Viewing posts for the category mobiles and development
On Monday, the New York Times published Ubiquitous Across Globe, Cellphones Have Become Tool for Doing Good. That a technology could be a tool for doing good is a fairly modest claim, and has been made about probably every new communication technology since the printing press. (For more basic claims about new communication technologies and/or a game of ‘seen in the NYT’ bingo see this handy cheat sheet that appeared in the webcomic xkcd on the same day. Certainly, Snapchat et al demonstrate that yes, teens will indeed use <insert new communications technology here> for sex). Technical solutions to problems of poverty and underdevelopment are particularly popular, not least because they require exactly no soul-searching on the part of the West.