PanNotes

First World Technology in Third World Hands

As a tiny dotcom in a part of the world that sits on America’s doorsteps geographically but technologically is far removed, our experience giving clients an interface with the Internet is both rewarding and frustrating.

If nothing else, the engagement reveals that as much as they want access to this new media world, they refuse to leave behind old notions and processes, and their legacy systems. Critically, they have little desire to understand the implications for their business. The result is a strange mix of old and new thinking where ideologies clash and culture, corporate and general, is remixed.

For many, it’s their first venture into an unknown un-explicable world. They come kicking and screaming, and arrive with untold anxieties that seep into our development process, and our profit.

Bringing Corporate Jamaica into a networked universe is as much an educational challenge as it is a technological one. Sometimes we have to introduce them to email, PDF, JPEG and MPEG files. What we encounter trying to equip clients with the functionality that today’s business needs and helping them to define their online presence borders on science fiction.

Even before our discovery phase we now present a document that outlines the nature of the work and what a web site development proposal will contain so that we aren’t carried wide before someone discovers they wanted an egg fried and not an entire restaurant.

Our work begins with simple explanations of what the Internet is and how a web site works and ends with appeals for updating and keeping material current. In between, we encourage people to drop dial up, to give Internet access to their managers, and to buy decent hardware and software.

We must try to keep client sites alive with ideas and content. We even have to explain conceptually how and why information gets stale. We also have to teach them how to let their web sites become a feedback loop to help inform their new products. We always have to explain how best to build communities of common interests.

Panmedia once took to the relevant government ministry an island wide backup plan to ensure essential services could still get on the web if Jamaica’s main access point was broken, as was the case in Hurricane Ivan. We were greeted warmly, but heard not another thing about it.

The upside is that Jamaicans’ use of technology offers the world an approach that is bold and enlightening. Cell phone penetration is closer to European levels. Eighty Three percent of Jamaicans own cell phones versus 53 percent in Trinidad, a much richer country.

Curiously, the rate at which Jamaicans replace technologies is astounding.Those who utilize modern technology often possess the best even when they don’t need them or the infrastructure is not in place to make use of the features. For example, we have had web enabled cell/mobile phones since their inception but none of our telecom providers built the infrastructure to make those features available to consumers.

Many here have ambitious notions of what meager resources can do online. We have been approached to build a Jamaican eBay and something close to Amazon. Some months ago, a client asked that we build him a replica of the Bloomberg site.

Looking at what happens in the developing world as people try to capitalize on new technologies even with limited knowledge of how such things work is perhaps part of our reward working in this space. But it can be terribly frustrating at times.