Title: A Response to "A Dialogue on ICTs, Human Development, Growth and Poverty Reduction"
Author: Ethan Zuckerman
Source: Publius Project
Publisher: Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University
Date (published): 18/09/2009
Date (accessed): 05/10/2009
Type of information: essay
Language: English
On-line access: yes (HTML)
Abstract:
If we imagine Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle falling asleep in a developing nation in 1998 and awaking today, it's likely that he'd be fascinated and surprised by mobile phones. When Rip went to sleep, only a few hundred million people had access to mobile phones, and most lived in wealthy nations. A decade later, the ITU sees 4.1 billion mobile phone accounts, two-thirds of them in the developing world. The changes brought by mobile phones are both subtle and omnipresent - mobile phone numbers painted above shop doors allow merchants to untether from their stalls; carpentry ads scrawled on road signs turn a craftsman with a phone into an independent, mobile business; secure money transfers from abroad pay the village school fees that grant a child an education.