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. 

When we grow up these differences become more noticeable. Cafeterias in schools and at tertiary institutions are sporadically clustered with the cool kids, the cheerleaders, the nerds – sorry, wait, wrong movie.

In South Africa it’s more like the Black kids, the White kids, the Asians, the Coloureds, and there’ll always be that one group that is demographically representational. Power to you.

The above situation closely mirrors the virtual communities present on the net. Even in this space, or maybe especially in this space, people migrate towards what interests them.

The internet is so user-friendly that one has the power to customise almost everything nowadays. You can even, after subscribing to a certain online publication’s RSS feed, then use a programme that creates your own electronic journal. Choosing only the news you want to read…this unhinges a can of issues that lie outside this post’s focus right now.  

The liberal nature of the internet means anyone can say anything about anything. Yey for democracy, when it doesn’t infringe on someone else’s rights…right? Right.

Just recently, a Facebook Group ek laaik nie n houtkop nie sou what received prominent media coverage. The founders created it as a racism promoting medium, which claimed a significant number of members until the press got wind.

Then most members, including the founders - ran with tails in hiding. While the rest were chased out by the new admin guy. He decided to turn the space around, he kept the name, and turned it to an anti-racism campaign. The group now hosts 370 members.

But how can one be sure if a line has been crossed, Facebook hosts a number of groups that cater for specialised groups. Including popular ones like Im Proud TO be WHITE and You KNOW ur a TRULY South African DARKIE When… These are just the groups, there are also websites dedicated to special interest groups.

To keep within the confines of culture I’ll skip over the ones on yarn spinning, Hansie fan clubs and the ones protesting against South Park that I’m sure exist. Instead I’ll touch on the culturally specific websites - Die Knoop, Pro-Afrikaanse Aksiegroep Gespreskforum, and Bruin-ou.com. These are just some examples of networks and forums that aim to represent the views of niche collectives – particularly those of the Afrikaans speaking persuation.

I’m all for people finding and utilising spaces that make them comfortable, spaces that speak to who they are. I figure as long as it stays within good fun…why the hell not?

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).

As the designated documentation officers for the conference’s three-day duration, we had to pretty much utilise the technologies at hand, save the possibility of their imminent failure or that of internet connectivity or other such ‘glitches in the Matrix’.

Tweets (microblogging regular updates on the conference’s happenings) had to be sent to twitter.com,  flickrs had to be posted, pics had to be taken, and video recordings of interviews had to be done. All with the toy of the day – our shiny new Nokia N82.

The Mobileactive08 conference we attended - ”Unlocking the Potential of Mobile Technology for Social Impact”, has been running for three years now.

At MobileActive08 participants will explore how mobile phones are used to advance civil society work, assess the current state of knowledge in the use and effectiveness of mobile technology to advance social action, and investigate trends, needs and investment opportunities.

One of the sessions I partook in a woman from the Philippines shared how cell phones have become an integral part of everyday culture there. Touching on the topical event a couple of years ago, that mobilised citizens to using IT to help topple their president. 

As much as mobile penetration in South Africa has passed the 80% mark, for a significant number of people familiarity with this technology remains a foreign concept.

Besides the problems though, incredible strides are being made with regard to the use of mobiles. MobileActive08 was about exposing people to the innovative ways mobiles are being used nowadays. From receiving reminders to help patients with chronic illnesses keep track with appointments and reminders for taking medication.

To farmers keeping up to date with developments happening in local markets, also via SMS. So as not to waste resources and energy travelling to a market where one’s crop is in access, a famer can simply reroute and head to another market where their crops are needed from the get go.     

There is a large group of people including sectors from NGOs, citizens, health workers, government, and researchers are who interested in developing this country using ICTs. A truth that was evident at the conference with all the interested parties who attended, enquired, and shared broached their ideas.

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.  

In my last post, Y’all gon’ learn Chinese… y’all gon’ speak Chinese, I mentioned Rhodes University’s successful initiative to translate the institution’s Webmail service to isiXhosa. This set me upon a quest to find more websites of my vernacular…’twas indeed a mammoth task. Though I did come across an interesting blogger for East London’s Daily Dispatch, Bongani Siqoko with his blog Epozini (In my house). 

Admittedly I did find it rather curious that although the content was in isiXhosa, the instructions themselves (‘search’, ‘archives’, ‘about’) remained in English. Mara why?

Surely, by virtue of the blog being in isiXhosa the people who are likely to flock to it would be those comfortable with the language. Those who would not need the navigation tools translated. And if the point was to maintain the site’s ‘consistency’, this could still be achieved with ’search’ in isiXhosa – could it not? I may be making mountains out of molehills so I’ll let this one go.   

When searching for Afrikaans websites I came across one with links to other Afrikaans websites. It lists travel sites, food and drink, and other types of nicknacks these like-minded folk may find interesting.

Yet when conducting the same with ‘isiXhosa’ as the search phrase,  all I got were articles with the word ’isiXhosa’ in them… not quite what I had in mind. Proving that these, among other minority languages the world over still have a long way to go before being regarded in the same reputed calibre as Portuguese, Hindi and of  course the usual suspects - Mandarin, and English etc.

So power to languages that are fighting the good fight, unwilling to be buried alive with the majority’s shovels.

Mark Griffith, site administrator for the website dedicated to boosting awareness of the world’s languages says:

We English-speakers hardly notice English – it’s like air for us. But every other language is also an atmosphere for an entire cultural world, and each of these worlds has people whose home it is. Each language encapsulates a unique way of talking and thinking about life.

It is the responsibility of mother tongue speakers to reclaim their indigenous language atmospheres. Hence this vlog on Vernaculer in Performance Art, the artists presented here are doing their bit to converve their mother tongues.

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.

In the paper, Introduction to Minority Languages, Multimedia and the Web, the divide between languages in terms of online content and services is discussed. Specifically with regard to the ‘information rich’ and the ‘information poor’ languages:

Where content in the local language does not exist, there may be increased use of English (or the majority language of the region) by non-native speakers in both consumption… and production… thereby contributing to the language shift.

It seems that African languages can generally be classified as ‘information poor’, though some semblance of progress is being made on this front. You just need to get a thicker magnifying glass to see it that’s all – or borrow those coke-bottom spectacles from the bookworm the rugby boys used to promptly point and laugh at in early high school days.

There is a slow but noticeable development with regard to the imprint indigenous African languages are making on the net. An example being the translate@thon Rhodes University in Grahamstown and the University of Fort Hare Telkom Centres of Excellence in Alice held last year. 

This was so successful that this year saw a delegation from the Rhodes School of Languages, Education and Computer Science, as well as some members from the South Africa Norway Tertiary Education Development Programme team head to Makerere University in Uganda. To attend a Southern Region Education Board ICT-for-development conference where another translate@thon was birthed. This time with the aims of translating the Mozilla Firefox 3 Web browser into Luganda, a commonly spoken language there.  

The paper mentioned earlier also speaks of a study that was done. Which found:

Users have greater difficulty accessing content that is not in their native language and that there is a significant effect of domain knowledge in mitigating a lack of language ability.

The point? Yes, ‘tis true that no indigenous African languages feature in the ‘top-10-most-spoken-languages-in-the-world’ list. But then again, let’s not feign surprise here. The silver and the gold go to English and Mandarin respectively.  And Africa? Well, we’re trying, and in my books that counts for something.

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.