/Culture/ Development 2.0: can the web save the world?
13/06/2007 | Filed under Discover > Culture
Children in Third World countries are about to experience wireless networking for the first time, courtesy of the One Laptop Per Child initiative. Scott Carney speaks to the men behind the project, and explores some of its benefits and pitfalls
There are no two ways about it, the developing world has problems. Two thirds of the planet still struggles against the ravages of colonialism, military dictatorships, poor sanitation and lousy schools. Outside of a few spits of land in Europe, North America and Asia, the planet is a mess. But what are we, the lowly web developers of the world, supposed to do about it?
Although they won’t admit it, Nicholas Negroponte, the project’s founder, and Walter Bender, the president, are the intellectual descendants of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian social theorist who coined the term “Global Village” to describe the way that communication is shrinking the planet.
McLuhan broke ground as a theorist when he declared “the medium is the message”, while arguing that technology is the most powerful engine for social change. According to McLuhan, the course of history was more radically altered by the introduction of the printing press, computers, radios and telephones than it was by Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon. The logic is addictive: even the most significant moments in history, such as the bombing of Hiroshima, could only have happened with significant technological advancement.
The green box
When OLPC set about trying to fix things in the developing world, the biggest problems it saw weren’t social issues, but technological deficiencies. Corrupt governments don’t disappear through armed revolution, they’re gradually filtered out by decent education. And what better tool for educating a population than setting kids loose on the World Wide Web?
And what a computer it is. The official name for the little green laptop is the “XO”, but most of the engineers working on the project have nicknamed it “the box”. It won’t win any awards for high performance, but what it lacks in power, it makes up for in connectivity and adaptability. Two plastic antennas on either side of the screen enable the box to instantly connect to other boxes up to one kilometre away and form a redundant wireless mesh network. Only one computer within the Wi-Fizone needs to hook to the internet in order to provide a whole village with access to the web – what Walter Bender calls “a mini internet”.
The dual-mode swivel LCD screen can switch between low-resolution colour and a hi-res black-and-white mode necessary for reading in bright sunlight. Every unit comes standard with a pinhole camera and microphone for video conferencing, three USB ports, 128MB of RAM and half a gig of flash memory. And the whole thing runs on Linux.
This nod to open source operating systems and software could be a major boon to the DIY community of programmers. In a single sweep, the total number of Linux users will rocket from 29 million to more than a billion almost overnight. With this sort of influx into the technology community at large, it doesn’t take a mathematician to realise that a lot of these Linux-using kids will graduate to become developers in their own right.
“The goal is to create a platform that has a low floor, but no ceiling,” says Walter Bender. “We want kids to be able to log on and immediately be able to use the device without a lot of instruction. But as they become more advanced, we want the machine to keep pace.”
Bender says that, other than simply giving the computers to children, there’s no plan for how they’ll use them; no standard curriculum or predefined ideology. It is, as Bender says, “an open-ended project”. The OLPC initiative may just save the developing world. Rather than using blogs and fancy web pages to make money, Bender and Negroponte are using simple machines that could transform whole nations.
He hopes that the kids will use them to edit their own wikis, compose streams of Third World eBooks, blog, code new web applications and figure out technological solutions to seemingly intractable Third World problems, but even Bender admits that the computers could be used for other purposes. For instance, there’s nothing stopping the kids from radically expanding the number of 419 scams, surfing (and filming) porn, or keeping tabs on celebrity gossip. Yet, even with some internet misuse, preliminary studies that explored what happens when poor, illiterate children are given access to computers have already shown positive results. In India, a project called Hole-in-the-Wall (www.hole-in-the-wall.com) plugged in free internet terminals in 126 slums across the country, and children learned to read and use computers on their own; they ended up teaching one other the ins and outs of technology, and the knowledge spread like wildfire. Once they had a bit of web savvy, they did better in school and began to conceive of a world outside of poverty. So when they get a hold of the XO, one would expect major results. The thing is, no one’s sure what those results are going to be.
The outsourcing boom in India offers an example. Everyone loves to applaud the financial gains India has made via outsourcing, but the focus has been on the successful capitalists who came up with the ideas, not the people taking calls at call centres. Medical transcription depots, call centres and data entry bazaars may make money for people living on rupees, but it isn’t the sort of labour that’s going to make India a market leader. So even if OLPC makes a jump in computer literacy, this doesn’t mean that Zambian computer geeks are going to be tapped by the movers and shakers of the world for anything more taxing than data entry.
Best-case scenario
Without assured results, it may prove difficult to sell the project to countries already coping with armed insurrections, poor sanitation and the ravages of AIDS. Each XO costs just $100, yet when you aim to give one to every child in the developing world, we’re talking $100billion, with replacement units needed every five years or so.
“I expect that this project will be a lot like what happened in India,” says Richard Wilk, an anthropologist at Indiana University, “when development people came up with the idea to create thousands of solar battery charging stations. They worked great for a while, but there was no effort for upkeep and they all fell apart.” With so many countries involved in OLPC, it will take a lot of coordination to keep everything running smoothly. So not every country has jumped onboard.
Whatever happens, the number of new users is, without a doubt, going to change the topography of the web. A billion more laptops could mean as many as two billion new computer users. And to some degree, every one of those people will contribute to the growing mass of searchable data, and hopefully the world of ideas.
