Interesting article today in the New York Times about how “Microsoft Would Put Poor Online by Cellphone as an alternative to Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) 100$ hand cranked personal PC.
The scuffle all started after Negroponte failed to reach an agreement with Microsoft about including Windows software in the laptop. He decided to go the Open Source route instead. Now Microsoft executives are discussing a cell-phone solution to the digital divide in which specially configured mobile phones can be configured into a computer by connecting it to a TV and keyboard.
Bill Gates himself showed a hypothetical version of the “Cellular PC” as the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month. But it wasn’t until the recent World Economic Forum that Gates mentioned it as a cheaper alternative to traditional PC’s and laptops for developing countries.
Craig J. Mundie, Microsoft’s vice president and chief technology officer, said in an interview here that the company was still developing the idea, but that both he and Mr. Gates believed that cellphones were a better way than laptops to bring computing to the masses in developing nations. “Everyone is going to have a cellphone,” Mr. Mundie said, noting that in places where TV’s are already common, turning a phone into a computer could simply require adding a cheap adaptor and keyboard. Microsoft has not said how much those products would cost.
While there is no real official release date for Microsofts cell-phone PC,I think that for once, Microsoft has a good idea. As I once reported in an article wrote over at PDF, Africa, for example, has one of the fastest mobile phone growth rates in world, in excess of 140% over the past 12 months. And for many on the continent, the mobile phone is becoming the only means of communication and possible information exchange. Patients receive reminders to take their medicine, saving time and money travelling to local clinics. Farmers receive details of market prices and demand for their products before heading off to market. National parks communicate details of dangerous animals, providing an early warning system to mitigate against human/wildlife conflict. Young people living in the slums of Nairobi receive texts alerting them to job opportunities in the city. Petitions are signed, protests are planed.
This makes a lot of sense especially when you consider that the reality for most African countries is that you can’t always get a reliable internet connection, if at all. “If you are working in the middle of Zimbabwe or a Kenyan national park you cant just pop into an internet café,” say Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net; a Cambridge-based ICT consultancy dedicated to making information technology more accessible to people, small organizations, charities and NGO’s.
And even Negroponte is not opposed to the idea of building a low cost PC from a cell phone. According the New York Times Negroponte reported that his research group at the M.I.T. Media Lab had experimented with the idea of a cellphone that would project a computer display onto a wall and also project the image of a keyboard, sensing the motion of fingers over it (whoa! damn cool!). But the researchers decided the idea was less practical than a laptop (yeah, ok… so market it here!)
More criticism of Negroponte’s laptop is that, laptop or no laptop, the digital divide still has its hold when you consider the often high price of Internet connectivity in developing nations. But Negroponte aid networking costs would not be an obstacle because the laptops would be made to connect automatically in a so-called mesh network, making it possible for up to 1,000 computers to wirelessly share just one or two land-based Internet connections. Also read this earlier post on Wireless Networking in the Developing World.
Negroponte and his Media lab team will also be at the upcoming 3GSM World Congress in order to explore the possibilities of setting up a data standard that would allow low-cost and educational use of wireless network capacity.The idea behind the technology is called “stand by bits” in which the laptops would send and receive Internet data only when higher-paying commercial data was not being transmitted.
There is one thing about Microsofts attitude, and Negroponte’s concession, about the cell-phone PC that does not sit well with my mobile technology philosophy. The mobile medium is not the “new computer.†It is the new phone. It is not a second rate means of accessing the Internet. Nor is it the “new internet.†It is simply a new, portable and lightweight way to approach the Internet, which in turn, will completely re-conceptualize the way in which we think about the Internet.
Some experts locate the rapid development of the mobile medium as a direct reaction to the digital divide. While the cost of broadband connection being substantially more expensive than, say, i-mode has a lot to do with it, it is also extremely important to note that for most Japanese consumers their first interaction with the Internet is and was via their mobile device. This is, of course, directly opposed to the American experience where most people feel more comfortable using their PC to access the Internet and Email. If an American is going to send a text message from their phone to another mobile user, SMS is the only real first option that comes to mind. And whereas mobile is seamless with everyday life, the PC requires abrupt attention to a specific location. Mobile functions more as a medium of lightweight ‘refreshment’ analogous to sipping a cup of coffee or taking a cigarette break. It’s a small moment of our lives with a humongous importance. The PC Internet is another social space, a cyberspace, as opposed to the mutual co-presence of mobile.
When looking at Internet technologies from the perspective of PC based Internet most American mobile users and businesses perceive the mobile Internet as ‘second-rate’ access, something good to have when you don’t have your PC or laptop. It’s good for making phone-calls (and in America even that is questionable). The problem with this model of Internet, when applied to the mobile medium is that it assumes a universally desirable technological resource whereas the mobile medium both infiltrates and adapts to the structures of existing practices and places. An economic understanding of the mobile revolution can only go so far. A different means of information technology communication did not only develop out of economic necessity but also came to be precisely because alternative trajectories of IT and communications discourse could and needed to exist.
So what the world wide mobile model teaches us is that the “American†way of thinking about and perceiving the Internet is not the only way and that “portable, lightweight engagement form an alternative constellation of ‘advanced’ Internet access characteristics that stand in marked contrast to complex functionality and stationary immersive engagement.†The differences here are between networked infrastructures that base themselves on a cross-cultural universal model (the PC internet) and a network built on a true network of shifting localities and cultures (the mobile medium). Neither one is better than the other, that’s not the point here. The point is to show that they are different and that problems only occur when one discourse dominates the way we perceive the other.
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