Convergence Conversation

Delivering universal connectivity

Colin Batten's post about household Internet use made me think a little more about our view of the world.  There's the developed world, where people use the Internet to revolutionise individual and organisational communications and social structures. And then there's the third world.... "Roughly one-fifth of all U.S. households are disconnected from the Internet and have never used e-mail, according to research firm Parks Associates."

It is interesting how we tend to assume that everyone is connected to the Internet all the time via some form of computer, when we know that they're not, but it's also I think slightly dangerous. not just because they're not (even in developed countries) but also because it skews our view of investment and development. The clearest example of this is the "$100 laptop". This seems to be viewed by the media as a good thing and there's been a lot of coverage about it, and it's trajectory. But it does seem odd to me that the coverage assumes that giving laptops to poor schoolchildren is a good thing, which is not entirely clear to me. Anyone who doesn't support this enterprise is therefore regarded with suspicion... "if the technocrats really believed in the human value of universal connectivity – and all of them say they do – they would find ways of wiring southeast Asia and Africa. But they don’t..."

But that's not true: it's last-century perspective. Asia and Africa are being wired daily, but they're being wired by the mobile phone operators and it is the mobile phone that is changing the lives of millions. A good friend of mine just got back from an extended family vacation in South East Asia. He told me that he went on a boat trip on a huge lake somewhere in Cambodia and in the middle of the lake, with no human habitation visible and nothing on the horizon but jungle, he still got a signal on his phone.  That's a truly wired environment, and the fact that it doesn't involve laptops ($100 or otherwise) doesn't really matter.