TMW Ideas

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight Home | Monday 8 January
There are times when I get thoroughly dis-heartened with all the trappings of this modern society and just want to go and live in one of those experimental communities where the participants live like neolithic humans. I'm sure that I'm not alone in this feeling and this time of year is probably a high water point for it. However, one of the things that I never get pi55ed off with is my mobile phone. I'm firmly of the belief that the phone is my servant and not my master and regularly choose not to answer a call much to the surprise of the people around me. And so to the point of this post. The BBC's Newsnight are running a series of items under the banner 'Geek Week' and last night's instalment (the first) was a fascinating and thoroughly uplifting analysis of the impact of mobile telephony on Kenyan society. Not only has the technology allowed Kenya to skip a costly infrastructure upgrade (have you seen the cost of copper these days?) which would probably never have happened anyway but it enabled a number of services that just don't exist in UK like P2P cash transfers.
Check it out on the BBC media player.
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