loose wire blog

Broadbangladesh

 
Illustration IHT, by Felipe Galindo

I wrote a piece for the IHT on a company of expats bringing wireless broadband to their native Bangladesh. Would love to have gone there to have a look, but budgets aren’t what they were (love the illustration):

In Bangladesh, where less than 1 percent of the population has Internet access and where the rare broadband connection is prohibitively expensive, bridging the digital divide may require new approaches.

A group of Bangladeshi expatriates think they have found one that could work - a plan to bring affordable Internet access to their homeland through a blend of high-end wireless technology and social entrepreneurship.

Bringing Bangladesh into the Internet age - International Herald Tribune

Computers: Right Back Where We Started

A lot of my time is spent writing for and talking to people for whom the computer remains a scary beast that is best kept at arm's length, or, better, in a closet. I feel for these people because I'm not naturally a techie myself.

I failed science and math in school and almost certainly would again if I retook those exams. (I blame the science teacher, an evil vicar who tormented me, but that's another story.) But perhaps these technophobes have a point? Perhaps computers and the Internet haven't really done us any favors?

Firstly, the stats. Has the computer/Internet boom made us more productive? Apparently not. Well, it did the first time around: the 1990s technology surge (the steep red bit in the chart above) made us all productive, and that continued until about 2003 (the extra years beyond the bubble burst helped by the momentum of the surge, and some serious cost-cutting. But since 2004 the U.S. has been in decline in terms of the rate of productivity growth (or trend productivity, to give it its proper name), to the point where we're pretty much back where we started in 1995. I know it doesn't exactly follow, but given a lot of us didn't have BlackBerries, ultraportable laptops and ubiquitous Internet connections in those days, does that mean we're doing about the same amount of work then as we are, with all those gizmos, now?

Scary thought. And in some ways the answer is yes. According to research firm Basex, nearly a third of our day is eaten up with interruptions from e-mail, cell phones, instant messaging, text messaging, and blogs like this one. In financial terms that's a lot of

McKinsey sees it differently: We've outsourced or automated all the simple stuff, so we're left with people whose jobs can't be done by computers.

I see it a little differently again. I believe that we have mistaken ubiquitous computing -- in other words, the ability to do stuff anywhere, anytime -- as making us more productive because we're filling "dead time". It's this misunderstanding of time that I think is causing us problems. Take some of these quotes from a story on how BlackBerries make us more productive, from July last year:

I can now use downtime--waiting to collect daughters, train journeys--to continue to read and action e-mails, which means I don't have a huge queue waiting for me when I'm next in the office

After a recent long weekend, I would normally have returned to around 150 e-mails ...Instead, I spent an hour on my PDA the night before I was due back into work, and the next morning, I walked in to only six mails that required attention. Not only did this make me more efficient, but it totally reduced my stress levels

The technology both increases output by enabling what would otherwise be unproductive downtime to be used positively, and is liberating in that it allows flexibility and responsiveness.

The BlackBerry has definitely extended the capability of utilizing 'dead' time effectively--trains, taxis, 10-minute waits or answering questions like this

We are all benefiting from quicker response times to things that need actioning 'now ... Communication between department managers is much quicker.

Each statement is usually followed by a 'I realise I need a balance/the wife hates it' comment, as if the user is aware of the pitfalls. But the pitfall is not the 'always on' culture this creates, or even the lack of awareness that the ability to react quickly to something will simply prompt another reaction and require another response. The pitfall is that the "dead time" of waiting for your daughter to finish school, or the "unproductive down time" is actually an important component of our lives, and therefore of our productivity.

Sitting in your car waiting for your kid, the lazy hour on a Sunday evening after the washing-up's cleared away and the kids are in bed, used to be time when you'd think about what needed to be done, or to reflect (on your daughter, hopefully, so you're mentally ready for her rather than still mentally scanning emails when she's gushing about gym class.) Dead time was there for a reason: a chance to think outside the box, reflect, think about that email you're going to send the boss rather than jab a misspelled couple of lines on your BlackBerry so you can cross that item off your Getting Things Done list.

Productivity may be slowing because we've just filled every second of that dead time already and there's nothing left to fill. If that's even partly true, then the productivity was fake, since it was based on a false assumption: that the dead time was empty, an unused resource. Anyone who has sat in a moving vehicle and looked out of the window reflecting on stuff knows that this is actually the most important part of the day, and by removing it most of our BlackBerry-wielding friends/colleagues/bosses/spouses have turned into zombies, unable to locate themselves in the here and now.

The solution then, to this productivity crisis is to use technology less, not more. I'm not suggesting we don't use BlackBerries -- although I don't -- but I'm suggesting we stop deluding ourselves that these gadgets are saving our marriage/hearts. They're not. They're like ping pong paddles with the ball on a piece of elastic -- we think are batting the problems out of our lives but they're just coming back at us. Time to put the bat down and look out the window.

How Technology Shrinks and Amplifies Distance

Two pieces in the NYT/IHT that weren't about technology, but kind of are, illustrate how technology can shrink distance but also grow it.

First off a piece by Geoff D. Porter,  an analyst in the Middle East and Africa division of the Eurasia Group, explores how African would-be immigrants to Europe are now making their way to Europe via the Canary Islands, some 50 miles off the coast of Mauritania. Until technology came along, this was a very risky business: The Atlantic is big, and the Canaries are small, making it hard for sailors in small fishing boats to find them.

Still, chasing fish stocks is different from finding a small cluster of islands in the middle of the ocean. At least it was until battery-powered, handheld GPS units became widely available.

Over the past several years, GPS technology has become smaller, more user-friendly and - most importantly - cheaper. A simple unit costs little more than $100. And because GPS uses satellites, they work as well on Fifth Avenue as they do 50 miles off the coast of Mauritania.

With the new oceangoing canoes outfitted with handheld GPS units, the Canaries were no longer so far away nor so hard to find for the Africans.

Cheap GPS has shrunk the distance between Africa and Europe, perhaps not for the better if boats are still getting lost, and the illegal immigrants are simply caught and turned back. Perhaps it merely creates more business for snakeheads. But there's no denying that GPS has become a tool of the masses, even in the developing world, and that that carries with it huge implications for the size of the world and the shrinking of distance.

But sometimes technology has the opposite effect. Another IHT piece, by author and diplomat Judith M. Heimann, explores how U.S. airmen shot down over Borneo in 1945 quickly learned the local Dayak language and helped turn the local people into a formidable guerrilla force. Ms. Heimann's point is that those individual airmen who were isolated from their comrades learned Dayak faster, and stands in contrast to the soldier of today in Iraq or Afghanistan:

And now, as I read the newspapers, I cannot help noticing how in today's unconventional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers' and leaders' current lack of success in co-opting the local people contrasts with what was achieved by a small number of American airmen 60-odd years ago.

How come this difference? And what can we learn from it?

The difference may well be directly related to the number of soldiers involved. The airman who was the quickest to learn the local language and to become a competent survivor, was the one who was alone in a Dayak village for months before meeting up with any of the other Americans.

The slowest to become capable of helping themselves and being part of an effective anti-Japanese unit were those in the biggest group - four American flyers.

Think about it. When do you learn a new language most easily? When you have no choice.

Compare this with the gizmos every soldier today carries -- communications devices, sustenance, translation gadgets, night vision goggles -- and you realize that while such devices may sometimes save him, they also isolate him from the sort of contact with local people and culture that turned a disastrous flight over Borneo into a successful grassroots campaign against the Japanese. Here technology merely creates a gulf, a sort of shield where the soldier remains dependent on his devices and reduces the chances of building the kind of bonds those stranded airmen did with the headhunters of Borneo.

'Guests' can succeed where occupiers fail - International Herald Tribune

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