Entry tags:

digital people, ideas, politics, rant

Virtual Africa, Technology & Privilege
*points up at the bitchface icon*

It seems this is Rant Week, so let's go with that as a theme!  Anybody else got a good rant that's been building up inside? Let it rip!

I saw another article yesterday that ticked me off, but I decided to hold off on blogging about it. I'm glad I did, because this morning I have some context for that rant, and some good news to wrap it in.

First the good news:  my dear friend Alanagh Recreant of Second Life Africa has just issued a press release:

Inworld Productions appointed as 'Virtual Africa' developers!

Uthango will develop an immersive 3D African environment in 2008...

[ By Dorette Steenkamp on 12 December, 2007 ]

The Virtual Africa 3D-environment in Second Life just announced that they will partner with German full-service developer, Inworld Productions, based in Berlin, to build the project's ‘sim’ or simulated environment. The developer will help bring highlights from the continent to the virtual world to support causes and draw awareness to the people of Africa. Similarly, it will actively pursue virtual worlds and real world integration via social networks to benefit African development and investment.

[see the full release here]

Alanagh has posted a discussion thread on Virtual Worlds Connect: "Why is it even important for Africa to be in virtual worlds?"  By way of an answer, here are some thoughts on two articles that appeared in yesterday's WIred Campus News (confusingly, a service of The Chronicle of Higher Education, and not Wired Magazine):

The first was "Yale U. Puts Entire Courses Online." 

Modern poetry, as well as introductory courses in physics, psychology, and political science, are four of seven classes from Yale U. that the institution put online today. Not only are the courses free for anyone who is interested, but they are as close to being there as online technology allows.

“These are gavel-to-gavel presentations,” Tom Conroy, a university spokesman, told The Chronicle. “We’ve put everything online that we could, and I think that’s what makes this different.” Lectures can be downloaded and run in streaming video or in audio only. There are searchable transcripts of each lecture, as well as course syllabi, reading assignments, problem sets, and other materials.

...

The project also has international connections, with Open Yale Courses lectures broadcast over Chinese television and a satellite network in India. The lectures will also be available at 300 libraries and universities throughout the world, via a U.S. State Department project called American Corners.

This?  This makes me proud to be Digital, thrilled to be living at a time when people have the power and the will to erase so many of the inequities that have plagued humanity from the dawn of time. The fact that humans aren't isolated meatbags, that by our very nature we are deeply connected to most everyone who lives and has ever lived, through language, knowledge and culture, is what makes us worthwhile as a species.  Now, now we can realize the full power of those connections.  Distance, class, race, economics can be wiped away as barriers to full participation in the richness of humanity.

Brave people *right now* are using technologies that fit our human natures so well-  technologies of communication and connection - to end ignorance, to give people the tools, the power, the faith, to transform our condition forever. Nothing is more noble and worthwhile than this.


And then there's people like Doris Lessing, the new Nobel laureate in literature. Her acceptance speech focused the hunger for knowledge in Africa.  There's much in it that's earnest and well-meaning, and it's worth reading. And, she's 88, and may be forgiven for being a little blind. But the Wired Campus coverage focused on a remarkable section of her speech:

In Nobel Speech, Doris Lessing Blames the Internet for a Decline in Book Reading

“We are in a fragmenting culture,” she wrote, “where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.”

She goes on to lay the blame on the Internet, which she said “has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc.”

Most of the speech has nothing to do with technology, and instead involves scenes of poor people in remote parts of Africa who, despite the odds, hold on to a love and respect for books. One woman clings to a torn section of Anna Karenina, which has found its way to her after a visiting United Nations official carelessly left it behind. It’s a stark contrast in attitudes, and one that is meant to be damning to Internet-happy folks at U.S. schools and colleges.....

Proponents of book digitization argue that it will one day help bring books like Anna Karenina — and even complete libraries — to remote villages thanks to cheap laptops and ubiquitous network access. Then poor students can get more than just cast-offs.

Lessing goes on to say,

This was Zimbabwe, physically conquered less than a hundred years before. The grandfathers and grandmothers of these people might have been storytellers for their clan. The oral tradition. In one generation – two, the transition from stories remembered and passed on, to print, to books. What an achievement.

Books, literally wrested from rubbish heaps and the detritus of the white man's world. But you may have a sheaf of paper (not typescript – that is a book – but it has to find a publisher, who will then pay you, remain solvent, distribute the books. I have had several accounts sent to me of the publishing scene for Africa. Even in more privileged places like North Africa, with its different tradition, to talk of a publishing scene is a dream of possibilities.

Here I am talking about books never written, writers that could not make it because the publishers are not there. Voices unheard. It is not possible to estimate this great waste of talent, of potential.

Seriously, WTF? Earlier she implied that perhaps we were too hasty in adopting the printing press. She also says that a love of "books" (as if one should love the needle and not the vaccine) was imbued in black Africans by whites, in contrast to indigenous storytelling traditions. Is this the product of someone torn between a sense of guilt and an urge to defend their own privilege in the midst of lack?  How could one defend a technology that controls access to the human community, to civilization, through agents, publishers, a "short tail" distribution model?  How could one go back and even imply that the printing press, which brought the production of knowledge out of the cloister and into the marketplace, that brought books from closed royal collections to the tin shack, was anything but a brilliant advance?

The technology that Lessing condemns will transform Africa and ennoble humanity. Books were a good start, but now they're part of the problem. Initiatives like Yale's will liberate Africa from a dependence on the castoffs of the white literary establishment, from being stuck with Lessing's sloppy seconds. Africans can choose for themselves what they want from the best of what the world produces.

And, equally vitally, if not more so, *African* "bloggers and bluggers" can *join* the conversation of humanity, can be liberated to be producers of knowledge and culture, not beggars for scraps at the global table of the white publishing elite. Those "voices unheard" that Lessing rightly bemoans? *Our* technology will let them be heard in every corner of every world!  *My* people - coders, networkers, bloggers - *you* reading this - are bodhisattvas, living saints, doing the work of grace in helping humanity achieve its potential.

The Lessings of the wold? Are a good argument against immortality. On the other hand, this speech confirms another transhumanist concept. The Singularity?  It already happened. You and I are living in a world the champions of the old order, the academics, politicians and literati, literally cannot even *see* to comprehend.