Publicado en Linkedin por Boye Balogun Regional Head of Digital - Mindshare MENA
The Right to Wi-Fi
June 05, 2014
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The other day, in the middle of a light discussion with friends on various topics ranging from politics and pop culture to the increasing dilemma of what to do with Generation Y-Z (a topic for another day!), we arrived at a initially amusing topic which then descended into an interesting & heated debate. The topic was fundamental human rights in the digital age.
My good somewhat accurate friend Wikipedia defines Human rights as “inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being . Wiki references ranges from the Magna Carta, through the Slavery Abolition Act to the modern wave of physical and social media activist movements. All heavy stuff so let’s stay away from that.
From the little I learnt sat at the back of my economic lectures, I remember the revered American psychologist Maslow’s 5 stage hierarchy of needs starting with a base physiological requirement of food, water, sleep…. and you live to worry about the other 4 stages.
I will simply summarize Maslow hierarchy overlapped with human rights with a quote from Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. which says that “a hungry man is more interested in four sandwiches than four freedoms”.
Now that may apply in previous eras, however the world is a radically changing place.
We now live in the Digital Age, where over 34% of the 7 billion people in the world are internet users whether through fixed or mobile connection, a penetration percentage that is closer to 70% in “developed continents” and still over 15% in Africa; a world where a majority of the world’s economic, business and support infrastructures rely on the internet or a similar web of computers to function; a world where we people spend more time online than reading books, where commerce is electronic, health is a mobile application, games are virtual and friendships are on social networks, Nothing is really as it seems
We live in a world that has shaped a gradual movement away from extended family units bonded together by geographical closeness through to a more common nuclear family structure and increasingly to a distanced family separated by oceans and time but connected by air travel, telecoms and the internet.
Businesses are now structured across distance locations and simply connected by the same methods.
Stop for a second and imagine, imagine a world without the internet, how long would you last? 24hrs, a week, a year!
Yes of course there are various other ways of communication like the postal service, telegraph, telephone, TV/radio broadcast but even most of those systems are digitized and none able to provide the unlimited access to information that the internet delivers. You may ask, fine but does it have to be Wi-Fi internet? This is where the human rights freedom comes in, read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, article 13 states the freedom of movement, article 18 and 19 state freedom of thought, opinion and expression. Article 25 states the right to a “standard of living adequate for health and wellbeing”.
Frankly speaking though, where does the right to stay connected to information, communications, online services rank in article 25 or in Maslow’s Hierarchy. I will argue somewhere right across the spectrum of both pieces of work.
But what do I know, just remember that generation X and the next, whether born with a silver spoon in their mouth or not will certainly expect it to be hardwired or receiving wi-fi signals.
So while I’m typing away in the *desert, surrounded by all my i-devices, pad, maps and apps, I rely on the internet. When I’m out and about in the city, I expect wi-fi like it’s a basic right. Now some will call this a #firstworldproblem but is it?
Last year, it was reported that Google is intending to build huge wireless networks across sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia using amongst other methods high altitude balloons and blimps. Other companies such as Space Data and Lockheed Martin also have or are working on similar invention. They don’t seem to think it’s a first world problem. Call it wireless freedom, a new form of liberation.
Now, is water more important? Of-course! What about social welfare and all the worthy human rights causes? Absolutely!! But watch this space, the world is a different place and people will soon demand “The right to be connected”
In the words of the Joseph Cinque/Djimon Hounsou in Amistad ,
“Give us, us free”
Give us, us fi!
Give us Wi-Fi
*Desert – well, somewhere in Dubai …but I can see the desert sometimes.
image * borrowed from somewhere and adapted