Posts with tag "technological divide"

The Digital Divide in Canada

Category: Technology
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Posted 1169 days ago

I have long argued that we, as a society, will experience a deep and wide technological divide and at the root of it is one thing – access to the Internet. Much of the time I have talked about this it has been with my American counterparts and in relation to the US. However such a problem isn’t just confined to the United States as my own country, Canada, will suffer from the same problem only I believe it will be a much bigger.

The primary reason is that as the second largest country in the world with much of our population centered really in three metropolitan areas. As a result there is no incentive for broadband providers to provide top notch reasonably priced services to the majority of the sparsely populated areas.

As Iain Marlow and Jacquie McNish pointed out in a recent Globe and Mail post

As urban Canada races to build high-speed broadband networks to keep up with business and consumer demand for efficient communications, outlying regions are being left behind with slow, unreliable or costly connections.

This growing digital divide makes rural economic prosperity increasingly elusive. Canadians living in rural areas already have incomes well below their urban counterparts (14 per cent lower than the national average, according to a recent study that used earlier census data), and the earnings gap exists in every province. In areas that have an abundance of oil, potash or other key commodities demanded by the world’s economic powers, fast Internet connections might not be so important, but for the rest, they’re crucial to pulling in new employers. Communities that cannot plug into the high-speed digital economy cannot attract new businesses that rely on basic services such as electronic invoicing, Internet conferencing and large digital file transfers.

I understand that there is a great expense involved in expanding broadband connectivity and doubly so the further out one goes from densely populated areas. Unfortunately this connectivity is becoming more of a necessity rather than a luxury which means those that don’t have equal access to the Web at a price that the median income of the area in question can afford .. well they are going to find themselves increasingly marginalized.

You can buy the best equipment around but if you can’t afford to connect to the Web; or even have a reliable broadband connection, then you are just a very expensive island cut off from the rest of the world.

The digital divide is real and it is growing. the digital divide isn’t just something that is happening in other less advantaged countries. It happening here at home as well.

Will you have the money needed to be on the right side of the Singularity?

Category: Technology
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Posted 1331 days ago

singularity Money is the biggest social divider our world knows. Those who have it, the more the better, usually end up on the winning side. Whether it be real world things like health care or in our technological world money will decide who gets the best care and who will be able to take advantage of all the good things that being technologically connected can bring.

As we reach for the Singularity of a Ray Kurzweil world one has to wonder who it is that will be on the receiving end of the benefits that come with that evolution in mankind. This is the subject that futurist Paul Saffo recently talked about and as with our current society he suggests that it will only be the rich that will be able to enjoy the benefits.

There’s Web 2.0 and then there’s Reality

Category: Technology
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53 comments
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Posted 1834 days ago

So close yet so far away I love the Internet.

For me it is a constant joy of discovery and learning. When I first started working with computers it quickly lead into programming (Clarion for DOS anyone?) which satisfied my urge for creativity for a long time and when the Internet came along it was a place to learn new things and much like a huge library. As time has gone by though my passion or developing began to wane but my love of being a part of the web only grew.

This fascination for the web found its voice finally in this blog and while it has been a long slog the reward of starting to be heard has been a great experience. Even though my attention is mostly in a small section of a larger tech blogosphere I believe it is an important segment as it has repercussions beyond the blogs that are its proponents.

I am of course talking about Web 2.0 and its related subjects like social media, social aggregation and the early adopters of these technologies. For me this area has become incredibly fascinating because it is occupied by some extremely intelligent and deep thinking people. To be able to be a part of that conversation and to be able to in turn offer up my own observations; good or bad, is rewarding beyond words.

The problem is though that I know to a very large degree that I am an outsider looking in and the reason for this is because I am on the wrong side of the technological divide that I have talked about in the past. While this doesn’t really bother me most times; as I believe it gives me a rather unique perspective on this whole Web 2.0 stuff, there are times where I also realize how tenuous this umbilical cord that connects us is.

One thing is more than apparent when you look in on Web 2.0 and the constant chatter about all the cool hardware, software and ideas. The majority involved in this space have no idea of what being on the other side of the technological divide is like or how it is limiting the adoption of the things they believe in. They talk about dropping a couple of grand on a new laptop in the same way they I would order breakfast or they line up to fork over a couple of hundred for a new cell phone without even blinking an eye. For them the connection is forever flowing whether through never ending broadband connectivity or wireless goodness. On the other side of the fence though real life has a habit of slapping you back to reality and your position in it.

You see once you cross that divide and find yourself in the badlands of real life where the vast; and growing, majority of people find themselves you soon discover that Web 2.0 means very little. You discover that all the blogs, Twitters and FriendFeeds in the digital world really mean very little when you can’t access them. You soon find yourself looking like a child with it’s nose pressed up against the window of the candy store looking at all the goodies but never able to savour them.

For me it doesn’t matter how much I want to be able to contribute to the conversation I am constantly limited by the reality of the technological divide. While advocates of openness and a web for all chatter on about their newest laptop or some other such toy I listen to the clicking of a failing hard drive. While others wouldn’t blink at slapping down a couple hundred for the newest and coolest replacement drive I have to figure out which bills don’t get paid this month.

Even more basic than that though is the tenuous line that connects me to the world wide conversation. While the discussions about ubiquitous broadband access for everyone float around the blogosphere I look at an empty PayPal and bank account and wonder if I can talk my uncaring service provider into giving me an extension on the disconnection notice that is in front of me. Chances are though that real life will step in come Monday morning and slap me back into my proper position on the other side of the technological divide.

I love the Internet but I have learned one thing – it and all it promises isn’t for poor people like me.

Freenomics is the Great Internet Leveler

Category: Technology
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14 comments
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Posted 1851 days ago

One of the best discoveries I have made in regards to finding other bloggers has to be the day that I came across Alexander van Elsas’s blog – which by the way was via FriendFeed – and I haven’t regretted a day since adding him to my RSS client. He writes some of the best blog posts about social media that I have read and some of the better comments on FriendFeed. In my opinion he is more realistic about the whole social media scene than many of the more evangelical proponents of the movement.

Alexander’s latest couple of posts about advertising and the web is a good example of how he can dissect a problem or idea and walk you through his reasoning as to why it works or doesn’t work. The problem is that while as a content producer I can agree with his premise that at some point we need to look beyond this idea that advertising can pay for everything the user in me knows that if I suddenly had to start paying for any of these supposedly great Web 2.0 social media service I would be left out in the cold.

While I agree with Alexander’s assessment that on-line advertisement is probably the biggest scam going the problem is that it is the only game in town that makes the web open for all comers regardless of financial status.

What I just don’t get is why we keep this dreaded web 2.0 free but ads based business model alive. It’s probably the biggest advertisement scam on-line. Over $ 16 Bln is spent on-line trough advertisement networks and there isn’t a single user interested in them. There have been a few reports of on-line advertisement boosting off-line sales, but I doubt the numbers are that positive across the web. It is pretty amazing that web entrepreneurs and investors have the balls to stuff $16 Bln in harassment down the throats of the user. It is by far the worst business model you can choose. BTW over 75% off all advertisement spent goes to Google! That leave only 25% to be divided across the thousands of web 2.0 services out there.

The problem for content producers is that with Google AdSense being the biggest lion in the advertising pack it gets to set the rules for the game. While Google might be getting over 75% of all the advertisement monies being spent the fact is that unless you are one of the big content producers very little of that percentage trickles down to the rest of us. This also doesn’t take into account the damage created by Google not actively policing splogs or other such ad farms that have created a negative feeling about advertising on the web.

As a content producer I can understand when Alexander says that advertisers are holding the whole Web 2.0 in a death grip

The free but ads based business model holds web 2.0 in a death grip. If you want to be successful, you need lots of users. If you want lots of users, you need to provide a free service. If you provide a free service you need someone else to pay for your server costs. If you don’t have an investor that gets you ready to be bought by another company (that’s a web 2.0 business model too), you need another sucker to pay for your costs. And that would be the advertiser. And he would be harassing your own users, the people you really, really need to become successful in the first place. See the flaws in such a business model?

But as a internet user I would dread the day that the pay for services model becomes the norm. We have already been down that road to a certain extent with Web 1.0 and all the different subscriptions and other methods of getting paid for your work. It didn’t work then and it wouldn’t work now unless you want to widen the technological divide even further than it is.

The fact is that I and a large percentage of the people who are on the web don’t have credit cards which is the principal method of payment accepted by any service wanting to be paid. Even today we are locked out of services like iTunes store or many other services that do business strictly on the web. Then as a subset of that there are also people who don’t have any money beyond what they need to keep them floating at the poverty line. Should all these people be excluded from being able to use the web to its fullest?

As much as we might want to rail against on-line advertisers and call them all kinds of bad names if it wasn’t for them and the current model of ad supported web services a large; and given current economic conditions a growing percentage of people would be locked out of the web. As it is for many of us it is a struggle to even maintain our connection to the web and now you would want us to return to a point where we would find ourselves once more behind the locked gate.

Sorry Alexander – you might like the idea of paying for services but I like having my access to the web and all the services that it lets me use even if that means I have to see ads and companies like Google get even richer. At least now we all have a level ground to work on rather than staring at each other from across the chasm of the technological divide.

The Decline & Fall of the West’s Internet Age

Category: Technology
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3 comments
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Posted 1980 days ago

You've been disconnected from the Internet Age We’ve been riding a pretty nice wave for the past few years but events around us are quickly changing that wave into a tsunami that is going to come crashing down on us. We’ve been made to believe that North America has some of the brightest people and the best access to the Internet. It was this combination of factors that has led to the whole Web 2.0 bubble that is growing bigger every day.

The truth of the matter is that our bright people are either being shipped to countries with lower costs or are being replaced by people who work for comparative pennies on the dollar. As for that so-called broadband access that we supposedly lead the world in … well that is a joke because the truth is that North America is trailing the rest of the world when it comes to true broadband speeds being available to all of its citizens.

At one time the US and to a lesser degree Canada did indeed lead the world when it came to technology but that time is coming to an end and a lot quicker than we are being told. Very little real technological research and development in either software or hardware takes place in North America anymore. Instead these so-called American corporations increasingly ship R&D overseas to workforces of cheap outsourced replacements. While these corporations are reporting increasing billion dollar profit margins and shareholders keep living fat off of the hog, the people who made those companies are finding themselves on the wrong side of the growing technological divide.

This divide is also being driven by telcos and cable companies that have increasingly come to look upon the Internet as their own personal feeding trough rather than the very lifeblood that is holding this world together more and more everyday. While countries around the world pull ahead of us in the area of broadband access we are living in a stagnating world of sub-par access that is jokingly called broadband. This doesn’t even that into account the large areas of the country where something like broadband is still nothing more than wishful thinking.

At a time when we should be piling investments into education, doing whatever we can to bring back technological innovation to our shores or even making sure that we have true broadband access everywhere regardless of whether it is a rural farm in Iowa to total WiFi access in every major metropolitan area all we end up with is an increasing technological divide.

As we have major providers talking about implementing hard traffic caps or getting government protection to spy on everything we do when we are online we are finding ourselves being regulated to the technological sidelines as countries like China move to surpass us with better speeds and more users. We are becoming the technological stepchild to the rest of the world and all with the blessings of our governments.

The open source crowd and Web 2.0 bunch can carry on all they like on how they are changing the world but it all amounts to nothing more than bullshit as long as we are held captive by corporations that control the very pipes we use to deal with the rest of the world. The fact is that until we all have fair and equitable broadband access to the Internet; regardless of where we live, we will continue down this decline we are on.