Searching Google, Where Internet Access is Scarce 130
Internet searching means that finding information mundane, obscure, or fantastically useful is just a few keystrokes away — but not if you're without a connection to the Internet (or can't read), both the norm for many of the world's poor. itwbennett writes "Rose Shuman developed a contraption for this under-served population called Question Box that is essentially a one-step-removed Internet search: 'A villager presses a call button on a physical intercom device, located in their village, which connects them to a trained operator in a nearby town who's sitting in front of a computer attached to the Internet. A question is asked. While the questioner holds, the operator looks up the answer on the Internet and reads it back. All questions and answers are logged. For the villager there is no keyboard to deal with. No complex technology. No literacy issues.' This week, Jon Gosier, of Appfrica, launched a web site called World Wants to Know that displays the QuestionBox questions being asked in real time. As Jon put it, it's allowing 'searching where Google can't.' And providing remarkable insight into the real information needs of off-the-grid populations."
Re:Put a computer where the intercom is! (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess you missed the part about these people being illiterate.
Re:Put a computer where the intercom is! (Score:5, Insightful)
1) The box requires less overall and less constant power.
2) An analog communications channel is much less difficult to implement over possibly unreliable wires. Let the human brain handle the error correction (static).
3) Much cheaper than installing and servicing a computer.
4) Employs local people.
5) Doesn't require the user to be literate.
6) Doesn't require the user to know how to use a computer, what the Internet is, what google is, etc. Just ask your question and get an answer.
etc etc etc
Re:Maybe I'm just being too cynical... (Score:4, Insightful)
Where is the new Development (Score:3, Insightful)
My parents and partner use this sort of service all the time, I am the one at the end of the voice communication network. Kids also use it when lazy.
Re:Maybe I'm just being too cynical... (Score:1, Insightful)
I can't see any practical use the a farmer would have for "paddy farming advice... train schedules, commodity prices, or personal loans"!
If we've learned one thing in Africa, it's that dropping a bunch of 'better agricultural tools' into a remote village works for about a year until they break. The people need access to information so they can learn about the tools and develop their own. Imagine dropping a computer off at Grandma's house and saying "this should make your life MUCH easier" and then leaving... She needs information in an accessible medium more than the tool itself.
As for proper training, Voice-Googling advice on "paddy farming techniques" is going to reach a lot of people for less money than sending teachers. Culturally, ownership of the information-to-practice process will probably mean more effective application than someone showing up and saying "You're doing it wrong!"
And lastly, I can't imagine what use those dirty savages would have for homework help and exam results!
/Posted AC for fear of sarcasm-deaf mods
Re:Put a computer where the intercom is! (Score:3, Insightful)
I can search google using just voice detection on my iPhone (and it works remarkably well). Then, the iPhone can read everything back to me. If a blind person can use an iPhone to search Google, an illiterate person can too. If an illiterate person can use an iPhone, they should be able to use a desktop computer.
I'm not sure how good Google's Hindi voice detection is, but I'm just saying it is theoretically possible.
Re:Put a computer where the intercom is! (Score:3, Insightful)
You teach his kids (or better yet, let them teach themselves [youtube.com]), and let them help him out. Hell, that's the way it happened in North America for the most part. My parents are relatively computer-savvy, but not nearly as much as their children. And my grandparents can't even program an answering machine. When they need something technical, they seek help from the younger generations.
Re:And what does the local wise elder say to this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe, but the village elder doesn't have any better access to the train schedule than the other villagers, or to information about which nearby market town is currently offering a higher price for millet. This service clearly outclasses him for questions of this type. If he is at all smart, he won't try to compete on this basis. He'll restrict himself to the topics on which he is better than google, say advice about how to approach your girlfriend's parents or what you should plant in which field.
Re:A subtle point (Score:5, Insightful)
Access to information is a valuable commodity in itself, one which existing structures often withhold from the poorest, who typically are farmers or labourers. Imagine being a subsistence farmer who relies on a small surplus from each harvest in order to be able to afford access to medicines or schooling for his children. Now imagine a cooperative or community of such people having access to accurate information about crop prices (this is probably the single most important financial value to farmers everywhere) and being able to negotiate with local middle men instead of being dictated to by them. There's nothing 'primitive' about this need, it's universal and it empowers communities and individuals. In fact it's essential to anythign which pretends to be a free market. Just because someone toils in the fields doesn't mean they are unintelligent or any less astute than someone who works in an office in a developed nation, and the benefit they can obtain from affordable access to information from disinterested parties is likely to be as great or greater and certainly more vital than the benefit obtained by those of us who already have easy access to information, medicines, education etc.
Where I come from we call that a "Librarian" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, libraries are so pre-digital.
Re:Put a computer where the intercom is! (Score:4, Insightful)
Stone-age? I'm guessing they have at least the same stuff my grandfather had before he bought the Massey-Ferguson and got rid of the horse in 1956. That's approximately 3,000 years after the stone age ended around here ...
Re:A subtle point (Score:5, Insightful)
You accuse other slashdotters of having a "missionary complex" and say "you should just leave them the fuck alone."
So, it doesn't matter to you at all what the people living in these places think? If they ask for our help, we should refuse? They might want our help, and we might want to help them, but no, Simonetta knows what's best for all the undeveloped areas of the world, and he says we should "leave them the fuck alone." In addition to technology, I suppose that includes other aid, like trying to dig wells to provide them with clean water? Their ancestor's children have been dying of dysentery for millennia, so we should stop trying to inflict our western anti-dysentery views upon them?
You say "why would anyone in the distant backward village want to go on the internet?" I don't know. Why don't you try using the link to go look at all the questions they're asking.
Unlike missionaries, no one is going into their villages and telling them they are going to burn in hell forever if they don't do such-and-such. They aren't trying to re-arrange their society and seize control and displace their traditions. They're just putting the phone there for them to use. If the locals don't want to use it, they don't have to. But they are using it. I suppose, though, that you know what's better for them, and it's good for your country to move ahead technologically, and learn new information, but that people in other countries are wrong to want to learn new information and use new technologies, and we should take them away from them and not let them use them? Because it's our responsibility to leave other people alone, and not offer to help other people if they're from different cultures?
Our ancestors got my just fine for thousands of years without smartphones too. Do you wish Apple and RIM would just "leave us the fuck alone" and stop pushing their newfangled technology on us?
Re:Maybe I'm just being too cynical... (Score:3, Insightful)
It is a great tool for detecting the areas where more education is needed and the trends of what is happening, and is also a good starting point for the NGOs to make their plans
Maybe it is time to include a lawyer in the NGO team to help the book writers, or to start promoting education about constipation prevention...
Re:A subtle point (Score:5, Insightful)
Your point would be valid if the very technology you condemn did not provide material and financial advantages to those who have it, allowing them to unfairly take advantage of those who don't. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The vast amount of information on the Internet today allows people with Internet access to anticipate changing conditions and adapt to them much more quickly than those without. This "question box" is an effort to level the playing field, allowing the least advantaged to access some of the networks and power structures that we in the developed world take for granted.
Indeed, it is you who is displaying the condescension and paternalism. You are so wedded to your "noble savage" idea of the Global South that you're presuming for them that they'd be better off without this technology. After all, no one is forcing these villagers to use the question box. What's the harm in offering it to them and letting them decide whether its worth the effort or not?
Re:The problem is African IQ. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with your assertion is that, if IQ were some genetically defined constant, the population-wide IQ average would change very slowly over time. This is not the case. IQ scores everywhere have been going up pretty constantly over the past few decades as more and more people get access to proper education and nutrition.
Also, the failure of Africans to invent anything "significant" probably doesn't have anything to do with their racial heritage, and probably has more to do with their environment, as Guns, Germs, and Steel rightly points out.
Don't freaking underestimate people! (Score:3, Insightful)
People are not even remotely as dumb as this paints them!
One experiment shows that nicely: Someone set up a tablet PC with an Internet connection on a wall of an Indian slum, some years ago.
After some weeks, they were browsing the web, watching videos on Youtube, etc.
Interestingly, being that supportive of stupidity is more a "civilized world" thing.
If you're stupid in some hard place like a slum, in the middle of Africa, or on the mountains of South America, you won't get far. But this does not mean that people will not get far. It means that they expect themselves to come up with a solution, because they have to.
While here when we fail, we get a support here, a help there, and an assistance to wipe our asses. And naturally we begin to also expect it. I know so many people who just state that they are dumb. Because then someone else helps them, and life is easy. This is efficient *for them*, so why not?
But in these remote areas, I recommend just putting a very sturdy computer with Internet access in a room, so that it can not break or get dirty that quick, and then let people play with it. Let them try it out.
I'd bet money that before your know it, they will know how to use that thing, and get out of it what they want.
You will watch things, like a kid playing with it all day long, and the parents and friends then asking if the kid could find something for them. Etc.
I have trust in humanity, because of one simple fact: When life is hard, we excel in coming up with solutions that help us survive. And we hold that skill up very high, in so many movies, games, stories, etc, etc, etc.
Re:A subtle point (Score:4, Insightful)
If someone is living in more or less the same way that their people have lived for the past two thousand years, then their way of life is sustainable ...
Any way of life that doesn't lead to extinction is "sustainable". When our ancestors were hunter-gatherer cavesmen tribes, their life was sustainable. It doesn't mean shit.
... and suitable for them.
And who are you to decide what's suitable for whom? They cannot truly decide themselves because they don't know any other options to their way of life. Let them find out, and then let them decide.
As for you, Mr 21st Century Caveman - what are you even doing on Slashdot in the first place? In the words of Robert A. Heinlein:
"... the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better.... Most of these long-haired belittlers can't drive a nail or use a slide rule, I'd like to... ship them back to the twelfth century -- then let them enjoy it."