Technology + [fill in the blank]

Years ago amazing visionary, mentor, colleague, and friend Brian Cantwell Smith (philosopher, computer scientist, and brilliant idea generator) described Philosophy as the hallway from which all other disciplines were doorways. Physics, Art, Literature, and so on — the analogy works — they all open from a foundation of philosophical thought, inquiry, and critical awareness. For Philosophy, especially in the USA, this seminal position as the foundation of everything has waned for a number of reasons within the Academy, but the analogy seems so apt it should live on.

To that end, I’ll carry it further — if philosophy and philosophical thought are the hallway, then technology is the air duct (breathing new ideas and thoughts into all disciplines), and the electrical wiring (connecting heretofore separate “schools” of thought with new, energetic ways of doing things), and it is the lighting system (shedding light on new ways of visualizing, conceptualizing, and sharing information).

Technology is no longer a luxury enjoyed by only the World Wide Web countries (US, Europe, Asia) and technological solutions are far from being just for technologists – it is core to everything we do, to all “disciplines”. In the sciences there is a great amount of work going on in 3D areas — that innovation is moving to the Humanities too. The Arts have a close connection with technology that can be seen in digital media departments at top Universities: NYU UCLA. The work going on in Law schools in intellectual property reflects the new issues created with digital media, its ownership and use. Libraries and Information Schools are tackling new ways to archive and “preserve” digital assets. There are now large bodies of work in digital archives: http://www.whitmanarchive.org/ Biologists are making new discoveries by using new technology. In health there is amazing work going into visualizing data, showing trends and properties of data that may not have been seen before the tools existed. Surgery is being transformed by robotics work – robot-assisted surgery. Every discipline has incorporated innovations in technology into their research, methodologies, and practices.

We are all using new technology and Web 2.0 solutions in our everyday lives to find and form new communities, to collaborate, to communicate, and to share: Instant Messaging, Skype (VoIP), Google Docs, RSS feeds, podcasting. The question is no longer whether or not to make use of technology – the question now is how. At Intrah I’m joining a team that asks this question and works to find innovative ways of using new and existing technologies to make healthcare information accessible where it is needed most.

Posted by Jess Mitchell on 2/22/2008 • Tags: ICT4d, Social Networking, Technology

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More on Mobile Phones and Development

In reading this article from BBC News on “The Invisible Computer Revolution,” a number of points seemed worth taking notice of. The article posits that a computer revolution is taking place in the developing world without attracting much notice from those of us in the development community. In the industrialized world, we are so used to interacting with our desktops and laptops (like the one I am writing this on right now) that we are ignoring the computer that has already penetrated the developing world: the cell phone. Because we don’t typically use the cell phone for computing tasks, we don’t recognize what a powerful and cheap device it is.

I have written about this before, but I wanted to highlight a couple of other points made by this article. First is the point that demand for cell phones in the developing world is driven by the user, not by nonprofits or aid agencies trying to put cell phones into their hands. We already know that for adoption of technology to be sucessful, it must be demand-driven. Rather than trying to sell a government on a cheap laptop, we should take advantage of the technology that is already in the pockets of so many people. It makes sense, doesn’t it?

Of course, even in sub-Saharan Africa, the fastest growing cell phone market in the world, many people still don’t have access to a cell phone. But the article points out that access has grown much more rapidly in certain sub-groups, such as health care workers–exactly the population we are trying to reach. One application the article proposed was continuing education software for health workers, delivered by text message straight to their cell phones. Why isn’t anyone writing this software? Why aren’t we?

I think those of us working in ICT for development need to start using our cell phones the way our target customers use theirs: to retrieve and transmit information (rather than make voice calls). Then we might stand a better chance of coming up with ideas for technology-based solutions that work in their world, not ours.

For further reading, here is a terrific overview from MobileActive on a variety of ways cell phones and text messaging are being used to solve problems in the developing world.

Posted by Shannon Turlington on 2/13/2008 • Tags: Cellphones, Development, ICT4d, Mobile Technology, Technology

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