discoverability and d igital colonialism
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Discoverability and Digital ColonialismFiroze ManjiAcknowledgement: research assistance by ThoughtWorks ™
Elements of disccoverability
TechnicalProducer / author determined
Political bias / digital colonialism
Infrastructural
Historical context
Mobilisations in 1950sRise of independence movementsSocial contractAchievementsReversalsPrivatization of the commonsConcentration and centralisation of capital
Set the context for
Microtechnological revolutionBio-technological revolutionNano-technological revolutionEffective re-appropriation of destiny of African
people (landgrabs, economic control, resource extration, ‘repatriation’ of profits, tax evasion etc
Don’t Africans produce knowledge?
Lack of content from Africa?
Economic Commission for Africa survey conducted in 1999 : Africa generates only around 0.4 percent (1:250) of global content.
Excluding South Africa, the rest of Africa generates a mere 0.02 percent (1:5000)!
http://213.55.79.31/adf/adf99/codipap3.htm
Articles in Wikipedia
The whole continent of Africa contains only about 2.6% of the world’s geo-tagged Wikipedia articles despite having 14% of the world’s population and 20% of the world’s land.
http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/#the-geographically-uneven-coverage-of-wikipedia
Geographically reference article in
Wikipedia
Geotagged article in English on Wikipedia
Educator vs Native
Academic and scientific discourse tends to be from a paternalistic / uninformed / and completely ‘educator v. native’. (http://aidnography.blogspot.in/2012/11/olpc-in-ethiopia-thin-line-between.html)
For no other continent is there so much written about it by outsiders
Spatial Solipsism
“This uneven distribution of knowledge carries with it the danger of spatial solipsism for the people who live inside one of Wikipedia’s focal regions. It also strongly underrepresents regions such as the Middle East and North Africa as well as Sub-Saharan Africa. In the global context of today’s digital knowledge economies, these digital absences are likely to have very material effects and consequences.”
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2014/02/there-are-more-wikipedia-articles-about-one-part-world-rest-it-combined/8486/
(Solipsism = belief in self as only reality – polite term for eurocentrism)
Access and bias
Internet allows those with time and money and easy access to the internet to control large proportion of discourse
Cultural homogenization
Since it is cheaper to send a data package from the North to the South than vice versa, and since access is greater in the North (Africa 13%, or 3% excluding the big ones), there is structural built in dominance of information coming from the North.
Google and silences on Africa
Languages
Africa has more than 800 languages spoken amongst its various ethnic groups. However, the Internet is an ‘English’ based medium which affects the usability and content creation thereon. A vast majority of programs, applications and services continue to be provided in English thereby denying access to large swathes of the population and exacerbating the digital divide.
http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-colonial/2031
What language?
Drag picture to placeholder or click icon to add
Not ours!
Languages
Google search by language
Academic Knowledge and Publishers
Location of academic knowledge
User generated content on Google
News travels
Infrastructure
Internet backbones
Internet penetration
Penetration
Top Level Domains
Africa has more countries than any other continent, but only 10 of the ccTLDs have functional registries within the African countries they belong to.
Most cloud services and data storage sites are outside
Africa
Data Centres in Africa
Colocation of Data Centres
Physical location of data centers around the
world
Google’s data centers, 2008
Microsoft Azure Data Centers
Population size: no of developers
Lack of employment opportunity in ICT
sector
Software import / lack of production of
softwareNigeria imports 90% of all software used in
the country. The local production of software is reduced to add-ons or extensions creation for mainstream packaged software.
Patent applications filed in Africa
Only around 10% of applications for the registration of intellectual property (IP) rights in Africa are made by African citizens or residents.
“Both anecdotal accounts by African IP agents and WIPO statistics on IP activity in Africa show that more than 90% of applications for registration of IP rights in Africa are by foreign IP applicants” http://zine.openrightsgroup.org/features/2013/digital-colonialism
Arm-twisting Microsoft has apparently attempted to arm-twist African
governments on policy issues repeatedly – for instance by threatening to withdraw funding to Kenyan government programs in view of its support of free software (OOXML), by hiring government officials and their relatives as in Namibia and Nigeria.
Lobbying with governments to ensure use of Microsoft products including by tying governments into long term licensing agreements.
Also see South Africa’s clamp down on open source in education.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/144898/article.html/ https://netzpolitik.org/2009/misconceptions-and-failed-attempts-microsofts-strategy-for-africa/ https://netzpolitik.org/2009/misconceptions-and-failed-attempts-microsofts-strategy-for-africa/ http://www.webaddict.co.za/2013/10/09/south-africa-education-department-bans-open-source-software/ http://techrights.org/2009/05/12/south-african-schools-windows/ and http://techrights.org/2009/05/10/lobbyists-bribes-vs-free-sw/
Thinking about the future
Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity. Frantz Fanon
Thinking about the future
If you don't change direction, you will end up exactly where you are heading. Lao Tzu
Thinking about the future
If you don’t know where you are going, any direction will do. Anon
Thinking about the future
The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason to hope. Teillard de Chardin
The challenge of thinking about the
futureThinking outside the box
Recognizing that we are in a box, we are imprisoned by our past.
Cognitive hindsight bias Our capacity to imagine the future is limited by our knowledge of the present / past.
The task
Imagine you are meeting 20 years from now. Discuss what you achieved and how you got there.
Imagine you are able to see your own funeral. What would you like people to say about what you achieved or made happen.
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