One Cellphone Per Child
For some reason, I started thinking about that, and now think that it has enormous potential, for economic stimulus and for modern warfare (identity colonization). As with any medium, it is neutral, and the results vary upon what you do with it. It has enormous positive potential, but also enormous negative potential.
According to Sara Corbett’s fascinating piece, “Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?“, cellphone ownership in Africa is doing more to improve living standards than any governmental aid to date. Not only are farmers better guaging and negotiating crop prices with a simple phone call, entrepreneurial women are earning income by selling access to a neighborhood cellphone, and cellphone minutes are fast becoming the newest currency (and phones as mobile banks) for Africans. Until people have better access to education, I think cellphones, not laptops, are more relevant for users in developing nations.
The mobile web is becoming the defacto standard in Africa and parts of China, India and the Middle East, much of it because of greater environmental/installation barriers for the internet. The numbers are pretty hard to dispute. There were 3.3 billion mobile devices versus .9 billion PCs at this time last year [I didn't feel like digging up current numbers, but suspect the cell/PC ratio is even greater now].
Government, of course, in its ineptitude, would fail to grasp its significance, and so it would be commercially managed instead of institutionally managed.
Google would be the provider, of course, making money on the advertising revenue from intervals/periodic texting of embedded media messages [which have an amazing impact upon children - they really respond to embedded media in text messagess]. Children, in their natural high drama further heightened by the enhanced drama of media, would badger their parents/caretakers for “life and death” “must haves” smile. This would work whether families could afford this stuff or not.
Families that can afford it - Well, they can afford it. Families that can’t afford it - Well, I’m making an unqualified leap here in my belief that many of them use dubious “must haves” as babysitters, sedation, etc, whose benefits for them outweigh the liabilities of neglect, or inattention, or noninvolvement, or self absorption, or laziness, whatever.
The Youth market is a slam dunk. I believe most parents spoil their children. Nurturing parents do it because it’s a normal inclination. Nonnurturing parents do it because it’s a lazy, easy way out. The only challenges are having a viable product, competition/share/penetration, and connecting with your market. One Cellphone Per Children is a medium for connecting with the market with on-point messaging.
This would work in the developing world as well, where people enthusiastically brand themselves with the products of the Global Theater: The Nikes, The Tommy Hilfigers, etc, despite a pair of Adidas equaling several months of income.
I would think that initally their parents would be enthusiastic supporters/adopters, having freshly realized the enormous empowerment of something that brings more immediate relief to situations that once took weeks or months to resolve, or to short circuit the convoluted trading patterns of barter systems, or to open new ways of making a living, etc. We forget or don’t comprehend the enormous matrix of processes and activity, the insertion into the total output of the industrialized/post-industrial world, that we jack into when we simply initialize a phone call.
The modern form of colonization, identity colonization, better suited to the Global Theater, is a much more effective and cost-effective form of warfare. Colonize the identities, and the hearts and minds will follow, and it doesn’t take bullets and missiles. It’s a self-funding, revenue-generating weapon, rather than a black hole of a nation’s resources.
Whichever turn it would take, it is a neutral medium whose outcomes are determined by what we elect to do with them. It’s like light in the darkness - It illuminates the ugly, along with the beautiful. Ugly or beautiful, bad or good - It’s that way with any medium.
Tags: Culture, Propaganda, Society, Technology