For my journalism and democracy class this week, we were asked to comment on some readings by Ann Florini from “The Coming Democracy.” She started her book by talking about how the printing press being invented by Gutenberg was really the start of society and democracy. I have to agree that this really changed the world, but she also mentioned how the printing press had been invented in China hundreds of years before Gutenberg but had never taken off because they “weren’t ready” for the advancement. This lead to numerous questions about “why” and “how,” but in the end it led my to wonder about our current situation with a modern printing press like the blog.
The blog is a universal printing press, with the Internet as our medium. Gutenberg printed pages of the Bible, just like people can now chronicle their lives via the blog. The real question I have to ask, and Florini made me wonder about, is why we developed this modern printing press first. The answer followed quickly, as I realized that we have a great economical advance over many countries. This led to the thought of what the world would be like if the people in Darfur or the rest of Africa had the same access to blogs, or this type of mass “publication.”
It really made me wonder how much more the struggles of this region might be shown to the world if everyone there was able to blog. Instead of picking on senators who are having gay liaisons in airport stalls, we could be highlighting the problems with entire regions of the world. It really makes you think about what a luxury we have to be able to use blogs for a class assignment or to use as a diary, when they could be used to change whole regions of the globe if they only had the access to computers we have.
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and thus the development of the X0, the $100 laptop (now priced at $200) to make the tools of the digital age available in the developing world.
Dunno if that laptop comes with an ISP though, eh?
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