I used this book as a reference for an essay at university. I was writing about technology, and how western society takes it for granted, so this book was perfect for me. Beautifully written and very eye-opening.

Whose Global Village?
I usually don't read non-fiction unless i have to, but i was caught by the title. Having been living in an international community for the past 18 months, this kind of topics was always present for discussion, although in a very, very small scale.
So i decided to read it, and it was really interesting in so many levels.

Throughout the book, the author gives an interesting insight on how technology affects different communities, in different places around the world; and how it can be possible when used wisely, that it can give a voice for the forgotton communities.

So again, Whose Gloabal village?
The term "village" is troubling as it collapses the experiences of billions into the agendas of the few who have power and voice.

The book was structures in an interesting way, at least as far as my rather simple understanding goes. A first part explained technology today, how it is shaped and seen throuh the western countries, and the different theories, conversations and experiment on how to advantage the developing and rural communities by this technology, to make them connected to the rest of the world.
I liked how the author pointed to the fact that all this is done from the point of view of the rich and powerful countries, without real connection or understanding to these "other" users, without knowledge about their priorities and struggles.
One experiment in particular caught me, it was called "One Laptop Per Child", it was in a village in Mongolia, to connect the children to the outside world. What happened in reality was that the laptop was used mainly at night as it was the strongest source of light in these Mongolian huts that do not have electricity.
It is rather disturbing how these scholars or powerful people became detached from reality as not to see the different priorities of the different communities.

The other part of the book was an account of the author's experiences with different marginalized communities in different parts of the world, rural India, villages of the Native Americans in US...
Through all these projects, the main concern was to introduce a version of technology that benefit the community, responds to certain of its needs, supports their own knowledge and cultural diversity, and helps sharing their stories among each other.
It was a very interesting part indeed.

I also liked the fact that the author pointed out a new problem caused by technology; the desire to collect knowledge, creating databases, storing imaging and objects, all of this outside of their actual context, without the stories that goes with this kind of knowledge, and all this has become a threat to the cultural diversity in the world.
Most scientific and cultural archives take specific actions, events, and practices and abstract these into indexable, comparative data. In the process, they filter out that which fails to "fit" with existing classification protocols. Lost in this transaction are the voices, values and practices of communities on the ground.

Reading this book was interesting, as it offered another point of view on how technology shapes our lives, and also by offering another possibility on how to make technology a tool that makes our life better, rather than just following the practices of the more powerful and richer countries just to fit in with this notion of "Global Village" that in fact is not that global after all.

I will finish this review by an interesting quote by Phil Agre, from the book:
In a world of shallow diversity, we will prosper and we will die. We must learn to value and conserve deep diversity, and we must learn what it would even mean to resplenish what has been lost.

In this book, Ramesh raises very important points about technology and the history of digital media. He emphasises the importance and role of collaboration in ensuring “world listening” as opposed to “world making”.

He dispels the notion that we live in a democratic global village. He explains how today’s ease of access to the internet has actually fostered more inequality.

Rating: 3.5/5

Favourite Quote: “Designing a technology to support multiple perspectives and voices is not merely a philosophical goal. Design, like communication, is a process.”

Mistitled

An ethnographer from UCLA looks at how the third world uses western e-technology. That is the stated foundation of Whose Global Village.

Srinivasan cites numerous examples where people use tech in ways other than intended. A child’s crank laptop becomes the sole light source in a family shack without electricity. A mobile phone becomes a flashlight to hunt crocodiles. Poor Indians call each other and hang up so the recipient will know to call back. Whatever the circumstances, people will find a way, a use and a workaround in their circumstances. But so has it always been. In an emergency, everything can become a hammer.

A somewhat better point he makes is that Facebook did not organize and run the Arab Spring, that almost no one there had internet service, and the arrogance of the Facebooks and Twitters is worrying. Word among “the last billion” does spread like wildfire, but the oldfashioned way.

He quickly shifts to describe various tech-assisted projects he has participated in around the world, and what he learned about himself and his own approach. The book is mostly about him, and the pitfalls for ethnographers. Like so many ethnography books, it fixates on the process of discovery the ethnographer underwent.

Srinivasan has developed a sort of flexible approach to cultural data he calls fluid ontology. There is a great deal of space devoted to it, and it is the only new idea Srinivasan posits. It seems to be a genuine and valuable innovation to preserve the uniqueness of a society. Basically, it rethinks databases to reflect the society’s own rankings, connections and valuations. One dramatic graphic shows how the Zuni see their society compared to how a museum populates a database, with a truly small area of overlap. But the connection to the book title is tenuous.

The concluding pages revert to the now ancient argument over the internet squeezing square pegs into rounds holes in one size fits all universal solutions from the Googles, Facebooks and Apples of the world. Despite their efforts, it is splintering. The internet has not created a global village.

I think what Srinivasan means to say is just as the thoughtless elimination of thousands of species cripples biodiversity worldwide, so the internet can cripple cultural diversity worldwide. We need to manage both, and not by using the trickle-down from big business. But keeping ethnographers from unintentionally adding bias is not what the concept of global village is about.

David Wineberg

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1842907812

Will add to Amazon when able.