[Air-l] ATTN: Race, Place, and Information Technology

[Art McGee]

> There has been little or no apparent rejection, as far as
> I can tell, of the Internet as a "white man's technology",
> as extraneous and irrelevant to local cultural life, or as
> an overpriced commodity imported from abroad (and that it
> definitely is).

And why should there be? The problem with the normal
interrogation of this issue is that there is a failure to
recognize that while the physical technology may have been
developed elsewhere, the concepts which undergird it's use
and operation are often indigenous.

If anything, the real "white man's" technology is anything
that is based on unidirectional broadcast and private
property ownership (broadcast television, etc.), as opposed
to the multidirectional and communal tendencies of the
internet and other forms of online communication. The
internet comes closer than any other "outside" form to what
non-white people would create if given a choice. The
barriers they face in acquiring the physical tools to
participate says nothing about how the idea of the internet
resonates with many of their cultural values. So, if there
is a digital divide, it's brought about not by lack of
interest, laziness, nihilism, or apathy, but by economic and
institutional barriers to getting at the means of production
and consumption.

> This of course speaks to the particularities of Trinidad,
> and I would not expect similar findings in all parts of
> whatever one may call it, the Third World, the lesser
> developed countries, ex-colonies, etc., etc.

There is nothing surprising to me about the Trinidadian
situation, and in reading the research it in many ways
mirrored my perceptions and personal experience as a Black
person here in the United States. Obviously there are many
objective differences, but there is a Pan-African thread,
however thin it may be, that ties them together.


Art McGee
Principal Consultant
Virtual Identity
Communications+Media+Technology
1-510-967-9381

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