Tilting at Robot Arms

Facebook has recently launched a series of ads for its not for profit Internet.org initative which aims to bring free or at least affordable internet to those parts of the planet not currently blessed with such a thing.  It would be churlish to suggest they're just hoping to get more customers for facebook.  The ads focus on people who have achieved extraordinary things despite the crippling disability of internet deprivation and end with an invitation to us to consider how much more they could have done if only they had access to the world wide web.  It's all very touching and uplifting really.

As a total non sequitur I can't help wondering how wretchedly bad a product has to be if the people tasked with marketing it figured that the most effective way to do so was to highlight the achievements of people who have never encountered it.  It would be like making a car commercial that featured nothing but draught horses.  Which would be ridiculous because everybody knows that draught horses advertise beer.

The first advertisement I saw featured a couple of young girls who had built themselves a robot arm.  This was, rightly, noted as pretty impressive for a couple of girls living in an internet free zone.  Am I alone in wondering if that might actually have helped.  With no internet you do rather have to think of something to do yourself.  Still, as I noted the ad posed the question of how much more the girls could have done if they had had the internet.  Possibly they could have built an entire robot.

The marketing team seem to be forgetting a couple of things.  Firstly if the girls had had the internet they would almost certainly have spent most of their time watching humourous cat videos and cyberbullying their peers.  Secondly they haven't really taken into account the fact that the girls are building robot arms essentially to pass the time until next year when depending on their culture and location they will either be preparing for their arranged marriage or going to work in a tin mine.

The next ad was even more bizarre.  It featured a couple of young boys who had designed a windmill.  Considering the surroundings they apparently live in I can't help thinking that a windmill is probably of more practical use to their community than any half a dozen robot arms you care to name.  And again there is the "imagine what they could have done if they'd had the internet" hook.

I'm sorry to be the one to point this out but we have had windmills of various descriptions for almost two thousand years longer than we've had the internet (and I know that's true I looked it up on wikipedia).  If we had had to wait for the internet before we could get around to designing windmills a lot of people would have gone very hungry, and died.  Using the internet to help you build a windmill is like going onto youtube to learn how to be a blacksmith (and without even checking I'm certain you can).  If those boys had internet access they would probably use it to find jobs in a part of the world where designing a windmill isn't an essential life skill.  I'm joking of course, they would use it for porn.  Unless they were of a particularly ambitious frame of mind in which case they would use it to cut and paste enough information from wikipedia to get themselves a university degree, and porn.

I don't think facebook's initiative is actually a bad idea.  Opening children's minds to a vast array of new ideas and experiences will help them to be dissatisfied with what they've got right now and dissatisfaction with the present has always been the thing that drives us towards the future.  Besides, the possession of a functioning internet service in these communities opens up the hope that other benefits of modern civilisation like potable water, adequate food and halfway decent healthcare might also put in an appearance.  For a society that apparently produces nothing but windmills and robot arms that's got to be pretty appealing.