Such a shame that I haven't been writing. But I've been fresh out of the angsty bullshit that really used to keep this blog chugging along. I really haven't written much recently- but a condensed version of this long-ass essay did get me accepted into the Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations and eventually got me a free trip to Seoul.
I might as well upload it right? It's not like I'm gonna be writing too many non-academic things any time soon.
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Recent events in North Africa and the Middle East have highlighted the incredible power media literacy and the internet can provide. The ‘revolution’ (or protests, to those less inclined to making sweeping idealistic statements) has spread to countries are decidedly ‘Third-World’, in Alfred Sauvy’s words, where the penetration of mass media and internet penetration is a fraction of what is common in the west.
Even so, simply having a neutral platform for people with common ideas allowed protestors to assemble, co-ordinate, and allowed the movements to reach massive proportions in a short span of time. Bold media coverage, often by citizen journalists, also brought to light reprehensible acts committed by the ruling classes- Muammar Gaddafi’s orders to attack civilians for instance, false ‘agitators’ placed by the Egyptian government in the ranks of the non-violent protestors to drive them to violence and give the rulers license to supress them with force, among others.
Similar movements in the Indian context are unlikely- the government of India remains just about responsive enough to prevent widespread popular dissent- even so, smaller popular movements in the urban centres of the country have occurred in response to botched investigations of high profile criminals with political connections- several murderers may have walked away unpunished if popular sentiment hadn’t forced a reopening of criminal cases, after originally being fed by but consequently fuelling popular media.
More recently, activist Anna Hazare’s bold stance demanding the formation of an anti-corruption committee has gathered a lot of support in urban India, heavily fuelled by coverage by the traditional media- print and video, but in depth discussions on the topic are now ubiquitous on blogs and social networks as well.
The scales of knowledge transfer that traditional media offers, the inherent democratic anarchy of ‘new’ media, are all incredibly powerful tools in shaping the social and cultural timbre of a nation.
This is not what I’m interested in.
To be more precise, I believe that the events that have been highlighted recently in the media are the culmination of process that starts at a much more fundamental level- the creation of a well-informed, well nuanced public that can involve itself in the affairs of their country, articulate their opinions- and most importantly- Learn from the collected sum of the human experience and use it to better their own lives.
Though the 2011 revolutions are powerful icons, symbols to be lapped up hungrily by the world media, I do not feel that they are representative of the wider, softer revolution that has been changing the face of the developing world over the last several decades. It isn’t violent, it isn’t rebellious, it has little to no ideology associated with it, its effects are well documented and occasionally unexpected- it forms the cornerstone for all stable societies and serves to destabilize many others.
Functional literacy and the access to information associated with it is something that is easy to take for granted in the west- where total literacy is common and a region where only 95% of the population can read and write is considered backward.
However in a developing economy education and literacy remain some of the biggest correlatives to an individual’s weak economic stature. An illiterate individual is harder to train, easily exploited and likely to belong to the lowest economic strata of any given country. Literacy and education, more than anything else, has formed the basis on which all cultural transformation takes place- the direction it takes often depends on the quality of the enabling education- a topic that I will touch upon a little later in the essay.
It must be noted that I will use the term literacy a little broadly- being able to merely read and write is rather limiting as a goal for society. My ‘broad’ literacy includes reading, writing, speaking, basic numeracy skills and knowing how to apply them.
The true impact of opinion marshalling tools such as social media will not be felt until we eliminate the incredible divide between the ‘haves’ and have-nots- those downtrodden are deprived not only financially- but intellectually- and there is no better bulwark against progress than the latter.
My own family history serves an inspiration for me-as a tale of the enabling power of education. My grandfather was born into a farmer’s household in pre-independent India, in a time in which an education was considered an excess that could not be afforded by the common man. He tells me how he used to walk seven kilometres to school every morning. There wasn’t much incentive for someone then, to attend school- it seemed to be a lot of hard work for not much gain. Of 4 brothers, only 2 graduated from school, only one, my grandfather, went to college, inspired after attending a speech by India’s nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru. He pursued a degree in mathematics, soon after which he joined the Indian government- giving up a cushy seat in the Indian Administrative Service dedicate his life to working in the Education Service in one of the poorest, least literate states in the country at a time in which less than one in four Indians could read and write.
As a young officer, he drafted a proposal to set a goal to ensure that 10% of the total students enrolled in state schools be girls- a proposal that was mocked and derided by his superiors at the time.
With today’s hindsight we can say that the officers of that time were myopic and severely underestimated the capabilities of people. But I find the education system in India, and indeed, much of Asia and Africa is similarly pessimistic when it comes to investing in its own people.
It isn’t surprising that Asia’s fastest growing economy- China, also has the largest education system in Asia, and in the years running up to today’s searing economic growth has raised its crude literacy rate from a miserable 20% in the 40s- comparable to India’s, at the time-to a respectable 92%.
The divide as it stands today, is vast, India has the highest number of illiterate and functionally-illiterate individuals in the world, the population if taken in isolation would form the world’s third most populous country (after China and Literate India)- an unforgivable waste of human capital.
The divide, I believe, is not impossible to breach, however- it has been done before, many times, but never on the same scale that the world needs today. To do so one needs to ensure that all individuals receive the kind of intellectual fodder they need to form opinions- and an access to a platform that allows them to do so. With modern technology, attaining the latter goal has become greatly simplified, and perhaps if utilized correctly- it can be utilized to affect the former as well.
Media, both ‘new’ and ‘old’, has a massive role to play in this field- not primarily as an active force trying to forge a community’s opinion, but as a passive, often unwitting agent of change. Traditionally it has been seen that high literacy and economic power have preceded the adoption of new technology- televisions, phones, cell phones, computers, the internet- all of these were prohibitively expensive when they were introduced into an economy- and it required a degree of financial prowess to attain these items of luxury.
Modern production techniques, economies of scale- essentially the dynamics of Moore’s law- have created a somewhat unusual situation in several countries- where the influx of technology outpaces human development-... the outcomes to which are- interesting to say the least.
I view media as one side of the coin and technology as the other- as an engineer I find it easier to focus on the macroscopic, quantitative, statistical aspects of a thing rather than to let myself get stuck in abstracts. Media is the qualitative part of the same entity that telecommunication technology forms the quantitative part of- unless the latter is ubiquitous in an environment- the two cannot be viewed separately.
India is a unique case in many ways.
It is a hugely diverse country with over with two dozen or so widely recognized languages and –some experts believe- three thousand dialects. Rhetoric about the importance of cultural diversity aside- this injects a terrible amount of difficulty into the accomplishment of tasks that would be relatively simple in a culturally homogenous country. India’s pathetic literacy rate exacerbates this even further.
Instead of providing education in one or two common languages, educational curricula must be designed taking into account the common languages of each region- the same applies to social messages - each vaccination drive must take into account the third of the population that is functionally illiterate- focussing a lot more on verbal and visual messages.
Technology has made a big difference to the delivery of such messages, but has also had a great impact in promoting functional literacy rather than what the Indian government calls ‘basic literacy’- the ability to merely sign your name (not exactly a deep and meaningful kind of literacy, I would add). The government claims, as of the 2011 census, that about 74% of Indians are literate- but the figure is highly ambiguous and likely to be substantially lower, perhaps close to 50% when factoring in people who can sign their names... but not do much else.
There is significant evidence that exposure to technology early in life translates to improved tech literacy later on- (I can attest to this myself, having spent quite a lot of time as a 6 year old messing around in MS DOS looking for videogames).
During my short stint in the telecommunications sector I became aware of a project headed by MIT’s Media Labs that has gained a lot of attention, a lot of prominence in the last few years.
The One Laptop Per Child project- which originally aimed to provide the children of the third world with 100 dollar laptops and change the world by doing so. The OLPC foundation headed by John Negroponte develops cutting edge technologies that are deployed in that ‘next-gen’ laptops, including crankshaft generators and internet sharing capabilities over wifi- all on an intuitive open-source GUI platform.
I had known about the One Laptop Per Child project for a while now, of course, but it was only now that I was exposed to the technologies and scales involved that I developed a more nuanced view of the matter.
The target price of the laptops has gone up to 200 dollars since then- citing research costs. The laptops are sold to governments and are then meant to be distributed to children. They are sold in the west for 400 dollars- the buyers are told that they are sponsoring a third-world child’s laptop along with their own.
India’s government refused John Negropontes offer to distribute OLPC XO tablets in India. When I heard the news- I, naive and emotive like most Indians, was incensed- it was another sign of government apathy to me.
Now that I look at it again, OLPC’s strategy is sound and logical from a business sustainability point of view- but from a social point of view- it makes little sense.
Does it make sense for a product designed solely for accessibility to have such a high premium on research? Yes the technologies funded by the project will go a long way- but you’re essentially demanding that third world governments pay for your research as you provide them with hardware- not only will governments have take on financial burden- they shoulder the risk should the consumers not take to the product in a big way or if it gets outcompeted in the market. It’s not easy to convince a hundred million people they need a computer unless you give them a VERY good reason.
Simply by being raised Indian, I was able to find flaws in the very idea of OLPC- You do not need new, expensive research to make things cheap.
Everything that is cheap in India (and EVERYTHING is cheap in India) is cheap because we skipped the R&D phase and focussed on reverse engineering technologies and then perfecting manufacturing for India’s scales. It makes sense to restart manufacturing of older/outdated/defunct products that have gone out of fashion in the developed world-(after giving them a slight dress up of course). The costs of the components used to make 5 year old computers have crashed substantially over time. Keeping research costs to a minimum keeps the end user price low.
People who have nothing will not complain about the older technological framework of their product. Quantity and cost here, are paramount, quality is important only in terms of ruggedness and functionality- whether the computer chips have been manufactured by 75 mm nanomachining or 40 mm nanomachining is immaterial.
Of course, MIT’s media labs will find the ‘go low tech instead of high tech’ idea abhorrent.
Small Indian companies have already come up that are closer to matching OLPC’s 100 dollar goal- not by spending millions in labs- but by collecting old PC parts and assembling cheap as sin models that meet the basic requirements expected of them.
Some NGOs have come even closer, focussing on the redistribution of used PCs to schools in underprivileged areas and other ‘deserving’ entities, another quick-fix solution with a lot of promise. (It’s a bit like how the Tata Nano- the world’s cheapest production car, made in India, is likely to revolutionize immature car markets- but will be a fish out of water in an economy with a flourishing used car market)
Hardware ‘trickledown’ has the added benefit of avoiding the creation of E-waste (another important topic, perhaps best left for another essay).
Secondly, Individual ownership- OLPC believes that, say if a village has 200 kids, it needs 200 OLPC XOs. Perhaps if you’re raised in an American setting- private ownership of the product has some deep cultural significance. In India, and indeed much of the less developed world- he have grown up around sharing and scrapping over scarce resources. Cyber cafes are huge in India.
It makes a lot more sense in the Indian context to have say- 10-20 computers in a computer lab in each village to service the 200 children- which brings down costs to a tenth- once again an idea not palatable to the OLPC foundation which seeks to maximize its own sales- making it increasingly look like a business and not a non-profit.
Misplaced ideals about the philosophy of progress, a lack of understanding about the importance of cost and contextually inappropriate marketing have really left me convinced that the OLPC project is more about getting easy research funding in the name of charity and ripping off developing economies rather than contributing in any meaningful way to the technological revolution that the world is in the midst off.
My own personal reservations there is one more reason that the OLPC program would have been doomed to fail in India.
More Indians than not, are in the possession of a portable media device that is more intuitive to use than the XO laptop, is cheaper, is downright more useful. As of now we have 791,381,574 (EDIT This figure has crossed 960 million by now) of them.
This is the number of cell phones registered all over India.
This figure might confuse a few. India has lucked out, in a way. The telephone Industry in India was shockingly primitive in the 90s, the physical cable infrastructure was almost nonexistent. What this meant however, was that unlike other countries in the west that had to double-invest, first to create a landline telephone network, then a wireless one- India and other ‘developing’ nations skipped right ahead into the newer, most cost-effective technology.
Digital electronics are some of the fastest depreciating products on the market. While those in the Industry might view this as a negative- I find it one of the most exciting prospects in the world today. The electronics industry is one of the most innovative in the world, and more importantly, their outdated products are becoming cheap so fast that even the poorest in the world can afford them.
Coupled with India’s scale- this results in the cheapest telephone network in the world- charging 1 cent a minute per call in many places- affordable by practically everyone.
Some studies estimate that India will have over 1.2 billion cellphones by 2014- one phone per person. India’s literacy rate will likely have moved ahead only a few percentage points by that time- if old growth patterns dominate.
Unlike computers such as the OLPC XO, while cellphones require only basic literacy- they are much simpler to use and have a direct ‘purpose’ or ‘gain’- something that people can relate to.
People have incentive to learn and use this technology, unlike with a computer which requires too many expensive add-ons, CDs, internet connections, very high literacy, to get the same kick out of a computer that simple talking can get out of a mobile phone. The OLPC Project once again fails to factor in economics- this time the economics of incentives and the desire for immediate returns.
Even though cellphones are simple to use- they have a positive effect on the growth of literacy and numeracy (apart from providing a calculator for those who simply suck at math), new users learn more and more to extract the maximum benefit from their product.
As part of my internship in telecom- I was asked to dissect this market of people that had once been discarded, and to find out what they wanted.
A few things came to light- firstly- the lowest end phones- costing 20 dollars or so, are not the highest selling devices in the low income region. The sweet spot for any tech gadget aimed at this audience is at about 60 dollars- people are willing to pay a premium for features like SMS, a basic camera etc and rich media support.
Shockingly people with extremely low purchasing power were interested in purchasing rich media products- ironically driven by low literacy. These are mostly in the form of movie trailers, wallpapers and previews, and cricket related products- but increasing engagement with rich media opens up a slew of opportunities for both business and social sectors.
There’s a lot of scope for social messaging- such as sending out SMS alerts in regions in case of a tsunami or earthquake warning, crafting small products that increase productivity- imagine how a thing as simple as giving a farmer access to a weather forecast- or product prices in cities- has the potential to completely transform isolated farming communities.
There’s something that I’ve taken for granted here, that telecommunication technology, and media access can rapidly change the landscape of a society. My gut says yes, but that isn’t going to convince governments to invest millions of dollars into offbeat projects, is it?
Does technology and the influx of media serve to change prevailing social attitudes in less developed, low literacy rural regions?
If so, just how much difference does it actually make?
I’ll refer to a study by Robert Jensen and Emily Oster, professor at the Chicago Booth school of business. The study deals with the influx of televisions into Indian villages and uses regression analysis to extract the statistically significant causal relationship between the introduction of television sets into a rural community and subsequent attitudes towards women in the community.
The original paper can be found at http://www.nber.org/papers/w13305.pdf
The authors focus on identifying causal effects by trying to ensure there aren’t any factors in their data driving both the expansion in access to television and changes in the status of women that would lead to the confusion of correlation with causation.
Participants from 180 villages in India were interviewed once a year for three years in 2001, 2002, and 2003. Although television first entered India in the early 90s- the early 21st century represents a time of rapid growth in rural cable access. During the years of the study, cable television was newly introduced in 21 of the 180 participating villages.
The analysis in the paper relies on comparing changes in gender attitudes between years across villages based on the time and duration of access to cable television. Some of the measures used to ascertain the change in attitudes include judging attitudes towards beating and preference for sons. Attitudes toward spousal abuse were measured by asking women whether beating is acceptable in six possible situations (if a woman neglects children, is unfaithful, etc.), and counting the total number of situations in which she reports beating is acceptable.
Son preference was measured by asking women who want more children whether they want their next child to be a boy.
Cable had an effect on both of these variables. Perhaps predictably- Women who live in villages that have introduced cable for longer periods show great declines in both the number of acceptable beating situations and son preference whereas villages whereas villages without cable television access show mostly no change over the years without media catalysis. This change happens between 2001 and 2002 for villages that introduce cable in 2002, and between 2002 and 2003 for villages that introduce cable in 2003. The timing of the change in attitudes lines up with the timing of the change in cable access.
Other indicators focused on changed behaviour rather than attitudes. Female autonomy was measured based on responses to questions about participation in household decision making. According to the results of the study, the overall autonomy of women increased after the introduction of cable and, again, this change coincides neatly with the rate of cable introduction. The authors also found a decrease in pregnancy rates after cable introduction.
Other indicators focused on changed behaviour rather than attitudes. Female autonomy was measured based on responses to questions about participation in household decision making. According to the results of the study, the overall autonomy of women increased after the introduction of cable and, again, this change coincides neatly with the rate of cable introduction. The authors also found a decrease in pregnancy rates after cable introduction.
If Jensen and Oster are to be believed- the effects of ‘cable’ occur rapidly, substantial attitude changes are observed in the first year itself. Older work on the effects of media exposure also typically finds similarly rapid changes. These effects are also large: the study claims that between 45 and 70 percent of the gap in attitudes and behaviours between urban and rural areas are closed by the introduction of television.
There is a possibility that some other, superseding variable affects both the expansion in access to television and changes in rural women’s attitudes and behaviours. Villages aspiring to be “modern” may be more likely to improve in attitudes toward women and also be more likely to adopt television. This would make the entire study one of correlation rather than of causation.
To test for this case, the authors tested to see if the social change in any of the villages began before the introduction of television- it didn’t, yet happened rapidly after the introduction of television- which would be expected if the television was actually the causal entity.
Some studies indicate that investments in children’s education and health care are greater when women have larger role to play in the household- so there may have been a spillover effect on the children of the of the society along with the women.
Attending school was used as an indicator of children’s welfare, and the study found that school enrollment, especially among younger children, increases after cable television is introduced- although the effect is delayed rather than immediate. The impact on enrollment is stronger if households have cable for more than a year. Unlike the immediate impact observed on women, television could take longer to affect education because plans for schooling must be made well in advance and money must be saved for fees and other costs.
The study raises important insights- namely that programs that are aiming to promote social change in low education, low literacy areas may be misallocating resources in a big way. The inability to evoke meaningful behavioural change has long been one of deepest thorns in the sides of reformers.
The alleviation poverty, building schools, and improving teacher quality- all use up enormous resources and yet they often fail to meet the goal expected (in this case, that of increased primary employment).
Using passive media techniques to inject modern ideas into backwater regions holds significant promise- it has a glass ceiling of course, issues that stem directly from poverty and discrimination cannot be eliminated by giving people TVs. Simple steps like this, though, can dramatically increase the efficacies of pre-existing social programs.
A professor at the Indian institute of management has pioneered an incredibly, absurdly simple technique to make education automatic. It’s called Same-Language-Subtitling or SLS. It’s so simple that the name explains the whole project. All TV shows shown in the region are subtitled in the same language they are spoken in. It’s useful tool in the west just in case you needed to mute the television for a bit but by putting together the spoken word and written text with India’s eclectic cocktail of semifunctional literacy, you have, for the lack of a better word, an EXPLOSIVE tool for auto-education with the potential to bring over 200 million ‘basic literate’ adults into the ‘useful literate’ fold, all the while imparting early literates- children, the tools to develop their reading abilities at a young age and keep honing them rather than slacking off.
The results on SLS aren’t out yet, most media studies in the west focus on the ‘negative’ effects of early media exposure- trying to find a link between too much TV and bad grades, social isolation etc, there plenty of fear-mongering and not much about how it influences people who are already at the bottom of the pyramid- where the only way to go is up.
I have a confession to make. I have grown up in a fairly westernized, urban India. I was largely apathetic apart from the occasional selfish act of charity. Without even realizing it, I grew up believing that rural Indians were at some level unequal to me. It was not out of any spite or malice- I assumed that Maslow’s pyramid and the lack of an education would make them irrational, illogical and prone to make stupid decisions. I wasn’t completely wrong either- cases like that aren’t uncommon.
I got my first real taste of rural India when I joined engineering college, the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, in Pilani.
When the college was being set up by the Ford Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the original team expressed dismay at site they had been allocated- it was so far removed from anything urban or urbane- they couldn’t imagine it producing high technology graduates. Yet the college survived, and prospered, today it can be considered one of the best in India, perhaps even Asia, with one of the most selective undergrad programs in the world.
Pilani is a rural township, but not a poor one, as far as rural townships go. There are no farmer suicides, no threat of famine or flood (though it’s in a desert), and there are plenty of small businesses, food stalls and shops run by people from the rural areas.
In my time here I’ve had the opportunity to meet and interact with many people of kind most urban Indians scoff at- the class divide in India is certainly great. I’ve met crowds gathered around TVs discussing the technical details of bowling action in cricket, restaurant cooks with diplomas in engineering who couldn’t find a job working in the field, rickshaw-pullers that are surprisingly fluent in English- better than many of the undergrads who had to clear an exam in English to get admission (though some will admit that their English vocabulary is a result of too much interaction with westernized engineering students- perhaps that explains the over-adundance of curse words in their lexicon, haha), heated political discussions are common before election day- something that apathetic urban Indians really can’t relate to- rural Indians are more informed and capable of forming nuanced opinion than ever before- often more so than their richer urban counterparts.
There is a sense of aspiration in rural India that most urban Indians have chosen to ignore... I doubt it is unique only to India. Thinking about it sends a chill up my spine.
People aren’t useless, people are incredible.
But far too many are raised taught only about their limitations and not about their potential. We lose out on a better world every time a daughter is refused the same education her brother received, every time a farmer’s children are told they can only ever become mechanics and taxi drivers, and not engineers and pilots.
Perhaps we can change that.
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