Unthinkingly

Ode To Ethan

The other day I referenced Jan Chipchase’s blog as “almost certainly my favorite.” This is patently false. I am a big fat liar when I get excited. (Chipchase is probably tied for second with a few other exceptionally cool writers.)

The blogger at the top of my feedreader is, really this time, absolutely, Ethan Zuckerman. I got into his blog when I was getting my journalism degree and I stumbled across “Global Attention Profiles,” basically maps of media blindspots. He was doing all of this research that combined media analysis with mapping with data scraping. Very cool.

When I was reading about that project in 2003 or 2004 I was totally turned on by the idea of writing scripts to create DIY datasets; I had no idea how to program at the time, but the stuff I have done with perl scrapers my whole new career in programming is directly attributable to Ethan’s inspiration 2 years prior.

So I kept reading his blog, and it got me into all freaking KINDS of stuff, among them (this is just the stuff that I directly attributed to him, by name, and took the time to write a blog post about):

• The Katrina Peoplefinder Project Absolutely. Incredible. Project.
• Cell Phones in the Developing World
• Geekcorps (Zuckerman was a founder)
• Hack Your on “Cantenna” for Bandwidth in Mali
• Open Source in the Developing World
• The Last Mile Wikipedia
• The Chinese Blogosphere
• The World Summit on the Information Society (This guy has incredible liveblogging prowess)
• Progressive Podcasting
• The One Laptop Per Child Initiative
• The “Dissident” Blogger Handbook (Or how to blog *really* anonymously)
• Conflict Diamonds

Ethan writes (at length, with incredible detail, humor and rich references) about the developing world at http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/. As evidenced by the number of links above, I AM JUST A LAME HACK RIPPING THIS GUY OFF AS BEST I CAN. And I’m ok with that. He’s just that cool.

Technology for the Poor

A technology conference yesterday in England was host to a speaker Iqbal Quadir, who has sold about 100,000 cell phones to poor folks in Bangladesh. These are people who otherwise would have no digital communications, and Quadir feels that their new phones are empowering them more than the development strategies of the last 60 years.

The approach is eloquently summed up on Ethan Zuckerman’s blog as a bottom-up approach to economic development. Here’s a bit from his recent post:

Iqbal points to a top-down approach favored by the World Bank and others and notes that it puts power into the hands of authority, not into the hands of people. The US didn’t develop this way - technological empowerment from below led to success in developed nations. Technology can amplify voices, make it possible for individuals to have a voice that gets heard by central authorities.

I love it.

But I always find it disturbing that his bottom line is productivity — the extent to which their communication means that they are participating in the market.

I write this in spite of the obvious fact that the real goal of progressive ICT is the empowerment of people, ie, the elimination of poverty. So there is always an element of market-think undergirding the need for communication.

But by understanding people’s lives in terms of an economic equation, there’s some unquantifiable (romantic, perhaps) aspect of communications-based development that is lost. Because, after all, of we were all well fed and clothed, we’d still be suffering without the ability to communicate.