I don't think of this as "what would be nice for Westerners", I think of this as "what would have been nice for me, back when I was a kid, if I had known what I was missing out on". I may not know what the specific social norms or economic circusmtances of people from even a few hunderd km away from my hometown were (tribes in my country are insular like that), but I think I have a pretty firm grasp on what young nerds have always wanted throughout history and regardless of the culture they were born in, whenever they were given the chance.
(To give an example: If you took a bunch of normal people and gave them too much free time and wealth, and gathered them at a party, you woudn't get Plato's Symposium. You'd get the sort of lame party that's described in The Great Gatsby. Regardless of specific cultural or economical circumstances, It takes a special kind of mind to have a blast making stories up and speculating on the cosmos the way those folks had, and then to go and write that stuff down. And that special kind of mind pops up every where, and every time, as soon as you give them the chance to bloom. If you give them no resources whatsoever, they'll still go and, say, make up an epic poem or a creation myth or whatever. Minds that blaze will find something to burn, given even the slightest chance.)
We want to learn stuff, we want to read books, we want to talk about the books we read, we want to spin our own stories. We want to learn skills, build things, dream about distant lands and eras. We want to speculate about the meaning of life, and ask "why" at stuff until the whys run out.
We see the society we're in, the way people live, and some of it doesn't make sense, and some of it doesn't seem fair, and we want to do something about it, improve stuff, solve problems, or at least understand why things are the way they are. There's only so much we can get out of reading the Qur'an or asking our elders. Eventually we feel the need to ask further questions. And we want a space to discuss them with other people who care, other people like us.
Whenever EY references classic sci-fi literature, I feel envious because before I went to study in Europe I had only been able to get my hands on a couple of Asimov and Radbury books, despite how much I relished the stuff.
Plus, if we're the one clever boy in the village (heck, the one anything in the village), it's alienating, isolating. Why am I different? What's wrong with me? The Internet can help you find that you're not alone. That, no matter how unique your tastes or ideas or experiences, there are thousands, millions out there, who thought like you. This might be especially relieving to LGBT folks, and to people who aren't satisfied with their assigned roles in life (such as gender roles in sexist societies).
It also opens your opportunities. Again, the clever boy would become, say, the Witchdoctor's (or Curate's, or Imam's) apprentice, because that's what you were expected to do.
With the Internet, you don't need to move to the big city to get a good education, leaving your family alone, perhaps draining them dry. Your town school doesn't need to buy the books to make up a decent library. Heck, you may even not need to walk ten kilometers in the wilderness at the crack of dawn every morning just to go to the underpaid, ignorant schoolmaster's tiny classroom (who may or may not spare the rod).
But the Internet isn't just a path to bringing the Gospel of Western Civilization down to the poor isolated folksies. It's also a way for the folksies to communicate with each other, to gain visibility, to speak up for themselves, to tell their own stories in their own words, to document themselves.
The Internet is a tool of self-empowerment. And I believe it should be a human right, as much as clean water, warm homes, and lighting at night.
A Western kid has a lot more unscheduled free time than a kid in a town that lives on average on 1$ per day. It has already learnt reading and writing in school. The kid also likely can't speak English.
Clever as in two standard derivation higher IQ as the others in the village might also mean IQ of 110 in that village instead of IQ of 130. IQ might very well be a biased metric and there might be cultural reasons for scoring low on the test but people with lower IQ while have a harder time to figure out how to use a command line interface of a computer to ...
Fact: the Internet is excruciatingly slow in many developing countries, especially outside of the big cities.
Fact: today's websites are designed in such a way that they become practically impossible to navigate with connections in the order of, say, 512kps. Ram below 4GB and a 7-year old CPU are also a guarantee of a terrible experience.
Fact: operating systems are usually designed in such an obsolescence-inducing way as well.
Fact: the Internet is a massive source of free-flowing information and a medium of fast, cheap communication and networking.
Conclusion: lots of humans in the developing world are missing out on the benefits of a technology that could be amazingly empowering and enlightening.
I just came across this: what would the internet 2.0 have looked like in the 1980s. This threw me back to my first forays in Linux's command shell and how enamoured I became with its responsiveness and customizability. Back then my laptop had very little autonomy, and very few classrooms had plugs, but by switching to pure command mode I could spend the entire day at school taking notes (in LaTeX) without running out. But I switched back to the GUI environment as soon as I got the chance, because navigating the internet on the likes of Lynx is a pain in the neck.
As it turns out, I'm currently going through a course on energy distribution in isolated rural areas in developing countries. It's quite a fascinating topic, because of the very tight resource margins, the dramatic impact of societal considerations, and the need to tailor the technology to the existing natural renewable resources. And yet, there's actually a profit to be made investing in these projects; if managed properly, it's win-win.
And I was thinking that, after bringing them electricity and drinkable water, it might make sense to apply a similar cost-optimizing, shoestring-budget mentality to the Internet. We already have mobile apps and mobile web standards which are built with the mindset of "let's make this smartphone's battery last as long as possible".
Even then, (well-to-do, smartphone-buying) thrid-worlders are somewhat neglected: Samsung and the like have special chains of cheap Android smartphones for Africa and the Middle East. I used to own one; "this cool app that you want to try out is not available for use on this system" were a misery I had to get used to.
It doesn't seem to be much of a stretch to do the same thing for outdated desktops. I've been in cybercafés in North Africa that still employ IBM Aptiva machines, mechanical keyboard and all—with a Linux operating system, though. Heck, I've seen town "pubs", way up in the hills, where the NES was still a big deal among the kids, not to mention old arcades—Guile's theme goes everywhere.
The logical thing to do would be to adapt a system that's less CPU intensive, mostly by toning down the graphics. A bare-bones, low-bandwith internet that would let kids worldwide read wikipedia, or classic literature, and even write fiction (by them, for them), that would let nationwide groups tweet to each other in real time, that would let people discuss projects and thoughts, converse and play, and do all of those amazing things you can do on the Internet, on a very, very tight budget, with very, very limited means. Internet is supposed to make knowledge and information free and universal. But there's an entry-level cost that most humans can't afford. I think we need to bridge that. What do you guys think?