Information Poverty = Rural Poverty? Computers as the New Knowledge Brokers in Rural India

The conventional ‘village’ is being digitalized. In the last decade, India has proudly embraced its new image as the world’s Silicon Valley and back-office (and arguably front office) for global business. This momentum is being driven by information and communication technologies (ICTs); subsequently government policies ambitiously live up to this new found reputation by promising digital change across all sectors, particularly in the rural domain (Aggarwal, 2002). After all, India continues to be an agrarian country despite its new found Silicon Valley status. Central to this effort entails connecting India’s 600,000 villages with computers and the net, signaling one of the biggest rural investments for socio-economic mobility. The net is heralded as the new intermediary to knowledge for the villager. Underlying this is the belief that rural poverty has chronically persisted due to information poverty. For instance, farmers are perceived as being poor due to their limited access to critical knowledge on food prices, fertilizers and market demands for agricultural goods; rural healthcare practitioners are looked upon as lagging behind in the latest knowledge on diagnostics and treatment; and rural students are seen as digital non-natives in this virtual and information economy. This paper critically assesses this premise on the information gap being the key barrier to transformative and positive change in villages in India. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural Almora in the Central Himalayas,

Fifty Shades of Privacy

Facebook serves as _The Internet_ to majority of the world’s poor through its controversial internet.org initiative. By providing free internet service to the poor in the global South, it has become the one-stop-shop for most social activity. Given the collapse of contextual diversity here, Facebook is both a forum of public expression and state control on morality and privacy rights. It is complicit in obfuscation that empowers and exploits. While universalizing virtual space for this vast populace with its global brand and algorithmic structure, specificities manifest through gender and racial enactments and codes of conduct across the global South. This text investigates how low-income youth in two of the BRICS nations- Brazil and India, exercise and express their notions on digital privacy, interpersonal surveillance and trust on Facebook. As Facebook situates itself as the dominant virtual public sphere for the world’s poor, we are compelled to ask ourselves if digital inclusivity comes at the price of cultural diversity. This text provides fresh perspectives on how privacy is pluralizing for a globalizing and emergent digital public

Profiting from empowerment? Investigating dissemination avenues for educational technology content within an emerging market solutions project

ABSTRACT: The Stills in Sync (SIS) project is a joint initiative of the nonprofit organization PlanetRead and the global information and communication technology (ICT) company Hewlett Packard (HP). The SIS project entails creating a multimedia product designed to enhance literacy in rural India through the revival of regional folksongs on relevant social issues. This product utilizes the Same Language Subtitling (SLS) feature that won the World Bank Development Marketplace Award in 2002 and the Tech Laureate in education honor from the Technology Museum of Innovation (San Jose) in 2003. This paper explores the dissemination avenues of the SLS folksongs product and its effects within the Inclusive Community (icommunity) of HP in Kuppam, India. This community has functioned as a social and economic laboratory in which HP tested new technologies. Analyzing this test environment makes apparent the dichotomy between corporate responsibility and community development. Keeping the balance between profitable goals of the ICT business and development goals towards sustainable social and economic reforms has been illustrated by the survey results in this paper

Walled Gardens: Privacy within Public Leisure Space Online and Offline

Abstract Social network sites are the new urban parks where people congregate, socialize and exercise leisure. Its web architectures however are being walled in, dictated by market systems and State ideologies. These cyber-enclosures are justified along the lines of privacy that garners protection, efficiency and functionality. There is significant concern for the potential irrevocable loss of the ‘public’ and ‘open’ character intended of internet infrastructures, fearing the fostering of social segregation, homogenization and corporatization of leisure and a loss of civic sense. This paper addresses these concerns by looking at contemporary material architectures that are shaping public social and leisure space, particularly gardens within gated communities and malls. It argues that for a comprehensive understanding on privacy and public leisure architectures, we need to recognize the parallels between these virtual and material spheres as social norms, values and laws permeate these boundaries

Copycats of the Central Himalayas

This case study highlights practices of a rarely documented group of neo-users of the Internet or newbies from Central Himalayas, serving as a catalyst for delving deeply into the act of ‘plagiarism’ in online learning By looking at such ‘learning’ practices away from schools, namely at cybercafés in Almora, a ‘rur-town’ in the Himalayas, much is revealed of its educational system and learning in the broadest sense. There is an urgent need in educational environments to move beyond the punitive approach to ‘plagiarism’ through computer usage and instead pay attention to the actual learning and teaching that goes on through these processes with online resources. In doing so, contemplation of the relationship between information, ownership and originality in online learning and its role in how we enact ‘schooling’ through online-offline spaces becomes central to this study. This case study aims to provoke innovative educational approaches where current practices with new tools can be capitalized strategically for genuine learning to transpire

Global cities: Global parks: Globalizing of digital leisure networks.

This paper proposes to understand the globalizing of online Social Network Sites (SNS) through the spatial metaphor of global parks. It builds upon a commonly accepted ideation of the city as socially-constructed and that which has been harnessed to understand the spatiality of the Internet. Over the decades we have learnt to conceptualize the Internet with the aid of metaphors, including that of the city to grasp its intricate information highways, networks and connectivity, the underlying logic that dictates movement within these spaces and nodes of concentrated social action. By equating the Internet to the city, we are compelled to extend our imagination by applying our understandings of urban planning and geography to current vital conversations on the shaping of Internet spaces. The persistence of this parallel has matured our thinking significantly from the utopic notion of the web as a frontier of limitless and depoliticized space to a more architected and socio-economic phenomenon of a propertied and contextual digital place. Given that the city has been a useful analogy for the Internet to confront its directionality and political intent in design and usage, this paper takes this parallel further, delving into a segment of the Internet that is currently in the midst of tremendous speculation- that of Social Network Sites (SNS) and its seemingly open, democratic, social and inclusive nature. If we narrow our attention to a domain of the city that is imbued with a similar rhetoric of being open, social and leisurely

Bottom of the data pyramid

To date, little attention has been given to the impact of big data in the Global South, about 60% of whose residents are below the poverty line. Big data manifests in novel and unprecedented ways in these neglected contexts. For instance, India has created biometric national identities for her 1.2 billion people, linking them to welfare schemes, and social entrepreneurial initiatives like the Ushahidi project that leveraged crowdsourcing to provide real-time crisis maps for humanitarian relief. While these projects are indeed inspirational, this article argues that in the context of the Global South there is a bias in the framing of big data as an instrument of empowerment. Here, the poor, or the “bottom of the pyramid” populace are the new consumer base, agents of social change instead of passive beneficiaries. This neoliberal outlook of big data facilitating inclusive capitalism for the common good sidelines critical perspectives urgently needed if we are to channel big data as a positive social force in emerging economies. This article proposes to assess these new technological developments through the lens of databased democracies, databased identities, and databased geographies to make evident normative assumptions and perspectives in this under-examined context

Prizes for innovation

The use of prizes to stimulate innovation in education has dramatically increased in recent years, but, to date, no organization has attempted to critically examine the impact these prizes have had on education. This report attempts to fill this gap by conducting a landscape review of education prizes with a focus on technology innovation. This report critically analyses the diversity of education prizes to gauge the extent to which these new funding mechanisms lead to innovative solutions in this sector. This is supplemented with interviews with sponsors and prize participants to gain the much needed practitioner’s perspective. We address important questions that pervade as prizes are being implemented in this sector: What seems to be working and why? How do prizes compare to other funding mechanisms to stimulate technology innovations? How is sustainability achieved? What can be learned that can inform the design of future prizes? A number of important assumptions are re-examined, namely, that technology innovation is central to educational reform, prizes stimulate innovation, scalability is a proxy for sustainability, and prizes are the most efficient funding mechanism to stimulate innovation. We recalibrate expectations of technology innovation prizes in the educational field against empirical evidence. We reveal key trends through the deploying of prizes in this field and offer case studies as good practices for sponsors to consider when designing future prizes. The report makes recommendations to enhance the impact of prizes, drawing from interdisciplinary sources. The intent of this report is to enable sponsors to distinguish the hype surrounding these prizes and proceed to design prizes that can best serve the education sector

Karaoke for social and cultural change

This account demonstrates the key challenges faced in producing engaging educational content for information and communication technologies (ICT) deployed in rural India. The 'Stills in Sync' (SIS) project aims to enhance literacy through the revival and proliferation of popular regional folksongs with social awareness themes in rural India. This product entails the use of the Same Language Subtitling (SLS) karaoke feature that won the Worldbank Development Marketplace award in 2002 and the 'Tech Laureate' honor from the Technology Museum of Innovation in 2003. This case study highlights the struggles faced in the production process as we sought to negotiate localism with scalability. The paper is meant to stimulate discussion and further research on the process of digitalizing cultural and educational content in muliple languages for literacy gains and empowerment. I attempt to give three-dimensionality to current buzzwords in education content creation using ICT: localism, relevance and engagement

The leisure divide: Can the 'Third World' come out to play?

As billions of dollars are invested in mitigating the digital divide, stakes are raised to gain validity for these cost-intensive endeavors, focusing more on online activities that have clear socio-economic outcomes. Hence, farmers in rural India are watched closely to see how they access crop prices online, while their Orkuting gets sidelined as anecdotal. This paper argues that this is a fundamental problem as it treats users in emerging markets as somehow inherently different from those in the West. After all, it is now commonly accepted that much of what users do online in developed nations is leisure-oriented. This perspective does not crossover as easily into the Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) world, where the utilitarian angle reigns. This paper argues that much insight can be gained in bridging worlds of ICT4D and New Media s