Ethan Zuckerman from the Berkman Center (yay!) talks about the global digital divide. He puts up the GeekCorps business plan:

To benefit from the Internet, you need geeks
There are few geeks in Africa
Geeks beget geeks (“Geekery is one of the last apprenticeship industries”)
Geek + plane ticket = Geek in Africa

We need to spend on both plantains and PCs, he says — the immediate issues of feeding people and building a connected economy.

“Electricity turns out to be a massive part of the digital divide.” Likewise, so is conectivity — there are 12 phone lines per 1000 people in Ghana, compared to 700 per 1000 in the Us. Plus, 78% of web content is English, but only 12% of the world speaks English as a 1st or 2nd language. This all ends up making a “relevancy divide”: What is a rural farmer in Ghana going to get out of the Internet?

GeekCorps took a different tack. Rather than looking at the rural, unconnected poor, they worked with those who were readier to adopt technology. He points to the “Busy Internet” internet cafe in Ghana — 200 seats filled 24/7. An hour of use costs the price of one beer. And he tells about a local guy who builds wireless systems.

From this experience, Ethan learned that there’s a ton of money to be made by bring the next billion internet users online, and it won’t be the current major multinationals because we’re idiots about the developing world. E.g., ilkone is an Islamic cellphone built by people who really do understand what Moslems might want in a cellphone.

We’re idiots but it’s not our fault, he says. Ethan has been mapping the areas the NY Times reports on. Not much about Africa, central Asia, or S. America except where the economies are booming. If you adjust them by population, Iceland (250,000) is tremendously over-covered and the Congo (52M) is under-covered. The best predictor for where the media looks is where the money is.

It’s an old problem, he says, pointing to The Structure of Foreign News” (1965). So, why don’t the media tell us about Africa? Ethan’s looked at what we’re searching for (looking at Overture’s version of AdSense). E.g., searches for Brazil are generally for tourism and pictures of naked women. (He calls this study “internet sociology.”) “We are a feedback loop for mainstream media.” We’re telling the mainstream media that we’re not very interested in the developing world.

Why should we care? Because, as Tom Barnett says, the failed and failing states are the ones that are most dangerous to us, and we’re not paying attention to them.

How to fix it? Hack the media. Peer production. We’re all producers and consumers. The problem is that people write what they want to write, and we’ve shown we aren’t interested in the developing world. So we need consciously to build “bridge blogs.” Paradigm: Salaam Pax. We need to do this not only because Africans need to be on the Net but because we need Africans on the Net.

[Great.]

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