Minority Reporter

Baby steps to getting connected

September 30, 2008 at 1:49 pm (Uncategorized) (access, computers, internet, internet access, olympics, paralympics, usain bolt)

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.”

The answer to why many voices remain unheard on the net is due to a simple term of a complicated nature -it’s about access.

Access is affected by a list of things ranging from race, gender, country of residence, educational attainment, income, location, and age and of course there’s more where that list came from. With the recent Paralympics, some complained about the lack of media coverage they received, mostly because they were comparing this coverage to that of the Olympics.

Now what people neglect to keep in mind is that though the Olympics can be traced back to Ancient Greece, the Paralympics only started in 1960. There were 400 athletes from 23 countries then, a number that has ballooned to 4000 athletes representing their 140 respective countries this year. Simply put, the Olympics have had more time to teethe – well actually they’ve had enough time to mature into Usain Bolt – and so has their media coverage. Whereas the Paralympics is still taking its baby steps. A notion reflected in youtube – when you search Paralympics there are 1920 hits, yet type in Olympics and the increase in hits is significantly higher, namely 267 000. Though, to be fair, some of these videos did turn out to be duds, with random lurkers promoting their own websites. Like searching for Usain Bolt and a freckled face red head boy pops up doing a little dance instead. 

Former US President Bill Clinton had the right idea, and he had it over a decade ago. In his 1997 State of the Union Address, Clinton called on the Americans to work together towards four objectives:

‘Every 8-year-old must be able to read, every 12-year-old must be able to log on to the Internet; every 18-year-old must be able to go to college; and every adult American must be able to keep on learning for a lifetime.’

Clinton’s administration put much faith in new media as the engine to move the US into the 21st century. And clearly it was right. Eleven years later according to the Internet World Stats, it is apparent that of the over 6.5 billion people in the world,  the America’s take up 13.7% of the world population, and 42% of them have access to the internet. Whereas if you look at Africa one could say the opposite is true, we take up 14.3% of the world’s population, whereas only 5.3% of us have internet access.