Tweet South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world, and these inequalities are particularly apparent in educational infrastructure. While some children don’t have toilets, brick classrooms or electricity, others go to schools with broadband, computer labs, laptops or tablets, which they start using before they even go to school. Such technologies [...]
Internet and electricity are basic needs for South African schools
Race/gender/games
TweetCultural borrowing in World of Warcraft Everything they say in this article about the fake Jamaican accents of the WoW trolls is true.I spent some time playing a troll and have usually joined troll guilds on a role-playing server. It is interesting that most players with troll characters mimic the Jamaican accents of the non-player [...]
Digital divide and social networking
TweetI’d not paid much attention to the MySpace debates until recently. I get very bored with the American paranoia about children online, since US parents are so good at being afraid for all the wrong reasons. Their reasons predictably involve teen sex, pedophiles, and (when they need some variety) computer games. Remember that these same [...]
Broadening access – US project
TweetA project to provide free wireless broadband – if this becomes a reality it should make broadband accessible to Americans of all income brackets. Can’t see anyone who’d be prepared to foot the bill for doing this here in South Africa, given the reluctance to provide other basics. Knysna, Tshwane and Joburg municipalities have smaller [...]
Long tails and fat cats: Social networks and inequality
TweetI’ve been fascinated by the idea of the “long tail” and online media for about a year now. The long tail is a distribution graph. For example, you might graph the number of blog readers for each blog, and arrange them in descending order of popularity – you’d find that a small number of blogs [...]
Blogging Beyond the Men’s Club
TweetSince anyone can write a Weblog, why is the blogosphere dominated by white males? By Steven Levy Newsweek March 21 issue – At a recent Harvard conference on bloggers and the media, the most pungent statement came from cyberspace. Rebecca MacKinnon, writing about the conference as it happened, got a response on the “comments” space [...]