Hungryghoast's Web Presence - "Letting The Change Fall. Kevin Kelly -- The Technium. [Translations: Japanese] Every month the Long Now foundation hosts its Seminar on Long-Term Thinking. I serve as a sort of co-host, winnowing questions from the audience to the speaker. This month’s speaker was Iqbal Quadir, formerly at Harvard and now at MIT. I met Iqbal at least 10 years ago and have been following his adventures in changing the world one cell phone at a time. Iqbal’s talk focused on how technology can alleviate poverty. Here’s my summary of the talk: When Iqbal Quadir applied to US colleges from his home town in Bangladesh he was surprised to discover that not all American universities were found in Washington, DC. Quadir presented this broad outline of development in order to give context for his belief that technology can alleviate poverty. In Quadir’s view, it’s not that centralization per se creates poverty.
Technology is the escape from this quandary. Quadir settled on the cell phone as a way to decentralized connectivity. Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty? Kevin Kelly -- The Cell Phone Platform. I am envious of Jan Chipchase. He gets paid corporate wages to hopscotch from one remote exotic destination to the next, taking pictures of local lifestyle details and interviewing local residents about their technology use. He is usually described as a ‘”user anthropologist” or a “usability ethnographer” — either one would be a cool job. I often crib fantastic images of street use examples from Jan’s site Future Perfect.
Jan has always been very generous and will openly share not only his images but his annotations. He was recently featured in a long New York Times Magazine profile that asked the larger question of whether cell phones could help cure poverty. They will certainly be part of the solution. But as this fine article points out, they are also becoming something more. Cell phone repair alley in Delhi, India Chipchase annotates his photo of a Village Phone set up in Uganda. Chipchase invited local residents in Ghana to design their ideal cell phone. Our Cells, Ourselves - washingtonpost.com. The home is remote, even by Tibetan standards. Charming carvings cannot disguise how primitive it is. Not only does it have no toilet, it doesn't have an outhouse. Or even a designated hole in the ground. It does, however, boast one very great prize -- a ringing cellphone.
Why? "That is exactly the question I kept asking," says Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, who is writing a book about "what technology wants. " Apparently so. From essentially zero, we've passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years. "We knew this was going to happen a few years ago. "Eventually there will be more cellphone users than people who read and write. "It's the technology most adapted to the essence of the human species -- sociability," says Arthur Molella, director of the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.
Maybe. Life was so simple back in January of 1982. "It ain't got no wires! "