What It Looks Like to Use the Internet for the First Time
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
As a programmer I am really optimistic about the future :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know that folks are in favor of stasis, per se. I get the impression it's more a by-product of the collective guilt a lot of Americans feel about the knowledge that the country was built by displacing and destroying a great many cultures. Loss of languages in particular is associated with the Carlisle school.
So folks are used to thinking of this stuff in terms of imperialism and ethnic cleansing. That maybe leaves them less likely to recognize that the issue has other facets as well.
Also related: there are similar articles around lamenting the effects of Cuba's opening on the pristine beaches. There are plenty of places in Cuba that might see new tourist activity where once there wasn't enough demand to build anything. Intrepid travelers can currently get there and enjoy the feeling of being transported back in time -- that will presumably be lost. Absent in this line of thinking is how badly Cubans want those jobs, and how much better their lives may get.
Victorians once rationalized their treatment of colonial subjects by arguing that the "noble savage" is purer, and better, than the industrial Westerner -- that they should be spared the need to toil in the muck like the modern man in England when it would be more virtuous to maintain their simpler lifestyles. "Oh no, they'll get addicted to Instagram like the rest of us, they'll stop playing cards!" seems like the same sentiment to me.
The internet has connected me with people worldwide. I've stayed with people I've met online. Something my parents would never have dreamed of being able to do. I learn about global politics and the differing worldviews of people from Australia, Japan, Germany, Brazil, Sweden, the list goes on and on.
I'd much rather discuss the cherry blossoms in the Spring than play a game of cards. Or learn how a saying in America might have a different meaning in Australia (and vice-versa).
I find my online social life far more enriching than the forced interactions of my life offline and find it irritating when anyone ever implies it's not "real social interaction".
My "fake" social interactions have taught me a foreign language, made me more aware of geo-political differences, and put me in touch with people I'd never have gotten a chance to meet if I went out to the park to socialize with the local kids instead.
I think it's interesting that people are coming to such different views of the value and genuineness of electronically mediated interactions and relationships.
>>Accessing the internet through one of the 35 government-owned hotspots on the island costs $2 CUC per hour (CUC is pegged 1:1 with the dollar), which is 10 percent of the average government-set salary. To waste time helping a stranger or chatting up a friend can end up being a not insubstantial waste of cash.