[iDC] One Laptop Per Child - MIT/Negroponte Initiative

[David Golumbia]

Some of the recent remarks on OLPC have started to touch on what I find
especially disturbing about this project, despite its benefits.

The people behind it have, to my knowledge, never been overtly interested in
issues of developing/"global south" countries, poor people, etc., until now.
They are not members of NGOs, activists, or social workers/theorists who
have a goal of improving the radical inequality of our world.

Instead, they are technophiles. They are people who have become convinced
that the computer is a transformative tool, and from that observation (one
that is largely not subjected to close criticism and self-examination), they
have determined that everybody in the world needs a computer. From what
intellectual basis have they come to this conclusion, other than the sense
of personal power which the computer provides for them?

Imagine that the tool of which they (and we) were so enamored was another
one, more familiar to us today: "one television per child"; "one toaster per
child"; "one typewriter per child"; "one telephone per child." Not only are
these enthusiasms more or less incomprehensible: they help to disclose the
ideology that underwrites the OLPC idea: that everyone should become like
us.

Unfortunately, to those of us who study it carefully, it is clear that our
contemporary so-called "globalization" includes the destruction, even what
could be called the "cultural genocide," of the world's diversity of
languages and cultures that have somehow managed to persist into our present
day. The OLPC effort fits too neatly into this pattern: it gives members of
minority and indigenous cultures even more reason to suspect (wrongly) that
their cultures are "backwards" and so-called "modern" cultures are
"advanced."

I don't deny that giving a laptop to every child might be fun, and might be
beneficial in many ways, and I don't in any way want to deny any person who
wants a computer access to one. But until and unless things like OLPC become
efforts stemming *from* indigenous and minority culture members, rather than
from technophiles, and an effort that does not provide dramatic incentives
for minority and indigenous peoples to sacrifice their languages and
cultural practices to engage with "the machine," I am forced to view it with
the deepest suspicion and concern.

DG

--
David Golumbia
Assistant Professor
Media Studies, English, and Linguistics
University of Virginia
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