Meaningful Broadband
DigitalDivide.org brings us to the real meaning of digital technology: enabling the pursuit of happiness. It is not just about learning how to learn or getting a job: it is about finding out why you are alive.
Meaningful Broadband (MB) refers to high-speed internet infrastructures and applications that fit three criteria: usable, affordable and empowering. In other words, MB refers to the quality of broadband -- broadband that fits the context of the user, the use and the location.
If you lack broadband you are stuck. You will be left out of the most significant period of innovation in history.
Broadband is what the US Founding Fathers (and their Greek ancestors) were referring to when they talked about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Broadband helps you journey into the world and find out for yourself why you are alive.
Thus, broadband is not just for the rich. It is also a basic human right of the 21st century that should be made available to all six billion users. But it is a matter for public policy as well as corporate social responsibility that broadband access fit the context of users at the bottom of the pyramid.
MB is a core innovation of IGADD being introduced in Indonesia with implications for emerging markets worldwide. The IGADD coalition may work with the International Telecommunications Union and other partners to operationalize meaningfulness as a regulatory concept. Regulatory innovations will allow governments to attract and reward meaningful technologies. It would also allow them to discriminate against technologies that are meaningless or, worse, addictive.
Meaningfulness will also emerge as a design concept. IGADD is working with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to formulate concepts of meaningfulness that can be translated into technology design. See MeaningfulTechnology.org.
