[iDC] One Laptop Per Child - MIT/Negroponte Initiative

[davin heckman]

I would encourage people to read Regis Debray's Transmitting Culture
(Columbia UP, 2000).  In this book (and elsewhere), Debray describes
what he calls "the jogging effect," or these unanticipated responses
to new technologies.  Debray explainst that futurologists predicted
that the automobile would bring about atrophy, and it some ways it
has, but it also has created "jogging".

I am still trying to soak in the possibilities and problems of the
OLPC, and really appreciate the attention that this thread is getting
by people who know more and have thought more about it than I have.
But, if, say, "modernism" can result in "fundamentalism" through the
jogging effect....  what jogging effects might result from this grand
effort?
-----------------------
For my part, I am prone to think first of decaying competencies,
embedded assumptions, and rising thresholds of participation...  I was
listening to an old comedy recording in which the performer asks,
"What's the difference between a dog's tail and a rich man?"  Answer:
"A dog's tail keeps a waggin' and a rich man keeps an automobile."
And think about how, though my life is easier for owning a car,
automobile ownership does not really help one overcome the vast
class-based privileges that such technology was once a marker for.
Culture develops new ways to keep people down, regardless of the
availability of consumer technologies.  (I'm not saying that I've been
kept down, either.  I am much, much better off than my father was.)
Rather, I am saying that class mobility is limited and confined...
and that the rich occupy a totally different moral, cultural, social,
economic, political universe...  which does not seem too preoccupied
with the lives of the lowly.  Most people just try not to be poor...
and if that's not possible...  try to not look poor.

This is something I became painfully aware of this past week at the
MLA in Chicago....  where the entire financial district is designed
precisely to discourage people like me from existing....  3 dollar
bagels, 40 dollar parking, 2 dollars to use my calling card from the
hotel room, 4 dollar coffees, 10 dollar beers, 10 dollars for wifi....
   Sure, my family of four lives well in the sticks off my 40,000
dollar a year salary (I have benefits, thank God)....  but once I come
to the big city...  In that arena, my 500$ Dell special is no match
for the clickety clack of 500$ boot heels by people who don't even
remember how much they cost.  That's the whole point of upscale
hotels...  they eliminate the riffraff without having to crack skulls
(but I'm sure they can do that, too).

Not to sound like a crybaby...  but I think that popular technologies
rarely are vehicles for social uplift.  They can provide convenience
and make life easier.  And this is to be celebrated.  But sometimes,
when we want to talk about uplift vis-a-vis things like OLPC, we are
really hoping that technology will improve the dignity of the people
that use them.  And technology cannot provide dignity (Although, one
might argue that some technologies, like guns, give people greater
ability to assert their dignity.  But do so at the expense of
another).  Really, we respect human dignity or we do not.  And if we
want initiatives like OLPC to have an impact, they have to be
accompanied by a revolution in social consciousness.  And, in such
cases, one might argue that the technology simply serves as an outward
sign of social solidarity that can only succeed if the social
solidarity itself exists.

Happy New Year.  Here's to a better world in 2008.
Peace,
Davin