Re: <nettime> The video above is less than a minute long. Please take a moment to watch it.]

[Michael Wojcik <mwojcik@newsguy.com>]

On 2011-01-27 05:19, Frederick Noronha wrote:
 
> I’m as guilty as anyone else for being overly enthused with
> investment opportunities as the world goes increasingly more
> mobile. But, in the case above, we’re not talking about some
> Stanford dropouts who’ve developed a hot new iPhone app. We’re
> seeing something much more fundamental. Not just a shift from the
> PC to handsets, but a shift from disconnected and isolated members
> of developing nations to connected global citizens. Many of whom
> skipped the PC altogether.

Yes. In terms of the impact of information and communications
technologies (ICT) on the lives of most people around the world,
the PC has had relatively little impact, compared with, on the one
hand, traditional "big iron" business computing (which enables
global capitalism) and, on the other, mobile phones (which have had
life-transforming effects in many places that have never seen a
general-purpose personal computer).

I gave a little presentation on this very subject last year at the
Computers & Writing conference, where I suggested that perhaps folks
in composition & rhetoric (my hobby academic field) have spent a
little too much time looking at the shiny new computing toys, and not
enough looking at the kinds of ICT that have a huge impact on how
people actually live.




-- 
Michael Wojcik
Micro Focus
Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University





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