TAD Consortium June 2000 Information Update 2
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CONTENTS
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NEWS/TRENDS
--- Kids' Online Privacy Easily
Undermined
--- Online Share Trading To Boom in
Europe
--- Cyber village in UP
--- Integration Of
Web And Print Products Absolutely Essential
--- Jumping On The E-Train
--- IS Assists Venda
Community In Link Up With The World
ONLINE RESOURCES
--- Math: Adrian Fisher's
Maze Maker Homepage
---
Is the middle missing from Africa's financial markets? Tracking impacts of financial
integration
--- Increasing efficiency or closing
doors? The changing role of the state in participatory development
--- Rural
development: what can the sustainable livelihoods route offer?
--- Life-support
learning. Are schoolrooms the best or only spaces for environmental education?
--- Distance
education: can quality be assured in an expanding market?
ARTICLES
--- Notes on the new design space
--- These Politicians, NGOs Are
The Bane Of Africa
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NEWS/TRENDS
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Taken from Nua Internet Surveys: May 22nd, 2000
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Annenberg Public Policy Center: Kids' Online Privacy Easily Undermined
Many children and teenagers are unconcerned about protecting their online privacy and would be happy to share personal information on the Internet in exchange for a free gift.
According to a new study from the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, almost two thirds of the young people surveyed said they would share the names of their favourite stores if they were given a free gift. Over half said they would give out the names of their parents' favourite stores.
More than a third would tell what type of cars the family owns, what they do at the weekend, how much their allowance amounts to each week and whether or not their parents discuss politics.
Teenagers (13-17 year olds) are more likely to give out information than 10-12 year olds are and boys are more likely to than girls are.
About 3 in 4 parents worry about their
children giving out personal information online. 96 percent of parents and 79 percent of
10-17 year olds agreed that teenagers should get parental permission before sharing
information on the Internet
http://www.appcpenn.org/final_release_fam.pdf
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Taken from Nua Internet Surveys: May 22nd, 2000
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IDC Research: Online Share Trading To Boom in Europe
There will be 16.8 million online share trading accounts in Europe by 2003, according to IDC. At the end of 1999, there were 1.85 million trading accounts active in the region and there should be 4.4 million by the end of this year.
IDC says the largest growth in online trading will occur in Germany. Germans are already used to electronic share dealing and many Internet users are already using online discount share brokerages.
Swedish Internet users are heavy online traders as the Swedish economy is growing rapidly and interest in Swedish technology and Internet stocks is burgeoning. There are now over 10 brokerages offering online trading in Sweden.
The UK is the third largest online trading market in Europe. Growth there has been fuelled by the presence of Europe's major financial market and lower Internet infrastructure costs. The market has been quite slow to develop in the UK but IDC attributes this to the domination of the local market by US online brokerages.
France, Italy and Switzerland are the other major online trading hubs in Europe and spectacular growth in these markets will contribute to the overall success of the sector in Europe.
Although gaining market share is crucial for online
brokerages at the moment, price will become a less important consideration for consumers
in the coming years and offering research and information services will be important to
retain customers.
http://www.idc.com/emea/press/PR/ESV051100PR.stm
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Lucknow, May 18
(Bobby Naqvi and Rakesh Goswami)
RURAL UTTAR Pradesh has fallen into the net, literally. Cyber dhabas are mushrooming in the eastern districts at a frenetic pace.
S. P. Kaushal, a medical practitioner-cum-chemist, now places his orders on e-mail. A bumpy road, that is perennially submerged in ankle-deep muck, leads to his clinic-cum-cyber dhaba in Chauri village in Basti district. Kaushal has been instrumental in effecting the e-revolution in this village, dominated by scheduled castes, who contribute 80 per cent of his total mobile PCO billing.
Kaushal is just one link in the revolution sweeping dusty Eastern UP villages. Like a backward farmer's 26-year-old wife, Sandhya, who now preens herself as she handles mouse along with coating her cyber dhaba floor with fresh cowdung. Sandhya's 11-year-old son is already through with Window 98 and e-mail, while her village Fattekhera, 38 kms away from the State capital, is still coming to terms with the swanky gadget. "It will take at least a year for the villagers to discard postcards for e-mails," says Kaushal.
Even though mobile PCOs and e-mail are in an incipient stage, the cyber revolution has travelled village roads faster than the jumbo-sized Telecom Department. And deeper. The nearest P & T PCO from Umesh Kumar's mobile PCO in Bahurawan Bazar in Sultanpur district, is 9 kms away.
But distance is not the only reason for the popularity of
mobile PCOs. "The public telephone at the Gram Pradhan's house serves no
purpose," says Jalalludin, awaiting a call at Ram Kewal Yadav's PCO in Baghauna
village, Sultanpur district. "The Pradhan gets so irritated by our using the phone,
which he believes is his personal, that he never informs us about the incoming
calls." Yadav operates the PCO from his cycle repair shop, which doubles for an
ice-cream store in the summer.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/190500/detSTA06.htm
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Taken from The Ifra Trend Report: No. 44 (24 May 2000)
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INTEGRATION OF WEB AND PRINT PRODUCTS ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL
While dismissing the idea that the Internet spells death
for print newspapers, Jerry Lanson, co-author of "News in a New Century,"
derides newspaper editors and publishers "who seem happy to settle for mere survival
and a shrinking market share." The time has come for aggressive integration between
newspapers' printed and online sites, he says, noting that newspapers have the opportunity
-- and the obligation -- to set the standard for Web reporting. As an example of how Net
reporting should be done, he cites the Washington Post's recent coverage of the World Bank
demonstrations in Washington, D.C. "Twenty Post reporters, covering various aspects
for the next day's newspaper, were pausing periodically to describe online what they were
witnessing," he says. "It had an immediacy and freshness missing in too many
authoritative, next-day newspaper accounts of countless events." In addition, the
coverage included multiple links to information about the issues and organizations
involved. Unfortunately, he says, most newspaper sites do little more than post wire
service updates to stories that appear in the print edition. "Newspapers still have
the biggest editorial staffs, the deepest morgues and the broadest range of sources and
stories," he says. "Why then, for Pete's sake, do they continue to ignore those
strengths in the very medium that might again make them timely and bring new readers to
the next day's paper?" (Online Journalism Review 12 May 2000)
http://ojr.usc.edu/content/story.cfm?request=379
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Taken from Eduprise/Need-to-Know, 24 May 2000
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Corporate e-learning is expected to nearly double year
after year – from $550 million in 1998 to $11.4 billion in 2003 -- according to a
report by International Data Corp., which follows the industry. And, while most of
existing Internet-based learning is focused on information technology, all that will
change by 2003, when the lion's share will shift to non-IT business skills.
Internet-delivered products are also expected to jump to about 11% of corporate training
this year and will soon overtake traditional classroom settings. Reasons for the rapid
growth and change in constituency are hardly surprising: Business skills these days have a
shelf life of about three years; Internet-based learning can cost one-fifth that of
traditional classroom training; and better, faster, cheaper technologies are making more
active (and interactive) courses possible. And there are more on the horizon. Until they
arrive, most organizations are combining various methods of delivery. One company has
students go to a Web site at a specified time to join a virtual classroom with a live
instructor, and listen to the course on the telephone. Students can ask questions via
their PCs, and when the course is over, they can contact a mentor 24 hours a day for
follow-up information. Compaq Computer recently shortened a training course from about
five months to a few short hours by gathering 1,700 employees into classrooms around the
country, where an instructor presented coursework on a large screen. Students could type
questions to assistant "content mangers," or ask them live via a camera in the
classroom. Sessions were recorded so students could review them later if they liked.
(Washington Post 15 May 2000)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58362-2000May12.html
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IS ASSISTS VENDA COMMUNITY IN LINK UP WITH THE WORLD
IS (The Internet Solution), together with Nortel Networks
and SchoolNet SA, has developed and installed a community computer network and Internet
access hub site at Vuwani in the Northern
Province. Valued at over R500 000, this hub gives the local community access to
telecommunications and the Internet via a network. The file server and a dedicated
digital line for Internet services was sponsored by IS. SchoolNet SA, a non-profit
organisation will provide the necessary support and training necessary at the site and
Nortel will supply the network of 22 Pentium PCs.
For the full story go to: http://www.is.co.za/smart_topics/
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ONLINE RESOURCES
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Taken from Education Planet Newsletter
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Math: Adrian Fisher's Maze Maker Homepage
http://www.mazemaker.com Do you think that mazes are just kid stuff? Visit this web site and you may have to rethink your opinion of all things maze... Here's a person who has made a profession out of designing and producing mazes and floor patterned tesselations. His work has been commissioned all over the world and he has established world records for designing the world's largest mazes. See how he has transformed some farmer's fields. What work do you like best: Maize Mazes, Floor Patterns, Water Mazes, Tesselating Tile Systems, or Mirror Mazes? Challenge your students to try out their ideas and make up their own mazes. Be sure to also check out the Maze Research Information section to find further information for educators, student project information, and a publications list. Visit the web sites listed at the bottom of the home page for additional examples and information.
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Is the middle missing from Africa's financial markets? Tracking impacts of financial integration
contributor(s): Machiko Nissanke, SOAS and Ernest Aryeetey, ISSER, University of Ghana - School of Oriental and African Studies 03 April 2000
Structural adjustment policy packages in sub-Saharan Africa
lay heavy emphasis on rolling back state regulations controlling finance and investment.
Yet the spurt in development these liberalisation and deregulation processes were expected
to trigger has not so far materialised. Multi-country studies by the School of Oriental
and African Studies, London, looked into savings-investment performance in Ghana, Malawi,
Nigeria and Tanzania. Poor results in all four cases could (suggests the study report)
stem from lack of interplay between the flow of information and funds in the formal
banking system and informal financial markets.
http://www.id21.org/static/7akb1.htm
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Increasing efficiency or closing doors? The changing role of the state in participatory development
contributor(s): Michal Lyons Carin Smuts Anthea Stephens - South Bank University
03 April 2000
Democracy in South Africa is stronger than ever and has
profoundly altered the nature of participation in urban development projects. Recent
changes in South African national policy coupled with a shift in service provision from
central to local government have had significant effects on development projects at the
local level. Given the growing support for community participation in north and south,
research by the South Bank University investigates data from eighteen South African
community development projects over the last fifteen years. It examines the changing role
of national government, the nature of participation and the impact this is having on
national and local institutions.
http://www.id21.org/static/4cas1.htm
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Rural development: what can the sustainable livelihoods route offer?
Contributor(s): Diana Carney - Overseas Development Institute
03 April 2000
New approaches to understanding rural life
provide a framework for thinking through development objectives and priorities, and for
putting people at the centre of development. Instead of focusing on specific sectors and
services, sustainable rural livelihoods approaches make it easier to understand and
support the complex livelihoods of rural people. They combine a focus on the effects of
macro policy and external factors with realistic insights into people's own strengths and
problem-solving capabilities. Yet they also pose certain problems for implementation.
http://www.id21.org/static/1bld3.htm
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Life-support learning. Are schoolrooms the best or only spaces for environmental education?
Contributor(s): John Parry - Institute of Education, University of Sussex
14 April 2000
Environmental issues have grown to command
ever more public attention and concern. At the same time, we have grown to realise that
most human activities have direct or indirect impacts on the environment. Governments can
and do support environmental education programmes to raise awareness and promote sound
pro-environment attitudes throughout society. But does the widely cherished belief that
children are most receptive to messages about environment, or best fitted to act on them,
add up to a realistic response to this vital challenge? A University of Sussex study for
the Global Environmental Change programme scans current environmental education practice
in the UK. Researchers asked: Is it enough to expect children to make society's decisions?
What other influences count and which teaching and learning approaches best answer today's
needs?
http://www.id21.org/static/4ajl01.htm
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Distance education: can quality be assured in an expanding market?
Contributor(s): Hilary Perraton - International Research Foundation for Open Learning
27 April 2000
Distance education is fast developing a
role world-wide and there is now a better understanding of what works and what doesn't.
Effective teaching materials are critical to success and much teaching still depends on
print. How can distance-education programmes ensure that teaching materials are of the
highest quality and are produced on time? The answer lies partly in training, partly in
developing sound management structures. A report by the International Research Foundation
for Open Learning focuses on two complementary strands of research: how to train the
writers of distance-learning materials and how to reward them.
http://www.id21.org/static/4ahp2.htm
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ARTICLES
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Phil Agre
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
May 2000
Information and communications technologies don't create much that's new; rather, people use them to amplify forces that already exist. A hundred forces operate in society, and many of them conflict with one another. It follows that we cannot generalize about, for example, "what the Internet does". Nobody knows enough to evaluate all of the changes, and so nobody can tell us the bottom line.
Design, then, means selective amplification -- amplification, that is, we hope, of things we value. What are the technologies for amplifying community? Some communities operate at a low level because their members' lives don't bring them together enough, or because they don't have enough shared sense of identity. Yet within every community is a force toward a higher level of community life. A community needs a shared identity, a collective memory, a repertoire of ways of doing things together, familiar genres of communication, ways of moving along from newcomer to oldtimer, places and landmarks, a language and a songbook. Information and communication technologies can amplify those things, or provide some of their conditions, but in the end it's the community that does it. Design has to be okay with that.
The design space is exploding, and so design must change. Information technology has few opinions of its own. It is plastic, malleable. Design means reconciling constraints, but now fewer of the constraints are dictated by intrinsic properties of the technology. It need no longer be heavy, or to sit in one place, or to be connected by wires. It can be woven into the artifacts and patterns of daily life in an unbounded variety of ways. So we have to be more imaginative. The technology can take an infinite variety of forms, so we need much more information before we can choose. We have to imagine our lives. Too much imagination is gadget-centered, or else driven by archetypes that are completely removed from the practicalities of the machinery.
Society is made of institutions: settled patterns of roles and rules, relationships and languages, repertoires and terrains of action into which we are all socialized. We take for granted the workings of banks, schools, markets, meetings, the news, street traffic, visits to the doctor, and a thousand other arrangements. The weirdness and brilliance of information technology is that all of those arrangements are liquifying. Many of them existed to solve informational problems, or were limited by informational problems. They depended on a stable assignment of activities to places. But with information technology they are all suddenly being renegotiated. People used to drop acid to get this effect. But dropping acid is insanely dangerous, and now we can get the same effect for free. We can best see what a thing is when it's changing, and now everything is changing. The rules of every institution of society are being renegotiated, and we are either party to the negotiations or we aren't.
Design is increasingly public. One designs information technology by inscribing social discourses into machinery, and the machinery and the discourse coevolve. Technical standards need not embody a consensus in any formal sense of the word, but they certainly provide an outcome to a debate. Right now, for example, we are all oppressed by the poor to nonexistent model of human relationships that is inscribed in the software of personal computers. People who write viruses do a public service by making this fact visible. Will the public debate over such events cut deep enough to shape a new understanding of trust? Or will they simply lead to reactive lawmaking? We're growing a whole branch of government to protect society from the poor model of society that's implicit in Microsoft products. That's not good.
What is public design? Hackers, in the original sense of the word, change the world by designing things. They see the power of a tool. They value rough consensus and running code. But intellectuals are hackers too. They intervene in the collective cognition of a society. These are grave responsibilities. Ideas become machinery; machinery becomes ideas. Each can set the other straight. Each can confuse.
E. P. Thompson wrote an influential paper about the fashion for pocket watches when pocket watches were new. People would spend large parts of their wealth to get one. They served to get one to places on time, and they also served to signify. Neither happens without the other. What does the Internet signify? The Internet came along at the moment when engineers -- at least the leading cultural edge of them – were surrendering the centuries-old conception of engineering as the Godlike giving of rational order. What's to take the place of that conception? Engineers facilitate local ordering. Rather than discover and optimal order, they provide a platform. That's the ideal, which we code with the word "open". But platforms, alas, are public goods. If markets epitomize the otherwise inchoate wish for an open society, we've been learning that marketplaces are commodities too.
As society liquifies, design becomes a way of life. The word design has been understood in two broad ways, deriving from engineering and from art. The two understandings are converging. It was once thought that engineering is a rational process. But we've come to a deeper understanding of process. The artists were right: design is a process of discovery. Can engineers get used to discovering things? If you accept the possibility and necessity of discovery then you surrender the expectation of knowing everything. You accept that you are not God. Engineering reason still has a purpose. One creates temporary islands of order, discovering as one goes along which abstractions might be broadly useful to others and then rationally designing those.
As platforms multiply, it becomes possible to do amazing things in an afternoon, in a garage. The platform provides more and more of the functionality. That, again, is the ideal. Some people use the term "platform" to refer to programmable hardware, but the deeper meaning is: something that you can build things on top of. Platforms nest, with new ones built on old ones. As the platforms stack up, the newer ones come closer to the experience and concepts of ordinary people. A microprocessor does little that any ordinary person cares about, but a payment system, for example, needs to speak the same language as the people who use it. Platforms become geographic strata, rigidly interwoven with a diversity of practical arrangements in society, so it's important to get them right.
The rising tide of standardized platforms presents a challenge for design. Good design means having a single, clear conception that can inform the design on every level. The internal architecture of the machinery, the packaging it comes in, its physical form, the ways you get help with it, the community of people who use it -- all should express the same idea. But the design space is exploding because of the economies of scale that come with standardized platforms. A new conception of the world can only cut so deep into a design if seven eighths of the design are ordered from a catalog. Traditional systems analysis and design classes imagine a world of bespoke software, every line designed from scratch. The world isn't like that anymore, if it ever was. The design of information technology is collective and cumulative. One isn't designing for a green field but a tangled network.
The concept of cyberspace is an artefact of old-fashioned technology. The "computer terminal", with its big flat screen, presents a membrane between two worlds, often glossed crudely as "atoms and bits". It's not like that. We're going to redistribute information technology so that it's not something separate. We're not going to redesign our lives so that information technology is a separate place. The idea that information technology is a separate place from the rest of the world was always just a lobbying campaign: your laws don't apply here. What a pallid form of imagination. We will not migrate into a realm of bits. Rather, we will reorganize and redistribute our lives, both individually and collectively. We will codesign our technologies and our ways of life. We can do this well, or we can do it badly.
Who is "we"? The collective design of information technology is a complex thing. Here's a simple model. Will we move to technology A or technology B?, we'll all ask. Both technologies exhibit network effects, so that they are only useful if a critical mass of other people is using them. And everybody knows this, too, having seen it happen with other technologies previously. So even though the two technologies might have real benefits and disadvantages for various groups, nobody will move until they figure that everybody else is going to move. The reflexivity of this process is exquisite. The supposedly decentralized society of information technology is always building consensus about design issues that affect everyone. It is nothing short of a political process. Self-fulfilling prophesies will count for a lot. So will the forms of imagination that, when shared, make consensus easier if not automatic.
It's not really a consensus, however. That suggests that everyone's voice counts equally. Network effects need a critical mass, not a unanimous agreement. The parliament of technology enfranchises the early adopters, the ones who create (or fail to create) the critical mass for a new technology. And the early adopters are the affluent and the gadget-obsessed who value the devices for themselves and not what they can do. We need forms of imagination that are anti-gadget.
Professional designers, perhaps, are latecomers to the scene of the accident. The real design has been done by poets, and intellectuals, and propagandists. And by social movements. Designers work with the raw materials of form and meaning. Sometimes they are arbitrageurs. To the extent that the design of information technology is collective, design becomes a way of life. You can't just move from job to job. Standards are designed by committee, and they build network effects in the technical public sphere. Design becomes advocacy. The designer becomes a representative for all of the people whose attentions are still elsewhere, who don't know the stakes in a design process whose results will become irreversible by the time they ever hear about it.
What would it be like to have amplified communities? Think about the people whose role-playing games can involve dozens of people and go on for weeks. They can remap a whole landscape with alternate meanings and become lost in the drama of their alternate world. That is one model. It's immersive in the truest sense: not being enclosed in a box of machinery, but imagining one's way into an alternate terrain. One can be enclosed in a box, surrounded by high-resolution displays, and not be immersed at all. What would an immersive artwork be like that one would want to inhabit for 24 hours?
Media companies merge in order to provide immersion in the broader sense. A child can live all Pokemon all the time -- Pokemon in every medium, through every sense, every moment. From an economic point of view, the media company is achieving economies of scope. The work that goes into devising the symbols -- the characters, narratives, design themes -- is leveraged across more products, and the work done on each can promote the others. Someone who is immersed in Pokemon can find numerous outlets for that immersion. Pokemon stands out because of the uncanny sense that small children live in a different world that is increasingly colonized by large media companies, but the same goes for a lot of other synthetic meaning systems as well.
Social movements can be immersive. Indeed probably do not succeed unless they are. A social movement needs cultural forms, and it needs institutions. It needs to provide everyone with something to do, and it needs to spot and recruit talented people. It needs to provide a repertoire of action forms, and this includes both ways of changing laws and ways of having a party. The challenge, of course, is to be all-embracing without being oppressive. Social movements thus rise and fall, each becoming rigid and providing fuel for its opponents. This is healthy, perhaps, in the very longest run, wasteful and often dangerous as it seems in the short run.
What makes a community worth an investment of one's time and effort? The strength, in some spiritual sense, of the people who are involved in it. The degree of shared meaning that they can build up without turning that shared meaning into a way of controlling one another. The distribution of labor: democratic organizations are too often run by a few people who carry the entire load and then burn out or become resentful. The quality of leadership: framing a vision rather than manipulating. The culture: people either have good habits or they do not, and they approach their joint activities from either a standpoint of positive expectations or a standpoint of powerlessness. Could a machine ever fix such problems? It's very much the wrong question. If a community and its machines are both informed by a common vision, then other communities that don't work can fade away.
Here's the paradox of design: design is supposed to make something new, but it depends on astute observation of what already exists. Many designers resist observation because it feels conservative: who cares what already exists, given that we're about to make it obsolete? And indeed, observation can be shallow. When you look hard enough, you see just how interconnected the elements of our existing world really are. How could one possibly change it? Yet it does change. "People resist change", the control freaks say, but this is a libel. What they mean is "people resist my changes". In truth, everyone embraces change -- longs for it. So what is the role of observation? Observation must be analytical, seeing the world not as a tangled whole but as a process in motion, a surface with depths, with moving parts, with forces whose development has been stunted so far by the means readily available to hand. What forces do we want to equip? That's the question for design. People will embrace changes they can understand, and so one must observe understandings and engage with them. If designers are no longer the engineers of human souls, what can they be? They can be interlocutors, partners, provocateurs, even leaders, just so long as they comprehend their own location in the whole.
The new design space afforded by information technology is basically about connection. Computing power is only somewhat useful by itself. It's good for speech recognition and a few other things. But the technology mostly challenges us to become aware of our embedding in a set of relationships. This can take a lot of forms, which we can explore and reinvent. Here's a thought experiment. Every one of us has six billion relationships -- one for every other person on earth. Each of those relationships has its architecture: you are near or close, you disclose some information and not other, you possess some information and not other, you are on good terms or bad, speaking or not, you are doing business, and your relationship is more generally embedded in one or more of a thousand institutions with their rules and expectations. You must manage every one of those six billion relationships, and in a networked world you must increasingly manage every one of them in real time. Once you would call someone once a week; now many people call one another ten times a day. Why not a hundred times? The calls are shorter, of course, more incremental. The thought experiment is extreme, of course: we are finite beings, and we could never keep track of six billion people in real time. But professionals often keep track of thousands of people in their social networks, and more generally in the universe of people whose careers they track as part of their own institutionally organized world. Agrarian societies, perhaps, had no use for a concept such as "networking": having and consciously using a conceptual framework for initiating, evolving, and managing large numbers of relationships in a strategic way. The very word "networking" retains the nasty connotation of "knowing people" and "politics" -- a sense that rich people and managers just build social networks rather than doing real work, and a sense that someone who moves dextrously among many people can mislead them all. In a dynamic world, however, networking is a fact of life. Networking skills need not be organized by means of a conscious framework of concepts and strategies, however. The people who live immersed in new communications technologies, and adolescents in particular who invent new customs around the technologies as they set about inventing themselves, are pioneers of new cultural forms for managing relationships. The technologies themselves presuppose overly simple or outright false models of these relationships. What other models could they presuppose?
The standard computer-science approach to answering this question is similar to that of the standard business-management approach: make a conceptual framework, then embed that conceptual framework in practice. But as computer systems are increasingly intertwined with real life, this design practice is showing strains. A whole research community is concerned with "groupware", and the central problem of groupware is that the systems are too rigid. One frames a concept such as a "task" or a "role" or a "rationale", builds data structures that go by those names, and expects people to represent themselves to the machine in those terms. One then discovers that group activities are much more complex than that. For computer science it's a puzzle: groups speak of tasks, roles, rationales, and so on, and yet they are not able to represent those things digitally.
This is the problem of structure in system design, and it is a hidden crisis. One response is to discipline everyone to conform to the structures. Once the flow of work has been inscribed in the machine, everyone has to organize their work in the way that the machine says. Life becomes more structured, and this increase in structure may be the point. It's a means of control in senses that can be both bad and good, depending on where you stand. Another approach is to relax the demands for structure. Paper documents, for example, are typically semi-structured. Even the most rigid form provides a lot of room for negotiation, and document genres exist largely to be violated, and not as grammars to be followed in a mechanical way. Document genres create expectations, but they do not necessarily impose constraints. Computer science assumes that all structures should be formalized, since after all a computer can only compute with data that it can capture, and captured data is only meaningful within a structure of standardized meanings and practices. Data can only be searched, aggregated, and computed with to the extent that it is structured. Because it is concerned almost entirely with the inside of the machine, computer science has not reckoned adequately with the deep trade-offs around structured data. And because of this, as Judith Gregory observes in her new dissertation, computer science is utopian in a profound and not especially useful way.
No wonder, then, that the rest of the world has come to see computers as a communications medium. The price of structuring one's life in order to create structured data is too high, but the benefits of being able to connect with others electronically are enormous. We are still using very unstructured email and voice communications, and we do not submit our electronic interactions to all that much structuring. The best "community" systems do both: imposing small amounts of structure on the interaction but then providing free-text interaction forums as well. Think of eBay: it imposes moderate amounts of structure on the auctions that users post, but leaves a big space for unstructured text describing the goods. It offers structured choices about payment terms, but also allows users to opt out of those structured choices and simply explain the terms in the unstructured text. It imposes structure on the bidding process, emphasizes that the structure derives from legal contracts, but then provides limited room for negotiating one's way out of those contracts. It counts "feedback" points but leaves room for free-text feedback comments and replies up to eighty characters. At each point, the border between structure and free text is thought through, or evolved. To computer science, however, this picture will be frustrating, because for computer science progress depends on discovering and imposing more and more structure on data. Can't the world progress beyond eBay? To the computer science way of thinking, it's a sad thought.
Still, eBay is a "community" in only the most primitive sense. Being a marketplace, it really does push toward the extreme "six billion relationships" model of society. Everyone's good are on display for the world to see, and everyone has a public persona. (They do provide facilities for private auctions, but the real leverage of an online auction service is that it's an intermediary for an unbounded range of people.) Economic sociology makes it clear that markets are embedded in societies much more broadly, but this embedding can be structured in many ways. Embedded or not, some market mechanisms are much more impersonal than others. Our conceptions of "market" and "community"are in tension no matter what the economic sociologists say, and one can have very different sorts of "communities" on different scales. The world's stock exchanges are embedded in a community as well, one drawn together by the financial press and the democratic public sphere more generally. But this community is no longer a small world. And what is eBay is embedded in? The answer will presumably be different in each distinct market that eBay mediates: the antiques world will work differently from the computer world or from consumer electronics. Standardized products can be traded more anonymously, for example, and markets in nonstandardized products demand greater knowledge. In some markets vendors often buy from one another, and in others a customer will develop long-term relationships with a vendor who then buys for that customer on the open market.
What does design mean in such a world? Design needs the conceptual equipment to draw deep distinctions among social worlds, and to notice deep analogies between them. When activities and relationships are structured so deeply by institutions, and by the particularities of communities and their customs, and by the diverse practicalities of embodied activities, one cannot design for "people" in general, much less for "users". Nor can one expect to design a gadget that's useful on its own. Just as participation in a social world is a long-term immersion, the work of the designer is long-term as well. Technology is indeed moving quickly, but the capacity of social arrangements to digest technology will always be limited. The huge quantitative improvement of the technology provides an irresistable force, but the social world provides an immovable object to meet it. Not immovable, exactly, but movable on its own terms, along its own vectors, with deep respect to its own forms of imagination and its own structure of interests. Design can participate in these movements. It can lead them, in the deep sense in which leadership, as a variety of politics, is the art of the possible. Or it can follow them, or confuse them, or become irrelevant to them. As life itself becomes inescapably a matter of design, design necessarily becomes continuous with life, or coterminous, as the case may be.
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These Politicians, NGOs Are The Bane Of Africa
The Nation (Nairobi)
May 23, 2000
By Chaacha Mwita
Nairobi - Africa is a continent that once stood proudly in the world. It gave the world the three elements of civilisation - art, religion and law. And it once had an immense sense of self-worth. After all, it is the original home of man. But look at it now. It labours under the weight of poverty, indebtedness, disease, ignorance, self-deprecation, civil strife and, worst of all, poor governance. Her sons and daughters have been thoroughly brainwashed and turned into wholesale copycats and retail consumers of the world's superfluities. A great deal has been said about Africa as a continent of great promise. Towards the close of the last millennium, Africans listened to speeches of optimism from heavyweights in the world's geo-political scene implying that Africa's leadership crisis would soon be a thing of the past. There was even talk of an African renaissance. But now African economies keep deteriorating, democracy is abused and dependency keeps rising. The optimism that greeted the dawn of a new millennium, like the one that greeted the dawn of independence in African countries, is fast fading away. All for the same old reason: placing her trust, hopes and destiny in the hands of leaders who would care less. African leaders, the people supposed to be harnessing the collective will of the continent towards a better life, are still engaged in their old game - talk. From Cairo to the Cape and from Juba to Abuja, all they do is hold "summits", further draining their countries' financial resources, just to talk. When will the action start? In countries where democracy was seen as a precursor to development, disillusionment has returned. Just take a peep at Zambia, Angola and Cote d'Voire among others. In Kenya, after a Constitutional Review Act was signed into law to set the country on what seemed to be a firm course to reform and accompanying prosperity, the citizens have been treated to a baffling rubbishing of the Act and the handing over of review powers to a clique of leaders responsible for the country's constitutional and economic woes. Uganda, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Sudan and Nigeria are the other African countries faced with constitutional crises. Certain leaders in some of these countries behave as if religion is the sole consideration in matters of statehood, making religious bigotry one of Africa's latest headaches. The continent's dependency on the West for material, intellectual and social solutions - a reliance perpetrated and perpetuated by her leaders - does not make matters any better. In fact, most of Africa's leaders behave as if it is the continent's divinely-ordained right and responsibility to beg from the West for donations, grants and aid even when she can do without them. In March, there was a devastating flood in Mozambique. Africa, except South Africa, slept for two whole weeks, until it was jolted into action by the arrival of 100 British marines. Then the continent switched on its begging machinery full-throttle and made it appear like a Western catastrophe on African soil! Meanwhile, neighbouring Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Uganda and Angola were killing each other over the DR Congo. Zimbabwe alone had 24 of its elite war jets fighting in the DR Congo at the time. Are the Mugabes and Kabilas the people Africa expects to save her? Even crude jokes have limits. Misplaced hopes are indeed tragic! How about NGOs working in Africa? They too. In a speech to the World Press Freedom Committee in December last year, World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn said people in the developing world, including Africa, do not trust their governments and NGOs working among them. In reference to a Bank study, Voices of the Poor, of 60,000 people in 60 countries, Mr. Wolfensohn said: "The first thing that differentiates poor people from rich people is not lack of money, but lack of voice, and the inability to be represented. The second thing is that they do not trust governments, or even all NGOs." Bankrolled by foreign donors - who seem to have bottomless pits of money - most NGOs work against rather than for Africa. They ingrain a dependency syndrome, giving tacit support to the status quo. There are more than 500 NGOs in Kenya alone for example - all of which are engaged in so-called developmental activities and advocacy. Theirs is a multi-million dollar industry. If they were seriously doing what they are supposed to do, Kenya would already be flowing with milk and honey. Seminars on poverty eradication or democracy in ritzy city hotels or swanky retreats in Naivasha or Amboseli will never, of course, put food on the tables of those in whose name such seminars are organised. If Africa has to develop, she must cease this donor-dependency derangement and reliance on her leadership for guidance and inspiration. Individuals must start exploring their own solutions to their unique problems. Here the trick lies in the catalystic nature of small civil society organisations. In Nairobi, residential estates such as Karen, Westlands, Jamhuri and others have organised themselves into formidable units without government or NGO linkages. These organisations are now vehicles of development and positive change. The cooperative movement, the enterprises networks and women's merry-go-rounds are working examples of do-it-without-government initiatives that, with a little management resources, can help propel Africa to, at least, economic prosperity. Forget the politicians. They will only do what they have always done - mislead Africa further on. It is not racist parlance that Africa was once the greatest. It is the truth. It is a greatness Africa can attain once again - with or without her embarrassing leaders.
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Telematics for African Development Consortium
P.O. Box 31822
Braamfontein
2017
Johannesburg
South Africa
Tel: +27 +11 403-2813
Fax: +27 +11 403-2814
neilshel@icon.co.za
www.saide.org.za
* To view an archive of previous updates
visit:
www.saide.org.za/tad/archive.htm
* For resources on distance education and
technology use in Southern Africa visit: |
www.saide.org.za/worldbank/Default.htm
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