Monday, 14 March 2011

.Measuring success by access to gadgets




Is there not something desperately wrong," I wondered, writing from Thailand in a column a few weeks ago, "in a world where everybody has a mobile telephone but nobody has clean drinking water?"

I was using hyperbole to make a point, but this isn't quite the exaggeration it might seem. Those who've traveled know what I'm talking about, and have seen the ways in which technology -- the mobile phone being the most ubiquitous example -- has crept into every corner of the planet. It has cut across every class line, into the tiniest rural village and the most fetid urban slum.

There are those who mark this as progress, but I am not seeing it that way. Not when the most elementary human needs -- water, healthcare, education and basic sanitation -- go ignored at every level. What exactly is the benefit -- to society or to the individual -- of owning a cellular telephone when you're illiterate and knee-deep in sewage? I understand the benefits of electronic connectivity -- the values of the Internet and wireless communications. But in certain contexts they are somewhere between overrated and irrelevant, and I fail to see the upward mobilization, the "empowerment," that is either the symptom or the cause of a growing addiction to phones and computers.

I recently read how the standard of living in Egypt has doubled in the past 20 years. Is that the same Egypt in which I saw a makeshift traffic circle constructed entirely of garbage, with its vast neighborhoods of crumbling apartments and smothering blankets of air pollution? You can cite all the statistics you want. My eyes show me that the world is as filthy and desperate as it's ever been. Meanwhile there is something wholly upside-down about a system that measures success in terms of access to gadgets.



By


Monika Jain



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