The Global Village Community Network

Digital Technology has the potential to be a truly transformative tool. It has the capacity to greatly enhance our connective and cooperative capabilities—-allowing us to learn, share information, connect, coordinate, and collaborate on unprecedented scales. These capabilities channeled through the right tools and targeted at the right areas can truly transform the world and change it for the better.  The challenge we face, and the reason why this advancement has failed to bring about this kind of transformation, is that, up to this point, the tools created within the digital technological age have not channeled this potential in the right ways nor have they been constructed with the aim of targeting the people who need it the most. 

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There are a growing number of people in the world who are growing up in communities that are falling apart. Through a mix of societal and environmental forces, the little resources that they rely on are rapidly depleting while the environments they live in are degrading. Many of these people rely on outside aid in order to survive and those that are not so lucky are left to their own devices. They feel trapped within their desperate circumstances and lose hope of ever transforming their communities. Part of this despair is the fact that there are little to no lifelines available to them whether through aid or through transformative resources like quality education and healthcare. They are also isolated from the rest of the world due to their lack of technological infrastructure and digital tools which can enable global cooperation. This leaves them in a situation where they cannot help themselves and cannot reach those who can provide a helping hand that betters their outcomes and improve their conditions. The few among them who are lucky enough to have access to the tools of our technological age face a situation where these tools are useless because they lack the correct infrastructure and environments around them to be effective in uplifting these communities. 

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Technology in general, and specifically digital technology, has often overlooked these people—treating them as simply new users to acquire into their systems which are tailored to the needs of those in more developed, well-off areas rather than the needs of those who actually need it. This has effectively nullified the impact these tools were originally intended to have. This is an issue Ramesh Srinivasan explores in-depth in his book, Whose Global Village: Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World—which was the inspiration for the design of this platform. In his book, Srinivasan argues the need to be more specific about the digital tools we create in order to target their effectiveness towards the underserved and developing communities that need them the most, writing:

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 “...across the world, we can consider alternatives around how networked technology can better support our families, communities, and cultures…I would like us to avoid thinking of the Internet or new technology as universal and instead imagine alternative democratic futures for technology that serve the agendas of the traditionally marginalized and silenced...technologies can support a range of practices, visions, priorities, and belief systems of indigenous and non- Western cultures across the world…what if we thought of technology design accordingly, as continuously and dynamically crafted through collaborative processes? We could then start to visualize a world where technologies serve diverse communities rather than vice versa...I hope through this to open up a space for rethinking how technology initiatives across the world might be reimagined from the perspective of peoples otherwise seen as objectified users…...to rethink how technologies can better serve diverse cultures and ultimately contribute to the world, we can imagine digital efforts where the voices and knowledges, or ontologies, of diverse communities are respected as sovereign while empowered to speak to one another…we can reflect on how to make possible what information and media scholar Phil Agre refers to as "deep diversity, where knowledge is treated as a process rather than a commodity...the examples this book shares reveal that technologies can be designed and developed according to the ethic of praxis, a collaborative approach that stresses the potential of equality and collective learning…Praxis is an approach that stresses collaborative learning and creation to overcome inequality…community members from this perspective are seen as active creators rather than passive recipients...[we need] digital tools [that] have been reinvented to support grassroots aspirations, values, and cultures...[we need to adapt] our thinking about new technology...[to] embrace the diversity and complexity of peoples, environments, and cultures…[by doing so] we can think past simplistic and incomplete notions such as having "access" or being "connected," and consider how these tools may be shaped in the context of everyday life across the world…” 

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To truly capture the transformative potential of digital technology, we need more than just digital spaces– we need catalysts for global change, bridges between communities, and channels of collective strength. We need digital tools built with an understanding of the challenges faced by impoverished regions and—through fostering connection, facilitating collaboration, and enabling greater coordination of time/resources—can help organize the allies and resources necessary to address them. This shift in focus can help us better realize the transformative potential of digital tools and channel them towards the areas that need it most. Redesigning digital technology to help underserved parts of our global community doesn’t necessarily mean overhauling our major platforms, however. It could simply mean building smaller targeted tools and platforms aimed specifically at facilitating collaboration and development efforts within these communities.