
What It Looks Like to Use the Internet for the First Time - danso
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/what-it-looks-like-to-use-internet-for-the-first-time
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ajonit
I stood beside my 67 yo mom when she used Internet for the 1st time. Her first
reaction was Wow - Google knows everything. :)

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dnquark
We've spent many millions broadcasting radio and TV to Cuba (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_y_Televisi%C3%B3n_Mart%C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_y_Televisi%C3%B3n_Mart%C3%AD)).
I wonder what the obstacles are to providing internet access via something
like Project Loon. Free, uncensored internet access would be a far greater
catalyst for regime change in Cuba than those shortwave broadcasts ever were.

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1971genocide
By 2020 80% of humanity will have access to a smartphone connected to the
internet.

As a programmer I am really optimistic about the future :)

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dublinben
They certainly won't be threatening your job any time soon. We won't be
educating a new generation of programmers when 80% of users' primary computing
device is a phone.

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oh_sigh
Why not? You can get a computer which runs linux, and lets you learn how to
program, for far cheaper than the average cell phone costs. For example
raspberry pi runs linux and you can buy it for $30.

Right now the thing that is stopping more people from learning programming is
probably the unfriendliness that is associated with setting up your
environment for the first time and learning everything from scratch.

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dublinben
The $30 price of a RaspberryPi is pretty disingenuous. You also need over $100
of accessories to actually use it as a desktop computer.

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robbiep
That was quick - when I was there at the end of 2013 internet access was hard
to come by and very expensive, and also very transient

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Walkman
If you don't read the article just look at the pictures, all you can see is
people staring screens. That bothers me a lot.

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scott_s
It shouldn't. You're starting at a screen to read this. I am staring at a
screen to write it. Communication with people outside of shouting distance has
always required staring at something. It looks passive, but it opens up a
world inside your head.

Put aside the romantic notion that these people are losing something. They're
gaining access to the rest of the world. They deserve it just as much as you
and I.

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thaumasiotes
Highly related -- the notion that we need to preserve linguistic diversity by
making sure obsure-language communities stay where they are, instead of
learning languages that allow them to participate in the world economy.

Oddly, this is an area of debate in linguistics, where you find people saying
things like "well, these communities with their languages spoken by 300 people
are great for us professionally, but it's hard to say the parents are wrong
for wanting their children to be able to have jobs outside the village."
But... _public opinion_ (in the US) seems to be entirely on the side of stasis
- if the world included an inaccessible 300-person village with its own
language last year, moral correctness requires that that village and that
language persist as they are forever, and what the villagers might want is
irrelevant.

Communication media are not primarily of benefit for their aesthetic appeal.
They are of benefit for letting people communicate.

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intopieces
>the notion that we need to preserve linguistic diversity by making sure
obsure-language communities stay where they are, instead of learning languages
that allow them to participate in the world economy.

In the Linguistics community, this is not an either-or proposition. The focus
is on preservation of minority languages in the face of the economic necessity
to adapt to the majority language. The economic necessity will always win out.
There's no need to defend it.

Additionally, the ethical concerns with Linguistic preservation are numerous
and well-acknowledged. There are many indigenous languages that may never be
preserved simply because the people who speak them specifically refuse to
participate in it and the professionals in that field respect that (they don't
have much choice, of course).

I've seen this anti-preservation sentiment before and it's quite puzzling; it
seems to assume a demand by the preservationists for monolinguistic isolation
that doesn't exist. That is, most of the world's people speak 2 or 3 languages
anyway, so the call for everyone to "learn English and forget the rest" or
something similar is not even necessary.

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thaumasiotes
I specifically called out that the linguistics community says a lot of very
reasonable stuff here, in contrast to the public. Are you disagreeing with me
about the public? I'm not disagreeing about the linguistics community (except
to say that there are definitely pieces of it that take a whole-hog preserve-
them-regardless-of-their-own-good view of things).

The demand for monolinguistic isolation is real, and springs from the same
realistic viewpoint you've stated that "the economic necessity will always win
out". That you don't share it doesn't mean nobody shares it.

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schoen
That's an interesting contrast! Language preservation efforts by professional
linguists do usually have a lot of respect for the speakers' autonomy, where
tourists' desire for things to stay the same so they can go see them as they
used to be might be less respectful of local people's autonomy.

Of course linguists also have a scientific interest which isn't necessarily
motivated by a view that it's _good_ for people to speak their heritage
languages, so much as that it's important for people documenting the language
to have access to as many competent informants as possible (ideally also over
time and from different walks of life). The ethical part as I understand it
might be more like a desire for people to have access to the resources and
circumstances that will let them become as competent as possible in all the
languages they want to use.

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contingencies
Very sad that social surveillance systems like facebook are taking off in
these uneducated minds. Firefox OS should contribute to liberating these
people by enabling mesh apps...
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10120722](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10120722)

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anishkothari
Related to this is 'El Paquete' \- a weekly offline delivery of the internet.
[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33816655](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33816655)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal)

