Virtual Rainbow Nation a spoof?
It is the nature of things that people with common interests will gravitate towards each other. In South Africa, the fundamental basis of those interests tends to be strongly rooted in one’s melanin count.
Fortunately so, (if you agreed with the implementation of Apartheid) and unfortunately (if actually reckon that the Rainbow Nation actually is not a fairytale).
True, this phenomenon is not really evident in primary school playgrounds, where even though they don’t look alike, the kids all speak with a Model-C accent. So they sound the same anyway.
Plus, you know it’s a problem when little Xolisa pronounces his own name Khow-lee-sa. The point is, kids see the person in the skin. But I digress.
Flickrs, tweets and mobiles
The Digital Divide has been a contentious issue since the mid-90s, so no, it’s not new - though it remains problematic. Minority representation on the internet has a lot to do with access.
To a very large extent the physical demographic minorities are mirrored by the ones on the net. For to be represented on the net, the fact is you must have access, and you must have a certain working knowledge of the Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) available to you.
Representation for minorities means that group being fairly represented. In my first post, Baby steps to getting connected, I tackled the concept of what qualifies a group to be in the minority.
The number of people in a group never really seem to be the factor – hoards can still be overthrown by few. Instead it’s a matter of which group’s ideology wins out in the end. With gender it’s generally males, with race whites, with money the rich, with class the affluent and so the list goes.
So my class and I took a little trip to Jo’burg last week. A moment was needed for lungs to acclimatise to the air’s toxic properties…and for the traffic (which made me miss the general Rhodes populace riding around on bicycles).
Language CPR
Yazi, I didn’t know that isiXhosa existed on the web until, well, fairly recently. This got me to thinking that ‘minority languages’ do have a toe in after all. Until I looked at the bigger picture, as it turns out isiXhosa is rather marginalised, being just one of the eleven (1/11) official languages in SA, eish mara mama!
Now in your readily available mental picture of the globe, stand back and ‘bigger picture’ that number, in terms of how prevalent it would be south of the Tropic of Capricorn (1/about 200), you remember the Tropic of Capricorn right? Last seen in a primary school Geography textbook. I’m digressing…
Extend the mental picture even further to the likelihood of isiXhosa’s presence in the content… in the world, and you get (1/5000). Because in case you weren’t keeping up, that’s how many languages are spoken in the world. And if your belief in aliens was rife you would need to consider the questionable standing of isiXhosa in the universe, to infinity – and beyond!
Upon completion of the above exercise you begin to see that the marginalisation of isiXhosa on the web is appropriately reflective of its lack of prominence in the world. Though it’s important to keep in mind that the same could be said about Friesian in the Netherlands, Ainus in Japan, and a list of other languages my tongue finds unpronounceable.
Y’all gon’ learn Chinese… y’all gon’ speak Chinese
Check out the stats on internet users - broken down by language and the results don’t lead to jaws dropping in ‘shock horror and disbelief’. Instead it’s no surprise really that on this respective pie chart, Africa falls in the miscellaneously titled category of ‘rest of languages’ also known as ‘other’.
Just like in primary school when you filled out those forms asking you to state your home language and race. Leaving the Chinese kids in my class to resort to filling in ‘other’, as they were not, well, officially black as yet.
But as we know, the Chinese in South Africa now qualify for the perks of Black Economics Empowerment (BEE) etc. and all the rest of the perks that come with being previously disadvantaged.
Baby steps to getting connected
Some months ago I was involved in a service-learning project where my class, a group of budding journalists was allocated to certain local schools, where we were to impart our higher education level of insight in to all things journalistic to these eager, and generally less privileged high-schoolers.
On evaluation forms filled in after the last workshop, a couple of our kids said they would have loved to get more exposure to working with computers.
In the early days of the workshop we had a discussion with them in an attempt to ascertain their level of computer and internet literacy. They told us how a school having a computer lab was not synonymous with access to the facility, unless if they were taking Computer Studies as a subject. Fair enough – one might argue.But not to allow access after school, even though their fees probably funded the existence of this facility as well as its maintenance seemed slightly unfair. And these are the learners whose principal would lean towards ticking ‘yes’ in a survey questioning whether her pupils had internet access.
The majority of these learners didn’t have computers in their schools let alone in their homes – since their parents generally have more pertinent things to worry about like providing food, shelter - the fundamentals of Maslow’s hierarchy. As Prof. Guy Berger of Rhodes Univeristy has said, “People can’t eat data.”
