EMFA: T1E6 - An Opportunity - Divide or Bootstrap - Kwankam

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Theme: Universal E-mail - Essay #6
Author: S. Yunkap Kwankam, Ph.D., Cameroon
E-mail: yunkap.kwankam@camnet.cm


Universal E-mail: An Opportunity to Create a Great
Information Divide or to Bootstrap Disenfranchised Peoples
into the Information Age.

The prospects for universal e-mail access have never been
better.  So, should there be a public policy goal of
universal email? Absolutely! Should e-mail access from homes or a
nearby public location be guaranteed? Certainly! But policy
should be visionary and interpret "universal" to mean "global".
The challenge is to allow access to e-mail by people everywhere,
even though they cannot read or write, have no electricity, and
do not have a computer or other sophisticated electronic
equipment capable of general purpose digital processing.
Otherwise, when universal e-mail access comes with text only, it
will widen the gap between the industrialized world and the
developing world into a great information divide.

Even in the industrialized world, it would seem to me that
convenience, not access, presents the main obstacle to the
next quantum leap in the impact of e-mail. E-mail may be
universally available, but its impact will only be universal when
its use is made as simple and as location free, as that of the
cell phone. In addressing the issue of convenience there is an
opportunity to attain the greater goal of global universal e-mail
access.

The key is to accept inputs in whatever form is convenient
to the user, and convert this into a message file. Speech,
is the only way illiterate people communicate. And voice
recognition is not a problem, even though there is software
to convert voice (English) into text. It is not necessary
for the machine to understand what the user says, simply to
faithfully relay it down the line to the human destination
at the end of the communication channel. Note that using
icons instead of text is basically changing the alphabet.
The tool should provide people with a way to communicate,
without having to radically change their way of life. An
important leap here is that not every aspect of the
microcomputer is needed for sending and receiving voice
e-mail. The bulky items (keyboard and screen) are
eliminated, and the entire system can be contained in a unit the
size of a cell phone. Between cell phones and wireless email,
most of the technology is already available. And for those of us
who neither have electricity nor batteries, the unit could be
powered by a Baylis generator, now used in wind-up radios.

Eventually, the industrialized world will go full circle and come
back to voice as the major way of communicating, even with
computers. Currently disenfranchised peoples will then be
empowered as a side benefit. This is the case with
microcomputers, where the eternal problem of power failure in
developing countries has been solved by the laptop, which was
designed to render the mobile executive in the industrialized
world more efficient. 

Visionary ideas such as Teledesic, Oxygen, Africa One, etc
will not significantly accelerate e-mail penetration in the
developing world unless they also facilitate consumption of
available access. We could wait for overall development,
which will certainly bring with it use of the Internet. Or,
we could leapfrog the communications side of this
development process and thereby, perhaps (some would say,
certainly), accelerate the overall development process.

S. Yunkap Kwankam, Ph.D.
Professor
Automation and Control Laboratory, School of 
Engineering, University of Yaounde I 
E-mail: yunkap.kwankam@camnet.cm
Location: Yaounde, Cameroon
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