Snowed In

My friend Lilly writes about the $100 laptop and its short and long term effects. She asks, “Could it be the new skolt lapp parable?”

I had to look up Skolt Lapp, because I had never heard of them before. I found an description in an essay about Diffusion of Innovations. The other examples of diffusion remind me a lot of the rhetoric surrounding the “99+1″ laptop:

what happened…

In the 1950s, missionaries distributed steel axes to a tribe of Australian aborigines, hoping “a rapid improvement in living conditions would result.” What ended up happening was a massive increase in leisure time, an upset of the power structure between young and old, and a weakening of trade relations because of deritualization.

what might happen…

It seems unlikely that laptops would act as a direct substitute for existing labor. People might find new sources of income to replace the old, but it’s not as if the laptop makes farming easier. It also seems unlikely that the laptop will become a mechanism for isolation like the steel axes did. People might talk less face to face, but it seems like the laptop would open up new social channels. As for upsetting the balance of power, I think that this is quite likely. Is it bad? It’s hard to tell.

what happened…

In the 70s, Santa Monica created a diamond lane for carpoolers and busses on their four lane highway. It was wildly successful, decreasing commute times for people both in the lane and out, and increasing bus use by 250%. But people hated it. It gave the illusion that it slowed the main road down (it didn’t.) And eventually, people sued to have the diamond lane converted back to a regular lane and won.

what might happen…

This seems like a common problem. Whether or not technology works seems less important than whether people believe it works. I can easily see the $100 laptop falling into this trap. Heck, look at how people villainize video games and the internet in this country.

what happened…

In the Nile river delta, many villagers choose canal water that has dead animals and urine in it over pure, chlorinated water that comes from public taps. They think it lowers sex drive, they believe their folk methods do purify the canal water (they don’t), they find the taps inconvenient (they are), and the taps don’t provide the same social opportunities that the canals do.

what might happen…

Could digital communication technologies result in a net decrease in social opportunities for $100 laptop users? Could they remove the need for geographic meeting places, killing off essential parts of the social fabric of the groups using them? Maybe. Certainly the opposite is possible as well: they could provide many more opportunities for social contact. Could people misunderstand their benefits, and continue to use old technology instead? That also seems possible.

what happened…

And of course the Skolt Lapps are a group of reindeer herding people in Northern Finland who had a fairly robust culture built around reindeer herding, eating, and trading, that was deeply upset when snowmobiles began to inflitrate their society and replace previously reindeer-centered activities. The snowmobile became the “thing to have” and people made fatal sacrifices to have it. Unemployment skyrocketed, debt exploded, the reindeer population dwindled, and their previously sustainable economy collapsed.

what might happen…

It seems reasonable that laptops could become a symbol of prestige, and that people might begin to believe that it is the right solution for all problems. This could certainly cause people to make large and misguided sacrifices to obtain and maintain them.

All of this is highly speculative, and I think Lilly is right to interpret it as a “fascinating historical event”. Still, it seems like it would be possible to avoid the same kind of mistakes that were made with the deployment of the innovations mentioned above. I don’t think we need to wait until the technology has run its course: we could study how third world cultures currently work and look for warning signs. We wouldn’t even have to leave our offices. I am sure there are a lot of ethnographies written about the cultures the $100 laptop will be deployed in. It’s just a matter of reading them and doing some slightly more educated speculating than what I’ve done here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 18th, 2006 at 6:37 am and is filed under Favorites, Summer of Code, pi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.