“If you believe the hype, technology is going to help us end global poverty. Advances have indeed made a huge difference in the lives of the poor, but there’s also a healthy amount of skepticism out there. Berkeley researcher Kentaro Toyama has a blog dedicated to calling out naïve or inappropriate uses of information and communication technologies (ICT). Calling himself the ICT4D jester (using the development jargon for “information and communication technologies for development”), he has no shortage of material. We’ve all heard stories of computers that sit unused in African classrooms; on a recent post, the jester takes aim at texting cows. The prospect of billions rising up from poverty with nothing more than gadgets is indeed a fanciful notion — and not a helpful one, either. But the evidence says that when we tether enthusiasm to reality, the reality starts to budge.”
art in and around South Florida
