I am not, perhaps unfortunately, given to doing much social analysis. However, and I really don’t know why, I caught myself considering some of these issues while going through Engadget’s review of Google’s Cr-48 netbook, the first netbook sporting Google’s Chrome OS.
By now it’s old news that Google’s OS is entirely based on the cloud. Even though apparently there is some simple file storage, everything is clearly meant to be taken and used online. That is precisely what concerns me regarding the digital divide in the post’s title. This “always online” philosophy might be fine for countries like the US or other places in Europe and Asia, where network connections are available pretty much everywhere and most, if not all, of the population has financial means to use this infrastructure. It’s certainly not like that here where I live, in Brazil. Sure, metropolitan areas have plenty of mobile network coverage. But bandwith is scarcer and data plans are very expensive, and the averge citizen is very far away from being able to indulge in these luxuries. Wireless networks are also not quite as frequently found as they are elsewhere.
Of course none of these problems are related to Google’s Chrome OS or in fact to any technological issue. However, the developing world’s infrastructure limitations are bound to become even more limiting as our everyday tech becomes more dependent on exactly this kind of infrastructure.
I’d love to try spending a few days with a Cr-48 as my only machine down here and see how it goes (wink, Google), but I strongly suspect things would not go so smoothly here as they did for the reviewers in the US.
Oh yes, and before I forget, at last someone heard my cries and got rid of the useless Caps Lock key! Google has replaced it with a much more useful “search” key.
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