these pictures have been floating in and out of my inbox, so i thought i'd put them up. they're not my pictures - if i've trampled your copyrights let me know and i'll give you credit or take them down.

In the process of cleaning out my hard drive, I came across this annotated bibliography that I compiled last year. The following is an excerpt from the introduction, you can download the entire pdf file here.

In this annotated bibliography I review some of the works that analyze the flip-side of digital globalization. Starting from the question, “What are the detrimental effects of spreading information technologies?” I have tried to find authors who attempt to deflate some of the optimism surrounding the information revolution. This bibliography is amazingly incomplete, and only scratches the surface of most arguments; nonetheless, it serves as a broad survey of the types of arguments that are being made. The hope is to provide a quick overview of some of the criticisms offered from a wide range of disciplines, from the formulaic analysis of the Bridges.org economic report to Husserl’s philosophical discourses.

china is crazy. i think china seems so different because the differences are hard to point to. i mean, cape verde was Different. it was obviously different, and that was that: the roads weren't paved, there was ocean everywhere, the whole country housed fewer people than oakland, etc. and cape town and buenos aires were different too, but they were big cities, and "big cities are the same everywhere".

            

According to this article from the WEF, Cape Verde is one of Sub-Saharan Africa's "Leading Countries in [Internet and Communication Technology] Growth and Penetration". The country has the region's third highest personal computer penetration rate - eight percent. Wonderful!

The thing is, when I was in Cape Verde, I didn't see a single household that had a functioning personal computer. One family had a perpetually-frozen PC running windows 3.1, another had a computer with a fried power source... and that was it. There are maybe twenty or thirty internet café's in the entire country, and public computing facilities are all but nonexistent.