Tech Perspectives

In Hyderbad, a company called Wipro is training Indian workers to speak with “Midwestern American and working class British accents” in order to answer service calls for companies like Dell Computer Corporation and Oracle. These are entry level positions that would have once gone (in the American labor market) to high school graduates. Now, they are being done by East Indians who, as the chart above points out, make less money a year than an inner-city black high school student would make at McDonald’s in six months.

What is even more significant for American worker is that there are aggressive forces in India preparing its workforce not just to receive outsourced jobs but to develop their own version of California’s “Silicon Valley.” One has but to recall the negative effect that Japanese carmakers, Toyota, Mitsubishi and Nissan, had on the domestic automobile market to imagine what might happen to the American high tech companies if they must face competition from abroad. In less than a decade from the time Japanese cars entered the American market, their cars were considered to be a better value than their American counterparts. HyderBad

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Internet World Stats News
January 25, 2009
 
[Internet World Stats says internet users number over 1.5 billion]
 
Note that these are early figures, and that breakdowns by country are not yet available in this database for end-2008. More complete data is available for mid-2008 at
 
Internet users in the world already hit one and a half billion persons approximately in July of 2008. The current estimates of Internet users for 2008 year-end (2008Q4) according to our database, which includes ALL the Internet users universe, comprises
over 1,573,269,743 persons worldwide. The Internet Penetration Rate is 23.4%, considering a global population of 6,708,755,756 persons according to the U.S. Census Bureau data. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm]

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Chinese Internet Audience Outranks U.S.
 
China represented the largest online audience in the world in December 2008 with 180 million Internet users, representing nearly 18 percent of the total worldwide Internet audience, followed by the U.S. (16.2 percent share), Japan (6.0 percent share), Germany
(3.7 percent share) and the U.K. (3.6 percent share).
 
[Others in the top 15 countries included France and India, each with over 3% of the world audience; Russia, Brazil, South Korea, Canada, and Italy, each with over 2% of the world audience; and Mexico and the Netherlands, each with 1.2% of the world audience.]

http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2698

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Africa: Internet Growth Accelerating

AfricaFocus Bulletin
Feb 4, 2009 (090204)
 

Editor's Note

"Until recently, the experience of the internet in Africa has been like having to eat a three-course meal by sucking it through a straw: time-consuming, unreliable and expensive. .. [but prices are dropping] and cheap international bandwidth is an essential component for any developing country to remain competitive in a changing world."—Russell Southwood, in Global Information Society Watch 2008
 
Southwood goes on to note that new undersea cables, two of them due to be completed this year, are predicted to cut international bandwidth prices for some African countries by as much as 90%, and that there will be strong pressure for reducing costs inside
countries as well, as well as for finding new ways to bring cheaper connections to neglected rural areas.
 
Although Africa still remains last among world regions in estimated internet penetration (5.4% of the population as compared to the world average of 23.4%, according to end-2008 figures from Internet World Stats - see article below), it also features a growth rate of over 1,000% between 2000 and mid-2008, with an estimated 19.8% growth rate between end 2007 and end 2008. Internet World Stats now estimates more than 51 million internet users in Africa, while leading expert Southwood estimates an even higher user/population rate, if usage at internet cafes is fully taken into account.
 
This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains excerpts from two recent articles on global internet usage, the first from the commercial firm ComScore (http://www.comscore.com) and the second from the web site Internet World Stats (http://www.internetworldstats.com), which also provides more detailed estimates by country. The Bulletin also contains excerpts from Russell Southwood's article on Trends in Technology, from the Global Information Society Watch 2008 report, released in December. Additional articles from GISW 2008 are available for download at http://giswatch.org, and a press release on the report is at http://www.apc.org/en/node/7558

GISW reports on Africa ( Abiodun Jagun ) /  Inernet statistics for individual African countries, as of mid-2008

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Bandwidth, the petrol of the new global economy—Put simply, bandwidth is what carries voice and data from one place to another. Bandwidth is the petrol of the new global economy; and cheap international bandwidth is an essential component for any developing country to remain competitive in a changing world. . . . Used strategically, bandwidth can create new “think work” industries like business process outsourcing (BPO) and call centres. For example, a single company in Ghana, ACS, employs 1,200 people doing data processing. The Indian Ocean island of Mauritius employs between 4,000 and 5,000 people in a combination of BPO and call centres. Over 10,000 people in the South African city of Cape Town work in these sectors. . . .

Take the example of West Africa. According to a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC), there are three waves of population movement. Since the early 1960s, 80 million people have moved to the cities from rural areas. Populations also move from one country to another in West Africa, and this represents 90% of inter-regional migration. Finally, West Africans represent 3% of immigrants from non-OECD countries living in Europe. Each of these people needs to be able to communicate with their family. . . .

Financial remittances flow all the way down this chain of communication and, according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), in 2006 these were worth USD 10 billion to West African countries. These remittances exceed the amount of money spent by international donors. But the cost of sending that money is around 12% of the total, whereas elsewhere in the world, such as Latin America, it has fallen to 6%. Cheaper communications and competition can bring cheaper transaction costs, and more of this money will arrive in developing countries.

The first wave of the communications revolution in Africa was the spread of mobile phones, which are now within reach of 60-70% of the continent’s population. By contrast, the internet is only accessed by 12-15% of the population. Until recently, the experience of the internet in Africa has been like having to eat a three-course meal by sucking it through a straw: time-consuming, unreliable and expensive.

While new mobile interfaces will increasingly allow mobile internet access, the second wave of the communications revolution will be the spread of relatively cheap internet use. For developing countries, particularly in Africa, the internet has been the poor cousin of much more widely distributed technologies like mobile phones and radio. However, despite the limitations of speed and cost, a surprisingly large number of people use it.

Based on national survey samples from a range of twelve African countries of different income levels, between 2-15% of the population use the internet (except in the two poorest countries) and 1-8% use it on a daily basis (except for the four poorest countries). On this basis, there might easily be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of broadband subscribers depending on the size of country. Literacy plays a part, but probably not as big a part as price. GISWatch

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What is significant for these “information activists” and their anti-capitalist organizations—the new computer linked social movement—to understand is that their activities have already caught the eyes of “independent critical intellectuals, mainstream social scientists and National Security Analysts.”

Cleaver’s paper, itself, is a compilation from various sources. But, from reading Cleaver’s paper, it is clear that he was deeply impressed by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. These intellectuals were able to transcend “Left notions of structuralism” and “dialectics” and have instead been able to focus on the “micro-dynamics of the individual and the social movements” themselves.

In other words, these men scrapped the old way of analyzing social movements and their participants in favor of different and more revealing analysis. What they have concluded is that there is emerging a global network of progressives, radicals, and revolutionaries linked by modern information technology—e-mail, cell phone, pc’s, etc. that yield power greater than the sum of their parts.  NetWar

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Broad coalition backs universal broadband—A broad coalition of Internet business leaders, online gurus, community organizers and advocates across the political spectrum launched a campaign Tuesday with the lofty goal of universal high-speed Internet service. Better broadband access and quality can be a boring and technical issue, fraught with bureaucratic complications, admitted the organizers for InternetforEveryone.org. But they also see it as crucial to the future of the U.S. economy, education and even the health of democracy. At a news conference in New York, the group warned that the United States is falling behind European and Asian nations with Internet access that is more limited, more expensive and slower. U.S. users pay an average of $53 a month for high-speed service, compared with $32 in Germany and $33 in Britain, according to one international survey. . . .A "digital divide" among Internet users could also leave lower-income and minorities behind, the coalition warned. According to the Census Bureau, 35 percent of households with annual incomes below $50,000 have broadband, while 76 percent of those with higher incomes are connected. It's 'life and death'. High-speed Internet is becoming crucial to democracy, said Van Jones, and people are left out "when they don't have access to the discussion in the blogosphere" or have access to specific information in an emergency. MercuryNews

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As my taste in music changed from Blues infused Urban Soul to Blues infused Urban Jazz, I can remember Marvin Gaye ask the question we all wanted to know the answer to, “What’s Goin’ On!”  What’s goin’ on with the Vietnam War? What’s goin’ on with the riots and the Panthers? What’s going on with Tricky Dick Nixon? What’s goin’ on? What’s goin on? And, of course, Marvin already had the answer. We all nodded in approval as Marvin crooned his reply over every black, urban AM radio station in America: “Mercy, mercy, me. Things ain’t what they used to be!”

Some will see all that I have said as coincidental. Those who see it as such are unaware of the mythic, purgative, transforming power that music has for the Black American. From plantation to plant floor, it has been hymns sung in church, Blues screamed in jukes, and Jazz played in clubs that have sustained us. And, if Hip-Hop is about anything, it is the scream of Black youth at war with itself as it watches the death of one world and the beginning of another. 

But the Black youth of America are not alone in their sense of profound confusion. For the whole world is singing the death song of the Industrial Age. All that we see in our children—the confusion, the obsession with drugs and thuggery, the fascination with death—speaks of the dislocation of their souls, their hearts, and their minds. A Post Industrial Blues

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Jazz, blues, and their sacred cousin, gospel music, all have a rhythm-device in common: the back-beat. Indeed, the back-beat, a heavy emphasis on two and four, is a hallmark of African American music and remains dominant as a rhythmic device into the 21st century. An interesting note about the back-beat with respect to gospel music is the flipping of rhythmic emphasis. In the then popular waltz form, the emphasis was usually ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three. But in gospel, when three-four time is used, as it frequently is, the practictioners usually clap on two and three, thus getting a one-TWO-THREE, one-TWO-THREE rhythm. The back-beat. 

None of the other popular musics of the African diaspora (whether from the Caribbean, Central America or South America) employs a heavy back-beat unless the particular form in question, such as salsa, reggae or soca, is a form that was significantly influenced by Black music from America. This absence of the back-beat is distinctive especially given that most African diaspora music heavily uses drums, or quasi-drum instruments (steel pans for example). 

This is a curious development that is made even more curious by the fact that for the most part the drums of the diaspora remained hand-drums and it was in the United States that the mechanical drum, or the drum kit, commonly called the trap drum or traps, was developed. So the place where the drum had the least continuity in terms of usage and in terms of the direct retention of African poly-rhythms, is the place where the back-beat was emphasized and the drum kit was developed!  Clapping On Two and Four

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update 27 June 2008/