January 9, 2004 - Open Democracy: When Edward Cherlin arrived in Korea in 1967 to start his Peace Corps service, ox carts were common in the streets of Seoul. Thirty-seven years later Seoul has the highest broadband internet penetration in the world, and people all over Asia and the Pacific learn Korean in order to attend Korean universities

Peace Corps Online: Directory: Korea: Peace Corps Korea : The Peace Corps in Korea: January 9, 2004 - Open Democracy: When Edward Cherlin arrived in Korea in 1967 to start his Peace Corps service, ox carts were common in the streets of Seoul. Thirty-seven years later Seoul has the highest broadband internet penetration in the world, and people all over Asia and the Pacific learn Korean in order to attend Korean universities

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When Edward Cherlin arrived in Korea in 1967 to start his Peace Corps service, ox carts were common in the streets of Seoul. Thirty-seven years later Seoul has the highest broadband internet penetration in the world, and people all over Asia and the Pacific learn Korean in order to attend Korean universities



When Edward Cherlin arrived in Korea in 1967 to start his Peace Corps service, ox carts were common in the streets of Seoul. Thirty-seven years later Seoul has the highest broadband internet penetration in the world, and people all over Asia and the Pacific learn Korean in order to attend Korean universities

Six billion voices

Edward Cherlin

9 - 1 - 2004

When poor people can speak, the world will change – and mobile communications technology is giving them the tools for transformation.

Suppose for a moment that we can get information and communications technology (ICT) to work for the poor. This would mean that remote villages in the developing world – with no electric power, telephone cables or money – would get low-cost computers and broadband wireless internet, plus internet telephony (VoIP), enabling in turn sustainable economic growth, education, good health care, access to government and jobs. Suppose that all of this works everywhere, and that over time it breaks the cycle of dependence on government aid and NGO charity, replacing it with self-reliance. What else would happen?

You may think it sounds far-fetched, but now is not too soon to begin thinking. Enormous initiatives are underway to make precisely these developments happen. The UN World Summit of the Information Society in Geneva last month is just one. Far more direct and technical projects have been in preparation for years.

From the village to the global community

In 2002 the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, challenged Silicon Valley to create computer and communications systems that would enable sustainable development in all of the villages of the world. It was the same year my company, Encore Technologies, released its ‘Simputer’ products, hand-held computers designed in India to meet the stringent requirements of the poor.

We were not alone. Other computers for villages were coming from Brazil’sComputador Popular, the Jhai Foundation (for Laos), and the Hewlett-Packard e-Inclusion program (for Native American reservations, American inner cities, and several countries, including India). The Grameen Foundation USA started a Village Computing project, evaluating different systems like Microsoft PocketPC, Free Software GNU/Linux – as well as Simputers. The Bay Area Research Wireless Network was experimenting with low-cost wireless communications units and deploying them around the San Francisco Bay area.

Now, many new free software and commercial software products are coming out to address the needs of the poor. This includes supporting a wide range of languages written in numerous alphabets and other kinds of writing systems. For input, you need more than just keyboard entry, screen display and printing, but also handwriting and speech recognition. For output you need text-to-speech or sometimes Braille.

Tata Consulting in India has used these capabilities to create literacy software in Indian languages. Encore’s partners and other Simputer developers have created a variety of software, including an agricultural survey programme, micro-banking software, a postal money-order SmartCard system, and much more.

The Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka is currently planning to deploy Simputers in its village banking system, and then to design programmes for its schools and clinics in 15,000 villages. The key to Sarvodaya’s programmes will be training people in the villages to understand their use. Villagers will also have to be trained as technicians, system administrators, web designers, and programmers, providing local support for Sarvodaya’s operations and local employment at the same time.

The dead must be heard

If it does all work? Well, it would still take at least a generation for the developing countries to reach the development status of, say, South Korea. When I arrived there in 1967 to start my Peace Corps service, ox carts were common in the streets of Seoul. Thirty-seven years later Seoul has the highest broadband internet penetration in the world, and people all over Asia and the Pacific learn Korean in order to attend Korean universities.

In the process of getting there, moreover, there would be a greater backlash of protectionism from the United States and the European Union than today against the increased agricultural and manufacturing exports from the rapidly-developing countries, and against outsourcing labour to them. This backlash would ultimately be as ineffective as King Cnut commanding the tide not to come in, though in the shorter term it would delay economic and social development.

But even alongside these problems, this dissemination of ICT to the people of the world will have one momentous consequence, which can be understood by asking: if everybody on the planet who wants internet access can have a broadband link, as indirectly promised by the UN Millennium Development Goals, what will they talk about, and to whom, with what results?

The people who get the new equipment will – in addition to pop music, TV and movie stars, news, the stock market, sports, jobs, eBay, health, education, and politics – talk about the programmes that accompany it. Villages that now have no regular communication will be able to form agricultural, craft, and manufacturing cooperatives. Distance learning will bring villagers and college students together. Doctors will examine villagers over telemedicine systems. Villagers will have direct access to government programmes, online banking, and e-commerce (both buying and selling).

More immediately important, according to surveys of actual villagers, will be the ability to make phone calls to friends, family, and business contacts. VoIP telephony is much cheaper than cell phone services, especially internationally. Email is not on the horizon for a lot of people, especially the illiterate, but that will soon change, as new literacy software becomes available to hundreds of millions of people in their own languages.

The biggest difference of all will be in discussions about poverty. There is a fair amount now, but almost all of it comes from prosperous people like me. For the first time, we will hear from poor people in all their diversity about their experiences and their views on what should be done. The poor will be able to talk to each other, too, in world languages such as English, French, or Arabic, and in many hundreds of local languages.

Again, much of what we expect to hear is not new. A very small number of poor people become prosperous or prominent and get the chance to tell their stories in each generation. Escaped American slave Sojourner Truth, before the American civil war, is a prime example, as are any number of blues, jazz, country, and folk singers. Prosperous people sometimes take the time to ask the poor about their lives and get the message out, as Studs Terkel does from his base in Chicago, and as oral history projects do.

The Association of Dead People (Mritak Sangh) in India is a good example of the problems we expect to hear more about. These are people declared legally dead by corrupt local officials bribed by the victims’ relatives in order to steal their property. One of the reasons this still goes on is that the members of the association have no email addresses and no website (contributions would be welcome, but I don’t know where you should send them). Thus they cannot mount a coordinated political campaign to fight this corruption. Journalists report losing track of the organisation, and not knowing how to contact them again.

A current demonstration of the promise of the emerging technology is the documentary Vis a Vis: Native Tongues. It shows video teleconferences between James Luna, Native American performance artist, and Ningali Lawford, Australian Aborigine playwright and actress, intercut with clips from their performances and other events and images. Luna and Lawford show where they live, introduce their families, and discuss their work, and the personal, family, and community experiences their work is based on.

Lawford and Luna had not previously talked to each other or seen each other’s work, but they were working on almost precisely the same issues of racism and cultural insensitivity. Both include in their work the experience of their communities with forced enrolment in government boarding schools in which native languages were forbidden.

Here we have a glimpse of the future, a hint of the way people around the world who share a problem will be able to get together online to discuss the problem and the possible solutions, to coordinate actions, and to pool their social and political resources.

A few billion people would like to have a word with you about our common future. It is not too soon to think about how you will respond.




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Story Source: Open Democracy

This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Korea; Interent

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