In our second Civic Media Class at the MIT we worked on a model that could illustrate the problem of digital exclusion or limitations that make people have different qualities of access to the internet. Our discussion departed from interesting article talking about different factors that influence exclusion. One of them, for example, mapped the access to the internet in different neighborhoods of Los Angeles (Modarres and Pitkin (2006). “Technology and the Geography of Inequality in Los Angeles.” Pat Brown Public Policy Institute: http://www.patbrowninstitute.org/documents/publications/CTF_Report.pdf), concluding that Latin communities of that city have more difficulties in access. Digital inequalities are everywhere.
My group worked on a decentralized model, mapping the different categories of factors (geography, economic, social, ethnicity, urban, etc), and their components orbiting around digital exclusion. All the groups rotated around each-others models, contributing to their improvement. The contributions pointed to relations between different categories in our model, and they started to relate among themselves, and the centric model evolved to become the net of exclusion.
The next step is now to try to apply this model to our previous experience. And that takes me, again, to the Amazon region. And here comes the main failure in our project, to be applied to the Amazon digital exclusion problem: we didn’t think of the access to energy! Of course, living in the US, we take it for granted. In the Amazon, however, access to energy is still a major problem for most forest and rural communities, isolated in the Rainforest.
In 2006, when I was working the the Verde Para Sempre Reserve communities, at the Xingu River, I helped local communities leaders to develop a project to demand that the government installed internet stations in many communities of the reserve, that has around 10 thousand inhabitants. The project included solar panels, batteries, computers, satellite dishes, and training. In spite of all our effort and lobbying, they never were delivered. That’s how the work in the forest is, many times: frustrating. Isolated and not very numerous, these communities are often overlooked by the government.
In a place where natural resources are under pressure because of economic pressure, digital inclusion with training and education could have a crucial role in reducing the destruction of the rainforest. The way I see it, is that if the next generation is educated and learn to use and program computers, they can be included in the global economy, find sources of income and, therefore, not need to depend on the exploitation of timber and other natural resources to survive.
That would demand a huge governmental investment, not only to install equipment but to maintain and update them, as well as to bring internet literacy to people who, until now, can hardly finish elementary school.
But then there is reality. Amazon communities will continue isolated in the rainforest. Or maybe they will migrate to a large city, as Manaus or Belem, to live miserably in a slum.