Ewan's Corner

Posts Tagged ‘technology’

Thanks to @hfordsa for the heads up.
via http://bostonreview.net/BR35.6/toyama.php

"Technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute."

If I were to summarize everything I learned through research in ICT4D, it would be this: technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute. If you have a foundation of competent, well-intentioned people, then the appropriate technology can amplify their capacity and lead to amazing achievements. But, in circumstances with negative human intent, as in the case of corrupt government bureaucrats, or minimal capacity, as in the case of people who have been denied a basic education, no amount of technology will turn things around.

….

Technology is a magnifier in that its impact is multiplicative, not additive, with regard to social change. In the developed world, there is a tendency to see the Internet and other technologies as necessarily additive, inherent contributors of positive value. But their beneficial contributions are contingent on an absorptive capacity among users that is often missing in the developing world. Technology has positive effects only to the extent that people are willing and able to use it positively. The challenge of international development is that, whatever the potential of poor communities, well-intentioned capability is in scarce supply and technology cannot make up for its deficiency.

….

The myth of scale is seductive because it is easier to spread technology than to effect extensive change in social attitudes and human capacity. In other words, it is much less painful to purchase a hundred thousand PCs than to provide a real education for a hundred thousand children; it is easier to run a text-messaging health hotline than to convince people to boil water before ingesting it; it is easier to write an app that helps people find out where they can buy medicine than it is to persuade them that medicine is good for their health. It seems obvious that the promise of scale is a red herring, but ICT4D proponents rely—consciously or otherwise—on it in order to promote their solutions.

”When a village has ready access to a PC, the dominant use is by young men playing games, watching movies, or consuming adult content.”

Disseminating a technology would work if, somehow, the technology did more for the poor, undereducated, and powerless than it did for the rich, well-educated, and mighty. But the theory of technology-as-magnifier leads to the opposite conclusion: the greater one’s capacity, the more technology delivers; the lesser one’s capacity, the less value technology has. In effect, technology helps the rich get richer while doing little for the incomes of the poor, thus widening the gaps between haves and have-nots.

….My point is not that technology is useless. To the extent that we are willing and able to put technology to positive ends, it has a positive effect. For example, Digital Green (DG), one of the most successful ICT4D projects I oversaw while at Microsoft Research, promotes the use of locally recorded how-to videos to teach smallholder farmers more productive practices. When it comes to persuading farmers to adopt good practices, DG is ten times more cost-effective than classical agriculture extension without technology.

But the value of a technology remains contingent on the motivations and abilities of organizations applying it - villagers must be organized, content must be produced, and instructors must be trained. The limiting factor in spreading DG’s impact is not how many camcorders its organizers can purchase or how many videos they can shoot, but how many groups are performing good agriculture extension in the first place. Where such organizations are few, building institutional capacity is the more difficult, but necessary, condition for DG’s technology to have value. In other words, disseminating technology is easy; nurturing human capacity and human institutions that put it to good use is the crux.

….

“Computers, guns, factories, and democracy are powerful tools, but the forces that determine how they’re used ultimately are human.”

We are in the midst of the largest ICT4D experiment ever. In 2009 there were over 4.5 billion active mobile phone accounts, more than the entire population of the world older than twenty years of age. The cell phone is overtaking both television and radio as the most popular consumer electronic device in history. Some 80 percent of the global population is within range of a cell tower, and mobile phones are increasingly seen in the poorest, remotest communities.

These numbers prompt suggestions that there is no longer a “digital divide” for real-time communication. Yet any demographic account of mobile have-nots will show them to be predominantly poor, remote, female, and politically mute. Whatever the case, if the spread of mobile phones is sufficient to help end global poverty, we will know soon enough. But, if it doesn’t, should we then pin our hopes on the next new shiny gadget?

South Africa’s second satellite – Sumbandila (“lead the way” in Tshivenda) – has produced its first official images from orbit (see left).

Launched on 17th September 2009 from Kazakhstan on a Russian Soyuz rocket, Sumbandila is a small 81kg low orbit (500 km) solar-powered satellite with a Butane propulsion system successfully fired in January. It carries a 6 spectral band imager (6,25 m × 6,25 m resolution) for ground photography and video (agriculture, mapping of infrastructure and land use, population measurement and the monitoring of dam levels etc), as well as an amateur radio transponder (SA-AMSAT) among other experiments.

See the Sumbandila mission blog for details, as well as the Wikipedia article – there is also a Facebook group.

A video taken of Earth from orbit (13th October 2009, moving over Namibia).

Scobleizer (Robert Scoble, a technical evangelist employed by Microsoft) is the most prolific blogger i’ve ever come across. When i have the time, i try and read most of what he publishes… although this can be dangerous, you tend to lose whole hours of your life :-)

This well-written post of his struck a note for me -
Ten evangelism and IT lessons from one of America’s biggest churches. I’ve been pondering evangelism using IT for awhile now… i truly believe it’s essential for the modern church to use… eventually I want to put up our church sermons online, for a start, and a church website is often a great way to reach people without putting any pressure on them.

Dallas Fellowship Church (i didn’t think much of their website) sounds extremely impersonal to me – and more like a technical paradise than a Christian one – but then i’m used to a slightly smaller setup :-) I honestly don’t see how the focus could be on God in a place like this… but Scoble’s article has several very valid points to make about effective use of technology today.

“While most of the computers at this church are running Windows, there are a couple of Macs (their radio show engineer was editing on a Mac when I was given a tour), most of the video is running on a Windows front end, but the back end is an SGI set of computers, along with a stack of computers running Linux that do the hard-core video rendering. “Why did you use Linux for that?” I asked. Storch answered that most the bleeding-edge video rendering apps were designed for Linux. Lesson nine: don’t be religious about technology, choose what gets the job done best for the least amount of money and staff time.“

Be sure to check out the article comments too… with an open mind, as usual. My favourite two comments:

“I believe this is known as syncretism: take the local belief structure (be it a winter solstice holiday with an evergreen tree or a belief that television or a computer is the most important thing to watch) and twist it so it appears to have a religious method. Now you know why Christianity has been so successful.

mb • 6/8/04; 2:35:17 AM

On that I agree. What a church website tho, I felt as if the dot.com boom had never died. Eye Candy forever, and took me forever to find the Statement of Faith, seems mainline Protestant with some Southern Penacostal-styled Vineyard Movement Redux, TBN Cheese Whiz with some happy happy Disneyland touches thrown-in. And the online giving part strikes me as amazingly crass. I do notice mass focus on Home Teams, ironic unto itself. The big needs to divide to little to survive, I dunno tho, with 19,000 people you’d be just a number, or a database entry, with SQL Server backend. This is church forged by MBAs; God as a corporation. And quite nice when churches can develop all that MSFT backend for nearly free.
Christopher Coulter • 6/8/04; 2:40:28 AM