Its funny that my first go around involves the pursuit of those two things that also differ from east and west: happiness or accessibility.
So I just read two very different blog posts involving the internet and data but their similarities are all about the same thing: how to bring people to the next phase of their own use of the internet.
The first is about Googles Next Billion Users team and how they are “the future of the internet”: https://www.blog.google/topics/next-billion-users/next-billion-users-are-future-internet/
This one to me is firmly about accessibility. Those folks who are not used to the Internet and Computing the way I know I grew up with but how will they interact with it. When it comes to voice interaction the western world sees it more as a novelty than a need but I never thought about it when it came to emerging countries. This quote really hit it hard on the head on why we cant go into a western mindset on eastern needs.
“This isn’t just due to many semi-literate or illiterate users, but also the fact that typing is difficult for people who never grew up with a computer keyboard. The next billion users will be the first to truly embrace ubiquitous computing, expecting apps to work in a natural way rather than having to learn all the artificial commands that we did on PCs.”
Yowza. Traveling to Pakistan I have met may people who can speak rudimentary english or Urdu but cannot write particularly well. QWERTY is not an accessible technology by universal standards. Google and other companies are creating these tools allow these human beings to join the rest of us close to the level of accessibility that folks in the west already see. They are for sure doing it for revenue reasons vs the betterment of humanity but at least they are trying.
The second is about how organizations are looking at what makes people happy and how to use web based tools to provide some of that happiness: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610159/100000-happy-moments/
This one is obviously around happiness. Yes the western world is on the internet and yes we are producing a lot of data. How do we take that data, condense those things that make us happy, and see what the internet and other virtual tools can do to make us happy. But this quote shows that its not as easy as they may think to mine
“Analysis turns out to be a complex task. For example, the superficially simple sentence “I had dinner with my husband” raise the question of what exactly about this activity made the moment happy. “The extracted activities could be “having dinner,” “being with the husband,” or something that is not explicitly in the text such as “having a date night without the children,” say Asai and co.”
Its an interesting notion. Something to think about no doubt.
person.earth 