. Linguists are chronicling how nomadic communication changes language itself, and thus thought.
In his ReadWriteWeb post, Attention Economy: All You Need to Know, Richard MacManus writes: “A key point is that The Attention Economy is about the consumer having choice - they get to choose where their attention is ‘spent’. Another key ingredient in the attention game is relevancy. As long as the consumer sees relevant content, he/she is going to stick around - and that creates more opportunities to sell.
It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen,” he writes. “Invisible is coming.
Corporations loom large, but corporations are being interpentrated by the horizontal communication the Net allows. You have to transform freedom into a commodity. [Not sure if he’s recommending this.] That’s where the business is. The endless capacity of hackers to create more levels of communication means the corporate world has to try to incorporate this. Ultimately the corporate media have to rely on a new form of articulation. The key is that this distributes power to the edges of the network. The consequences are powerful. New images. Public debates. And throughout history, they have watched us; now we watch them. The real citizen journalist is anyone with a cellphone who can upload into YouTube.
Web to go
In a delicious irony, the Web2.0 paradigm to move the “desktop” from the PC to the Internet has created (for some) a host of seemingly old fashioned problems of connectivity which, of course, are the daily lot of many in developing countries. To wit, in a Web2.0 world, when all your programs and files are on the Internet, what do you do when you can’t connect to the Internet? There is much activity now to develop applications that work seamlessly in an on-line/off-line world that will be of enormous utility to developing countries where lack of access to the Internet is not an occasional nuisance but a daily reality. The big players have been very active here: Google with its Gears application, Adobe with Air, Microsoft with Silverlight. We can only look to developments here with heightened anticipation.
What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed? What if the networked nature of content on the web has changed not just how I consume information but how I process it? What if I no longer have the patience to read a book because it’s too…. linear.
But the convenience argument seems to float on the surface of a deeper issue — there’s something about the print vs. online dialectic that always seemed superficial to me. Books, newspapers, and other print media are carefully laid out. Online content like blogs are shoot from the hip. Books are linear and foster concentration and focus, while the web, with all its hyperlinks, is kinetic, scattered, all over the place.
Julie Ferguson, a researcher at the VU University Amsterdam, sees the same problem in communities of practice. She observes that knowledge management is largely dependent on community members sharing and fulfilling each others’ knowledge needs. ‘These communities are most successful when they emerge spontaneously, without management interference. But if the aim is to use this knowledge at management level, you have to intervene’, Ferguson says. ‘This is the paradox of knowledge management, and resolving it is a great challenge’.
When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots. While researchers don’t yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids. In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.
